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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

The assumption that racism and sexism result in elastic deformation of society that will go away as soon as you remove whatever force is warping it.

Yes, this is the economic assumption - folks are greedy and will exploit undervalued resources.

I don't think history bears that out. Society is a soft ductile metal. If you bend it, it'll stay bent.

This ignores the history of various oppressed groups who unbent themselves (east Asians, south Asians, Jews, Irish). It also ignores the fact that women have unbent themselves in most fields, just not math heavy STEM fields.

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> Yes, this is the economic assumption - folks are greedy and will exploit undervalued resources.

Except that's not what history shows us. Economics didn't free the slaves. Guns did. Economics didn't end segregation in housing and education. Bitter, expensive litigation did.[1] Economics didn't make gay marriage legal. Waging a cultural war on homophobes until it became social suicide in most circles to be one did that.

[1] And guns when people defied the court judgments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_National_Guard_and_th....

Most countries around the world abolished slavery peacefully.

> Most countries around the world abolished slavery peacefully.

[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline

From a quick skim, the US and Haiti seem to be the only non-peaceful abolitions out of hundreds.

This is a weird lens to look at slavery through. The circumstances in the US were unique: intense economic coupling to slavery, very large regional identity defined by slavery, &c.

More importantly, I'm not sure what this has to do with Rayiner's point. The realization that many plantation slaves would be better utilized as doctors and lawyers did not free the slaves, nor did economic competition from non-slaveholding plantations. It did, in fact, require coercion.

IMO the blame lies at least partly on American hyper-competitive mentality, where you have people on both sides willing to go to war over slavery, or "wage cultural war on homophobes" today. My link was intended to show that not all countries are like that.

I just can't agree with Rayiner that we should escalate more because the current conflict is all-important. Game theory tells us that if everyone thinks that way, society loses. And game theory offers a way out: you need a shared culture that enables de-escalation without losing face. Conflicts would still get resolved, but without wasting tons of resources on both sides. Many countries have that.

That's the first time I've heard the Civil War ascribed to Americans being too competitive. Every day I learn new things on this site.

> intense economic coupling to slavery, very large regional identity defined by slavery, &c

If we wish this to be relevant to the current discussion: do you think the US has intense economic coupling to few-women-in-tech? Large regional identity defined by few-women-in-tech?

> It did, in fact, require coercion.

In a minority of instances, it was achieved through coercion. That doesn't mean coercion was the only way it was ever going to happen in those instances.

And when someone says "it took guns, not economics" then it seems entirely to the point that guns were only involved in a minority of instances. I'm not sure how you can not think this is relevant to what Rayiner was saying.

just to add, some writers distinguish between societies where slavery existed (almost every human society) and "slave societies", where "the definition of the relationship between ownership and labor -- is defined by slavery". (see: http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/09/the-slav...)

> Economics didn't make gay marriage legal. Waging a cultural war on homophobes until it became social suicide in most circles to be one did that.

And even that movement began with drag queens throwing bricks at cops.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

Economics did end segregation of Asians, Irish, Italians and Jews. Again, the fact that some groups have been violently unbent does not mean that groups can't unbend themselves. Just because you can cite other examples doesn't mean that the ones I cited don't exist.

Incidentally, you are aware that Jim Crow laws were mainly about economic protectionism, right? Raising wages for (white) workers by using guns against the competition. Folks at the time were well aware that greedy employers might tolerate black as long as it came with extra green. In fact, all your examples live outside the realm of greedy economic actors interacting via voluntary trade, so I really don't get the relevance at all.

These positive claims, whether they are accurate or not, regarding economics, segregation, and oppressed minorities are all fine and dandy in an abstract world. What are your takeaways from such arguments? Is it something along the lines of: "Since all of these other groups managed to unbend themselves when the economic factors were right, we (society as a whole/at large) should wait for other oppressed groups do the same?"

I've made no normative arguments here.

To amend yours, one such normative claim might be: "Since all of these other groups managed to unbend themselves when the economic factors were right, we (society as a whole/at large) should figure out how the groups (or treatment thereof) which didn't unbend themselves differ from those that did."

> This ignores the history of various oppressed groups who unbent themselves (east Asians, south Asians, Jews, Irish). It also ignores the fact that women have unbent themselves in most fields, just not math heavy STEM fields.

I almost had a crazy theory about what determines if a group can overcome their oppression and become mainstream, but the Irish provided a counterexample that shot it down.

The theory was that to overcome oppression, a group had to contribute a cuisine or food style that became mainstream. Asians. Check. Jews. Check. Italians. Check. Hispanics. Check. Blacks...they contributed soul food, but it has not gone mainstream the way the others have, and they have not overcome oppression. Indians. Check.

But I don't think I've ever even seen an Irish restaurant in the US, so my beautiful theory went down in flames.

Good news! Irish pubs are pretty great (I guess many thematic pubs are?), and while not pop-culture mainstream, are at least common enough that you likely have one not-too-far away. At the very least, it gives your idea something to grab onto :)

so basically you're saying to un-oppress women, they should get back to the kitchen :-P (I'm kidding! I'm kidding)

it's an interesting theory, and as HCIdivision said, there's indeed Irish pubs, and (mainly in the US) also that whole St. Patrick's Day thing that does indeed put Irish in a good light.

but realistically, for women in tech, I don't think baking cookies is going to do the trick. however going with the Irish example, some general celebratory thing could be nice. even if it doesn't work, at worst, you'd have a great time? I've always been of the opinion that pretty much whatever you do with a group of people (be it a convention, a party, study, or work) just steadily gets better in many ways the more the gender ratio approaches 50/50.

out of curiosity, what is popular Jewish mainstream food? (I can't think of any, perhaps it's something that I forgot was originally Jewish)

Wait, Hispanics "overcame their oppression"? So they aren't economically disadvantaged and victims of rampant discrimination in the US?

They might be better off than blacks, but I think they're at least as big a hole in your theory as the Irish.

Those oppressed groups mostly came "unbent" because they stopped putting up with their oppressors and started killing them.

Are you even at all aware of the history of any of the examples you just cited?

Jewish folks and South Asian folks overcame discrimination from Americans by killing them? Are you from Earth-2?

Read Steven Dutch's essay "The world's most toxic value system" [1] before you recommend violence as a solution to any group's problems. It's a comfortably direct approach, but it backfires. It creates a class of violent people who will push others down, so the group as a whole stays down.

[1] http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/toxicval.htm

I didn't recommend anything.

I just suggested one become a little more familiar with history before making absurd claims and value judgements against whole races of people. Every single one of the cited examples had to fight bloody wars of independence against occupation before their refugees were even seen as human. We enslaved the Chinese. We used the Irish in proxy wars between street gangs that still are going on today in parts of the Northeast. The Jews spend hundreds of years trying to assimilate into European society, and then the Germans killed 6 million of them. We gave them back their own country. Out of guilt.

Spouting a bunch of stereotypes about the local immigrant population is a pretty fucking ignorant view of that history.

I just tried to educate myself about the Chinese getting enslaved and fighting a war for independence, but unfortunately I failed. Which events are you referring to?

Perhaps they were referring to the respective diasporas who succeeded by investing in their own education. The groups cited tend to be high academic achievers or at least put great emphasis on academics so much so that American born sometimes avoid some school districts with high achieving groups for being over competitive.

Asians started killing white Americans to get into the Ivy League? I think I missed that one.

it's hard to argue that any of those groups are truly "unbent" outside of very narrow, precarious and conditional contexts.

I'd argue the Irish have "unbent themselves". What prejudice or discrimination do the Irish face in contemporary America?

(My background: Grew up in the New England then moved to Austin. I look Mediterranean but my last name is Farrell and I play the bodhran...mediocrely)

I'm highly skeptical of the idea that this "unbending" is anything but a loud, activist process.

They don't face it in contemporary America, but they did face it when they started immigrating to the US many years ago. Given that you don't discern any anti-Irish sentiment I might argue that they did a fine job of "unbending themselves"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment

I'm not suggesting that "unbending yourself" is the only way to do things, just that it does seem as though it's possible. Maybe not easy, maybe not quick, but to suggest that "it can't be done" would be disingenuous.

Only place I've ever heard people openly hate Irish people is Scotland, only place I've heard people claim intellectual inferiority is Australia. One of my parents is Irish, and I don't have an accent, so people tend to say what they think.

The rest of the world stereotypes and is occasionally ignorant of history, but that's common for people from most countries.

Every single year America celebrates the de facto Irish holiday, St. Patrick's Day, by getting as drunk as possible and pretending to be stereotypical Irishmen.

Note: I am of Irish descent and not at all offended. What I wonder is if this impassive attitude to a relatively minor transgression, came about before or after the cultural "unbending"?

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