Hacker News Reader

Comment by H0n3sty | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone is wondering what the "textbook" definition of racism is:

the belief that "ALL" members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

The belief that races may be different in average ability with respect to certain characteristics or that members of certain races have their own preferences is not racist. Some people like to use the term racist as some sort of a perverted trump card to silence an opposing view rather than engaging in an actual debate. Good luck trying to have a civil conversation with someone like that.

View on HN

I refrained from calling you a racist even after you said the obviously racist thing. Moreover you first implied I'm racist out of the blue, because I disagree with a SCOTUS Justice who happens to be black. Also:

> The belief that races may be different in average ability with respect to certain characteristics or that members of certain races have their own preferences is not racist.

Quoting this for posterity in case you try to edit it out later. Sorry for you, I think you'll find the belief that black people are just not "on average" intelligent enough to be enrolled at university in the same proportion as white people, or that women are just too emotional to be in tech, or whatever, are rather unpopular opinions and likely to get you labeled (indeed, correctly) a racist and a sexist. Good luck with that.

I'm still trying to decide if you're holding the racism of lower expectation beliefs. Privileged and oppressed are just code words with no clear meaning. I don't know you, so I don't know why you would use profanity to describe Justice Thomas. He has solid principles based on his life's experiences and has had to endure a lot to serve so it makes no sense to me that anyone would describe him that way.

You're probably right about the labels but certainly wrong about the accuracy (thanks for the tip).

I'm not sure why some races perform better at some tasks, on average. I think that Blacks are faster sprinters than Asians, on average. I think that Asians have a higher preference for education than Blacks, on average. I think that the physical characteristics that we describe as races are shaped by evolutionary pressures. Darker skin is likely an adaptation for living closer to the equator. Blacks can probably withstand more direct sun exposure than Whites before developing skin cancer. None of this makes one race superior to another outside the narrow scope of the adaptive characteristic, and even then you only see the differences on average.

I suspect that the lower turnout of women in tech has more to do with preferences around work/life balance and family. But I wouldn't rule out other possible explanations. I've witnessed a few emotional breakdowns at work, but never from men. Which is fortunate because it seems that when men snap they go postal, on average.

> I disagree with a SCOTUS Justice who happens to be black

I like how you phrased that. Much more civil. Do you like George Carlin :D? -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRoOOm0-3_8

This kind of generic ideological flamewar, as unresolvable as it is tedious, is off topic on HN. Please don't do this again.

It's instructive how you managed to leap from gender to race without skipping a beat. That's an example of what I mean by generic. This is a marker—maybe the primary marker—of low quality discussion. It's always about pre-existing views, held for extraneous reasons, pretending to be a rational response to the story under discussion but reflexively heading straight for one of the same two or three places. A few people insist on taking every discussion there; the rest of us have visited countless times and wish not to return. This community exists for interesting things, of which these ideological back-and-forths are the antithesis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com