Hacker News Reader

Comment by eej2ya1K | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when corporate codes meet kindergarten mindsets. The longer this continues, the worse the blowback is going to get - I'm just happy to be far enough away to not have to care (protip: get the fuck out of the anglosphere as soon as possible)

View on HN

Yeah this seems an issue in the anglosphere, but similar issues are arising in Spanish though. There's also push to change the language in weird ways from the left, although it's true that is not as widespread.

Oh yeah, there are attempts all over the world, but for some reason it seems to "stick" better in the anglosphere.

Also, while this is all coming from the left, it's not really coming from the "mainstream left" - it's coming from a fringe of troublemakers. The mainstream left, respectful as they believe themselves to be of the "other", are just letting it happen. And they're going to continue to let it happen for a while longer, until... well, I don't want to speculate too much on what happens when the house of cards falls down, but I doubt it's going to be pretty.

(I used to be a "leftist" myself, but now consider myself apolitical. I moved out of my home country and can no longer vote, but to be honest, I don't miss it at all)

The really interesting thing about all this CoC nonsense is how it's making strange bedfellows between some on the right and the left who have a keen interest in civil liberties. I'm a lifelong social democrat and have a lot of issues with barely-regulated free markets, but holy hell am I ever sick and tired of this identity-politics BS. I just want poor people to have free healthcare and educational opportunities, man. I didn't sign up for this personal-pronoun-crusade crap.

If I ever start a project where I need to implement some kind of CoC, I'm going to base it on the friggin' Discordian Five Commandments and call it a day.

I'm basically in that place. I'm also a social democrat, yet I'm seen myself distanced from the left, be it parties, social movements and so on, as they seem to embrace this more and more. I also studied sociology so I can spot the BS from miles ahead, even from people who pretends to be thoughtful and so on.

The problem is that my threshold for this BS has become so low that I'm basically rolling my eyes every time I see it on TV, press or anywhere else. It looks like the media is really pushing for it, be it because of profits or some conspiracy-agenda. Sometimes it causes me anger to see how people is completely distracted from very deep problems that we have to face, be my country or the whole humanity.

I even lost contact with some lefty "friends" and acquaintances because of my stances on this, which I found very sad. It made me avoid to talk about politics, which was something I talked with everyone in the past.

what's your take on latinx or latin@?

You'll be disappointed if you join the frenchosphere as the new pronouns are basically crazy and unlearnable.

I have friends in Germany who are seeing the same trends in academia there.

> get the fuck out of the anglosphere as soon as possible

Can you expand on this?

Contextual languages like Korean and Japanese omit pronouns/the subject entirely, unless it's ambiguous. It's common to use their name instead of "you", etc. It's not like English where the subject cannot be omitted.

It's also a cultural thing. You're not going to see any of this craziness in any Slavic country, or in most of Asia.

Ideological extremism is everywhere, but this particular strain of it is mostly concentrated in the Western world, particularly America, Canada, Sweden, and Germany.

> You're not going to see any of this craziness in any Slavic country

I think you might have misunderstood why that is.

I welcome you to enlighten me. Unless you're going to suggest that all Slavic people are homophobic (as many Westerners seem to believe), in which case you'd be dead wrong.

I meant for example in Russia. The reason they aren't bickering much about pronouns there is because gays are happy to survive a parade at all.

I'm going to not argue that all Slavic people are homophobic (that would be completely impossible to back up with facts). A more reasonable claim would be perhaps that people in Slavic countries today are more homophobic on average than e.g. an OECD or EU average. Not sure if such surveys exist, however - so that would have to be a guess and subjective at this point.

E.g.: "The worst countries to be gay" (Italy + Eastern europe) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-15-worst...

https://www.dw.com/en/homophobia-in-poland-still-deeply-entr...

On the other hand:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/04/debunking-ster...

Right. From the article:

> Among the general population, the general attitude to homosexuality is: do what you like, just not in public.

Having an intimate connection with Slavic culture, I can agree to this being the prevalent social sentiment.

The opinion that people should try to be gay "in private" (if they absolutely have to be gay) is of course extremely homophobic, and is exactly my point. If e.g. kissing in public risks you a punch, or if gay marriage isn't recognized etc - that's a sign that a country (or city) is homophobic.

Kissing in public in Poland generally doesn't risk you a punch. I don't know where you're getting that, though I understand it's a pretty common — though completely misguided — Western view. My local gay club is quite peaceful (though inside they all have a grand ol' time — it's by far one of the rowdiest gay clubs I've been to).

In Slavic countries generally, who you have sex with is your own business. It's private. Nobody wants to know.

AFAIK in Slavic languages you don't even have a cop-out like English "they" and the only way of expressing non-gendered pronoun is a neuter pronoun which has very strong dehumanizing connotations when applied to humans. So I think if it ever reaches Slavo-sphere they won't be as an easy solution as using they/them in English, unless the English solution would be just copycatted - which is quite alien to Slavic languages but I guess learning newspeak would require to give up on oldthink.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com