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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

>> "old white guy in charge of Linux"

Erhmmm, why does his age or colour matter in this context? Debate can happen about people and their leadership style, (I'm not a fan of Torvalds) but when the first criteria someone sees for criticizing another person is their age, colour, or race, that seems a bit shallow and biased.

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I agree. Isn't this overt racism, sexism, ageism, etc?

> Racism: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group

Of course it is, but it's the kind of bigotry nowadays some people evangelize as good (by redefining racism), and what the twitter mob encourages.

Chain of events: I was tempted to try a respectful reply with substance, but then realized I wouldn't be allowed to discuss this here, due to moderator preference for "not talking politics".

I was then [regrettably] tempted to write something with a "mic drop" feel, just to express my disagreement in an acceptably pithy way.

And then it occurred to me that this whole sub-thread is Twitter-length comments. And I was about to add one more. And I realized that maybe the moderation of HN actually prevents us from going as deeply on this topic as we do on everything else, and so that moderator preference has essentially reproduced a pithy and unproductive Twitter dynamic for topics like this.

Pithy and shallow self-censored comments in reply to pithy self-censored comments.

EDIT: But also, moderation is really hard <3 Just wanted to try to put words to a small dynamic that's perhaps playing out here.

There was a huge thread yesterday on HN about this topic with many comments much longer than tweets. It is certainly a topic that can be discussed at length on HN. People were voted down and up, but no one was cancelled; we're all still here.

I'm not aware of any moderator preference against talking about this subject. Again: huge thread on it yesterday that persisted on the front page all day.

However, I don't think every single off-hand mention of race or gender needs to devolve into a subthread of 50 multi-paragraph comments. So I appreciate your decision to avoid it in this instance.

FWIW, I probably disagree with you, but I wish we could talk about these things in a civil way. I think the PC/cancel-culture prohibition about discussing this stuff is a real impediment toward progress. Further, I don't envy the moderators since it's hard to keep things civil--bad actors on both sides come out of the woodwork. Anyway, have an upvote as a small gesture of peace and kindness in a world where disagreements are supposed to make us bitter enemies.

Aw thanks!

Yeah, I was a moderator on one of the first university-run online forums, and it was so stressful and difficult...! All the first-year students just spoke off-the-cuff, but "monitoring" all that speech was SO challenging...!

> due to moderator preference for "not talking politics".

There's no such preference. What made you think there was?

The question of political topics on HN is a hard one because some political stories are on topic, some are off topic, and even the on-topic ones tend to turn into flamewars. I've written a lot about how we approach this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN.

If anyone reads those explanations and still has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.

thanks dang. Was thinking about y'all when I added that "<3" edit. I appreciate you.

> What made you think there was?

I recalled a post way back when trump was voted in, asking the community not to speak about politics. (I'm sure I'm misrecalling the specifics, but that's the fuzzy take-home that's nestled in my mind after all these years.)

---

Ah yes, found it. Apparently it was just one week, but I remembered it as a standing request :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404

"Racism" against white people in the US is completely devoid of systemic material consequence. Understanding definitions isn't about "mobs" or even ideology, it's about identifying what happens in incidents of racial bias and why those things happen.

What? We are not ants. Even if being racist to a person doesn't affect the "colony" still is being racist to that person.

And redefining a word so is "bad for everyone but X" doesn't make X innocent of doing it, it makes X guilty and a bully.

Also, the world is much bigger than the US.

Fair enough, but does that make it "good" or simply "less bad"? And if it's just "less bad", then why should we tolerate it when there's no dichotomy between "racism against whites" and "racism against minorities" (i.e., we can and should aim for a world with no racism at all)? Further still, once you've established a racial worldview with a racial hierarchy that puts whites on the bottom, you've established a framework that facilitates white supremacist arguments (both by making it easier to frame whites as victims of racism and by validating racial worldviews in general--a worldview that puts whites on the bottom is a lot closer to a worldview that puts whites on the top than an egalitarian worldview is to either). Liberalism (i.e., treating people as individuals instead of identical constituents of their race) has been the driving force behind the massive reduction of white supremacy and anti-minority racism; it's an enormous success and an important bulwark that protects minorities. Why should we erode this important bulwark by replacing it with a system that (1) perpetuates injustice against whites and (2) paves the way for white supremacy? Racism is lose-lose.

I agree with you but that’s not how a lot of people see it these days.

Precisely no one wants to replace Linus Torvalds with a woman or person of color just to have a woman or person of color maintaining the Linux kernel.

You’re begging me to go nutpicking with the phrase “precisely no one” but let’s grant that point. Many people have been outspoken about, in general, replacing white males in positions of power and importance with non-whites or non-males. The degree to which none of these people want to replace Linus probably has more to do with the degree to which Linus Torvalds is perceived to be in a position of power or importance.

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