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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you 100%. This is the take of people who have little on the line, and don't face issues everyday, falsely lumping all matters of outrage together. They're now upset, outraged even, that their status quo is challenged, and write about how we need to chill out and slowly work towards change. Well, yes slow change works if they've got little to lose from it.

I'm honestly flummoxed by all the people in the comments here talking out against this supposed "outrage culture" without breaking down the nuance of what people are outraged about.

Are we talking about outrage over sexual and racial harassment? Is that not worth being outraged about?

Or are we talking about Hasbro making gender neutral Potato heads, and the end of sales of some racist Dr Seuss books?

Articles like this help people lump everything in together, and feel better about themselves for being above it all. It's a supremely privileged position.

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> This is the take of people who have little on the line, and don't face issues everyday

This kind of narrative is an easy way to dismiss the opinions of people who disagree with you, but it bears little resemblance to the real world, where people of all kinds face issues that you may or may not know about, and people of all demographics actually do care about things like beloved Dr Seuss books going out of print: https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/and-then-they-came-for-...

I think you missed my point completely if that's the part you're latching on to out of context.

My whole point is that you can't dismiss outrage as a whole, and lump all issues together.

You want to a priori establish some outrage as virtuous and legitimate (ie. critiques around sexism/racism) while dismissing other outrage as silly and trivial (ie. critiques around pressure campaigns to censor culture).

Is it possible that there is some legitimacy in both complaints?

I'm not saying either is trivial or silly though. I'm saying there's different values and things at stake. I never said one was invalid, that was your own take on things, and you're misconstruing what I said.

Is sexual and racial harassment the same level as the potato Head thing? No, of course not. But articles like this, put them all in the same bucket.

Sure, the article lumps together all kinds of outrage, some of it more serious than others. For example, it also lumps together outrage that someone would commit a micro-aggression like asking "where are you from?" together with much more serious issues like people losing their careers or reputations over questionable or downright false accusations of racism. These are clearly not on the same level, but it would be silly to get mad at the author for not introducing this distinction.

What does it say about this moment in time when a person can't even speak about certain human emotions like outrage as a universal human experience without being accused of things and called names?

Who called them names? It feels like you're reading far more into what I'm saying than is there

> This is the take of people who have little on the line, and don't face issues everyday, falsely lumping all matters of outrage together. They're now upset, outraged even, that their status quo is challenged, and write about how we need to chill out and slowly work towards change. Well, yes slow change works if they've got little to lose from it.

> Articles like this help people lump everything in together, and feel better about themselves for being above it all. It's a supremely privileged position.

This is not a substantive response to anything the author wrote, it is pure ad hominem, and purely speculative, unless you know much more about the author than can be gleaned from this article alone. How do you presume to know what issues this author does or does not face every day?

Sigh there's no point even discussing with you because you're obsessed with some kind of persecution here.

I don't really care if the author has problems or not. What I do care is that they and the other people who agree with the author are belittling the what outraged people with significant things on the line. End of the day, that's it, And that's the place of privilege I'm talking about. Because the author belittles other people's outrage by lumping it in with everything else and saying it's unnecessary and overblown. It's a strawman.

In short, I don't need to know the authors full life story to see the effect of their post trivializes people's issues. If they have issues themselves, so be it. That's a wholly unrelated matter.

Anyway this is a tiresome topic. I feel like we're just talking past each other, and you are willfully taking things I say out of context.

100% spot on. i would like to be your friend IRL

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