How Basecamp Blew Up
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I would maybe be more sympathetic to DHH if it wasn't the guy who was so opinionated he pushed through Rails features that everyone else disliked or co-wrote several books on company culture that are glorified ads for basecamp (although "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" is still a thought-provoking read, at least in part). I can only imagine that he might be similarly self-righteous in workplace situations.
I think that, no matter your political views, if a situation gets out of hand that bad over matters that aren't even really directly related to workplace concerns, something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere.
It happened randomly and completely out of the blue: one software engineer mentioned he didn't believe in the gender gap and he was promptly replied 1000 words essays by other leaders in the company shutting him down, to show that "we don't tolerate certain behaviour".
Guidelines were created to avoid future political discussions in the workplace. No-one left because of it (immediately) and we sadly didn't become famous. The engineer who brought that up quit a few months after.
After that, half of the employees hated thinking there were people thinking something different from them in the company, the other half was afraid to talk in public.
Again, I don't think there was a particular situation in the company: just a naive person who likes to talk frankly and people who get offended and are quick to attack in order to defend the "safe space" for the people who share their beliefs.
(Or maybe it also shows that being a fully-remote company can have downsides, such as coworkers not socialising enough and therefore not trusting each other? Who knows. DHH certainly has championed the "remote work for everyone" approach countless times.)
Yes, it absolutely is the climate here. it’s awful. tribalism, division, distrust and eagerness to demonize anyone who doesn’t tow your line.
we’re doomed
If I were at a company of ~58 people, and ~20 of them were forming a DE&I committee to evaluate the company's vendor relationships, speakers, etc., I'd be tempted to join just to get the potential target off of my back. They're not going to fire 1/3 of the workforce, after all.
edit: "here" is okta, not basecamp
How am I supposed to talk about my husband doing the housekeeping?
"My Man Spouse is doing the domestic science"
> 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
Are all gendered words banned?
What the hell happened to us?!
Yup. Pro tip: If you're at a SV-influenced company and you find yourself talking about your personal life, don't say "husband," "wife," "boyfriend," or "girlfriend;" say "partner." That signals that you're an Ally rather than an Enemy.
You'll notice other weird speech patterns too. Pay attention to them; they're meaningful.
"More inclusive: Spouses/partners <> Less inclusive: Wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends"
What if my wife would prefer if I referred to her as my "wife" instead of as a generic, faceless "partner"? By insisting that I refer to her as a genderless "partner", you are failing to respect her chosen pronoun.
Because I have no clue who your partner is (or really if you have one) so I shouldn't assume until I have that information. Note that the words in the example are all plural, presumably referring to multiple other peoples' partners.
This isn't any woke thing - its just a "don't reveal information that isn't necessary."
You earn the details of my life by being my friend, not through a contractual relationship.
"Co-founder + CEO of @okta, proud husband + father, addicted to exercise."
Similar verbiage on their company site as well haha
wtf
I’d bet remote work was a strong contributor. People don’t form the same humanizing attachments remotely as they do in person, in my experience.
Did you read that comment about Basecamp employees "crying and screaming at their screens" after the Zoom meeting? That just sounds so much like people who are both venting their spleens and at the same time have no connection to their workplace.
At the risk of armchair quarterbacking, the whole thing looks like a broken culture, and I get the impression nobody knew just how broken it was until now. Nor do I think any one person or action is to blame. I’d bet that it’s been festering for years.
It’s a fascinating case study, though, and I’m glad we have a view into it.
You don't have to leave it anonymous; I think most people know what Google is.
/s
Remember, the proximate cause here was something that directly related to what happened at work.
It's not the case that forming a committee that's over 1/3 the size of the company to do unprompted evaluation of vendor relationships for DE&I and approval of guest speakers follows logically from, "there used to be a list of funny sounding names and management didn't handle it well."
Yeah that seems to have been the trigger but I'm not sure that such a list should lead to everything described in the article.
How that lead to demanding someone denounce white supremacy at a meeting seems like things have long since disconnected from the funny names list.
It's not about being successful. It's about not having an ego and acting like you're better than everyone else just because you are successful. Americans are much more willing to tolerate this behaviour than Australians.
Also, I guess this is personal, but a little humility is good for everyone, IMHO, and doesn't necessarily contradict a healthy dose of self-confidence either. DHH seems to have little of it — at least judging from his books and also from his Twitter.
I think there's a lot of cross-purpose arguing about it all. It's likely that they're a bit painful to work for AND that as founders they'd have concerns about their paid staff getting distracted from their mission at work.
(With no small amount of irony, I find that many "normal" people have a very hard time truly empathising with the ways in which people on the spectrum are different.)
But it doesn't even have to be something as categorisable as the spectrum. Just as people don't choose their genetics or initial brain chemistry, it's equally true to say that nobody chose their genetic parents or their upbringing. People are the product of their environment; we would do well to keep this in mind even when we (rightly) castigate people for their misdeeds.
The autism spectrum is a continuum that fades into normality, with no clear boundary. Part of that continuum is individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP), who have significantly more autistic traits than the average person does, but not enough to reach the diagnostic cutoff for ASD. That cutoff varies from clinician to clinician, and is moving over time, which renders the boundary between BAP and ASD particularly fuzzy.
> (With no small amount of irony, I find that many "normal" people have a very hard time truly empathising with the ways in which people on the spectrum are different.)
Damian Milton speaks of the "double empathy problem" – it is claimed that a defining trait of autism is deficits in empathy, and yet very many non-autistic people are at least as deficient in empathy for autistic people.
Based on my own experiences (which are very limited) I don't see a deficit of empathy in people on the spectrum. What I do see is someone who sees the world differently (has a different kind of "filter" to distinguish signal from noise) which causes the response to stimulus to be different. If you see the world differently, your internal model of what another person is is different, and therefore the way one expresses their empathy is different.
Arguably this isn't so different to how concepts of honour and respect can vary greatly between cultures.
If you want to attract and keep talent you need to listen to their views and involve in them defining the values of the company.
As a personal example, I work in a shared office space. If a vocal tenant talks loudly about politics, even if it's something I agree with, I cringe and worry that it creates a less welcoming space for anyone in the room that doesn't agree with the points. Seems reasonable that they should expect an office where they can work without feeling on edge.
If it was purely about talking about politics at work then everyone wouldn't have resigned.
I read the first third-party piece about this and nothing sounded outrageous. Read Jason and DHH's pieces, and then DHH's follow-up entry. I read Jane Yang's bit. And I read some Twitter threads from employees.
Obviously employees are well within their rights to want a workplace where they form HR policy and the founders can want another scenario if they think it's to the detriment of their product. Former can move on to another workplace. Founders can wear the blowback of their decision.
eg. if Basecamp got bulk gym memberships at 20$/employee but each employee would have to sign up at 40$ per person, Basecamp paying each employee 20$ would not be the same as giving each employee a gym membership.
Fair enough that it might not work so well in subsequent years due to taxes.
A lot of the complaints or commentary I've seen across a few issues, leaving aside this more acute issue was that DHH and JF were entirely comfortable espousing _their_ opinions and feelings on things, but a lot less interested in hearing other people's.
If I'd founded something 20+ years ago (well, I have), and at some point a third of the business was putting work time into deciding HR policy that was alienating other staff, I'd be looking at resolving it too. I've worked for myself for 20+ years so can't be sure, but I haven't heard of anything like that equality-council from any friends working here in Australia. This situation might be more unique to current USA?
They're also within their rights to say all employees will only make minimum wage, and that their products will now be marked up 1000%, but that doesn't mean employees or customers have to accept that.
If you came across a list that contained names that were being laughed at because of their ethnicity, and you shared that ethnicity, would you feel comfortable working with the people making those jokes?
Assuming that it wasn't malicious or targeted, I'd expect the managerial response to be "Hey - this list is not really showing respect to our customers on a couple of fronts, so please wipe it ASAP. I understand that you weren't aware of why it's truly problematic, but you're aware now and I don't expect to see something like this again."
As I've said elsewhere though, I don't live in a place that feels as politically polarised, so I'm sure that's a serious factor.
Do you have sources for this, or anonymous blogs? Because I'd be concerned what "like" means here. It's obviously not literally this, otherwise it'd the word 'literal'. But to me, the ambiguity can be read (in bad faith) as "I think LGBTQ identities, broadly, are bullshit, and I shouldn't respect a direct report who identifies as bisexual, it's as ridiculous as someone who is believes they're a wolf sexually".
A little bit of disambiguity would do a long way here, as I genuinely can't tell if this is someone who thinks asexuals, bisexuals, etc. are bullshit not worth respecting (aka, a place of ignorance of the speaker), or if Google is literally saying that unheard-of sexual identities are part of its HR policies (which I've never heard of and would love to know to avoid working at Google in the future.)
Although I'm also just some random stranger on the internet, so take this post as you will.
I agree for the most part there. Less so the founders, I think there sin runs more along the lines of being extremely naive (but in a way a lot of people might be, especially when the alternative might be to accept you're screwed).
> something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere.
Well, the tensions exist because they're being pushed for by large influences societally for political gain. The problem is they promoted a workplace environment where it was considered okay to bring it in, as well as to poke fun at clients (which is what kicked it all off).
I see this as an example of the cost of free doughnuts.[1] It's well known that we value the loss of something as more than the gain of something, and we value free things for far more than they're worth. Employees were given free reign for a long time in ways that weren't all that conducive to a diverse work environment or to respecting clients. Now they are being told not to do things that most work places already expect you to know enough not to do, either by explicitly telling you or by culture, such as don't blast your political views out to everyone, and don't be disrespectful to the clients, as that's where your paycheck comes from. My guess is the majority of people that leave if honestly reflecting on this in a few years would acknowledge that maybe announcing and focusing on your differences with those you need to spend time with is not as good a strategy for a happy and productive workplace as focusing on your similarities.
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
which would be maybe more excusable if it didn't come from the guys who wrote several books about how awesomely they run their company. I guess that's why my sympathy for their situation is somewhat limited.
I mean, it's easy to think you're doing well because you got lucky in personnel and timing for how things went, but maybe have a bit more introspection before writing a book about it and how good your ideas were (there's a lot of non-fiction that could be said about...).
If I have sympathy for them, I think it would be because I could see myself making the exact same mistakes: writing confidently as my business road a wave of great timing, thinking that emboldened and involved employees were great for company culture, and then deciding that maybe it was a risky distraction.
Fried and DHH are a lot of things, but naive isn’t one of them.
How anyone can look at this debacle and think of the employees as anything but victims, and the founders as anything but reactionary blowhards, is absolutely incoherent to me.
The founders are obviously the ones in the wrong here, and obviously come out with shattered reputations.
They do not accept non-racist environments, only anti-racist ones. They do not accept that businesses be politically neutral. Businesses must take political stances internally and publicly. To do anything less, or to remain silent, is to be complicit in what they see as white supremacy and systemic racism. And if you disagree with those people, you will be accused of being racist, as Singer was.
The irony, of course, is that Hansson and Fried built a reputation around righteousness and wokeness, and then it came for them, because they were two white guys with power.
And when they realized what was happening, they executed their cultural pivot very poorly. They came out with a hard ban on a bunch of people who have the talent to work elsewhere.
Coinbase, at least, had the good sense to focus on the positive, their orientation as a mission-focused company. At the same time, Coinbase was making its employees rich with options and headed for an IPO.
The two companies will be paired case studies at HBS someday about how to screw it up and how to do it right.
That's extremely predictable at this point.
Sounds like they talked the talk, but when it came to walking the walk, they walked back and told everyone to be quiet.
Perhaps they are the ones working toward a politically neutral, non-racist environment, and it is you who won't accept it.
In truth, I don't believe either they or you could properly identify what a politically neutral environment really looks like, and you're probably all unreliable and serving your own ends.
At my company that I was formally employed at before moving on to my current startup, we had a minority of employees very aggressively and vocally demanding that the CEO issue an anti-racism statement after the George Floyd murder. A statement was issue condemning what happened and racism. They were not satisfied with this and demanded that the exact words black lives matter be used and also that a donation to the BLM organization be made.
The company sold data analysis software targeted at Excel power users. It didn't have any offices in Minnesota. The idea that the company needed to make these statements was insane. They don't control police forces in Minneapolis they don't control police forces anywhere.
It is literally not their business to comment on these matters.
And something I have repeatedly stated and noticed is that the employees making these demands are mediocre at best. I rarely see talented developers doing this because they're too busy working.
I love the privilege on display here. You can ignore racial inequality issues because "they are too distracting," meanwhile I have to wake up each morning, read yet another one of my brothers and sisters has been killed by police, and I still have to run my business. Your mediocrity exist in your complacently to the status-quo. On a daily basis we innovate, build, ship, and push tech more than you could ever hope -- and we don't need to ban "political discussions" at work.
If a business chooses to condemn something without backing up that solidarity with meaningful resources and capital, they should be criticized.
You act as if the only people who are killed by police are "one of my brothers and sisters".
Let's unpack that, shall we?
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
Roughly 3/4 of people killed by police in the US are not one of your "brothers and sisters" if by "brothers and sisters" you are referring to humans who share your melanin content and location of ancestral origin (of course all humans are descended from African humans, but to suit the purposes of demagogues, we can ignore that and just stop at the arbitrary point in lineage where we can maximize division to reap power).
As you read this, it is extremely likely that you cant name a single one of the non-black people killed by police last year, can you? Of course not. Or even in the last 5 years, can you? There are 3 times as many of these people as the group you are ethnocentrically focused on.
Let's also talk about the "sisters" aspect. Statistically, women killed by police are minimal. The referenced website, run by activists, removed the filter for women, but you can download the data yourself to see that it's a minimal amount.
Based on the logic of this movement created by people who don't understand basic stats, the discrepancy between men and women must mean that police are systemically sexist against men, right? Because only the outcome matters, and all explanations except bigotry must be ignored.
A big difference these days is that when a non-black person is wrongfully shot by police, the complete lack of national media coverage allows the police to get off scot free.
See Daniel Shaver, who was recorded on camera being executed, unarmed in his underwear, begging for his life, by a psycho cop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv_eyGw4s3w
Unlike Chauvin, said psycho cop was exonerated and dismissed with a full pension, as if he honorable retired. Where were you and BLM? Nowhere, because it's a bigoted, ethnocentric movement designed to divide rather than unite.
You should ask yourself why you used the phrase "brothers and sisters" about people who share your ethnnicity, and why you don't use it for all humans, like I do. Ask yourself if you've been sucked into the precursor to pure racism, ethnocentrism. Ask yourself if you've allowed yourself to be misinformed by media designed to monetize your confirmation bias, rather than inform you.
>Black people were 28% of those killed by police in 2020 despite being only 13% of the population.
You basically just proved the point you were replying to, that racial inequality exists in policing.
I'm asking in good faith, because I think you have insightful comments and I'm curious, even if I disagree with you on a few things.
Just knowing the percentage of men owning guns is way higher than women owning guns would change your perceived threat level based on sex.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/29/how-male-an...
Also feels safe to assume men murder at a higher rate, are cereal killers, and generally a more dangerous type of human than a female.
Enjoy your sad, weird life https://andrew.im/
What "real views"? He laid out a fairly neutral and convincing case for apolitical workspaces.
I can't tell if your posts are parody or not.
Have a nice day.
Taught himself how to code at the library.
He was a recipient of the Thiel Fellowship. You get $100,000 for 2 years of living expenses and you get to work on whatever.
Unfortunately he doesn't seem to blog about that and instead focuses on the time a cop forced his head into a steering wheel because he reached in his pocket.
The human mind gravitates towards the negative, probably due to evolutionary pressures.
The US is such a racist place that a white dude who is a well-known Republican gave him $100,000 to do whatever for 2 years but he ignores that and focuses on the negative experiences in his life with the minority of whites who are bigots, ignoring the kindness he clearly must have come across.
I can relate because I had a similar background to him in the sense where I had a very poor and also drug addicted mother who was in and out of homeless shelters. Eventually when my father was able to locate me I got to have a somewhat normal life compared to that, although we were technically below poverty line income wise.
I don't think he ever got that lucky and I can't imagine what he's been through. He seems to have done great things already. I wish him well, and hope he learns to recognize how fortunate he has been in other ways. If being given 100 grand to do whatever for 2 years isn't privilege, then I don't know what is.
Edit:
Importantly, I forgot to add that he CLEARLY capitalized on that fellowship. He's created a pretty badass startup that leverage video/data streaming to allow playing of console/pc games on iOS/Android/etc. Personally of note for me, his startup created a grpc-like serialization format (bebop) that I looked at months ago for a project I was working on. The lesson/reminder for me is that behind every post on the internet is a human being who I probably have a ton in common with. Plus, anyone who buys an old Camaro and fixes it up themselves is automatically relegated to a higher status in my embarrassingly country boy worldview, lol.
Really, this whole write-up about him is a thinly veiled backhanded compliment. Extremely petty and childish.
No, it's what you wrote that means you're passive aggressive.
>Unfortunately he doesn't seem to blog about that and instead focuses on the time a cop forced his head into a steering wheel because he reached in his pocket.
>The human mind gravitates towards the negative, probably due to evolutionary pressures.
>The US is such a racist place that a white dude who is a well-known Republican gave him $100,000 to do whatever for 2 years but he ignores that and focuses on the negative experiences in his life
>I wish him well, and hope he learns to recognize how fortunate he has been in other ways. If being given 100 grand to do whatever for 2 years isn't privilege, then I don't know what is.
This is the most condescending thing I've read in a while, and clearly a backhanded compliment.
I read Mr. Sampson's blog, and I literally got tears in my eyes. I regretted engaging with him in the way I did, but HN doesn't let me delete posts. It was also too late to edit them.
He and I had something in common, and it's just extremely rare to encounter fellow coders who spent some part of their childhood in "the system" (shelters, foster care, etc) like I did. I've also seen hardcore racists who disown their children for dating a person of color. I even tried to dissuade a man (he was a boss on a construction site i worked at) one time from doing this to his daughter. The hatred in his heart was so deep that it was like talking to a wall.
I saw a commenter continuing to engage, and I wanted to express my emotions I felt after reading his blog. I understand the anger too. I remembered, especially in my mid to late 20s, having the suppressed memories/emotions come back and fuck up my head, and often consume me. It was an attempt to relate and process, and yes, a reminder that these negative memories cause us to forget about being grateful for the good things and good people we encounter on a daily basis. The dehumanization of people who disagree with us, is bad, and I'm not pretending I'm not part of the problem, including some asshole things I said in this thread, which I regret.
Based on your outright hostility and strong political beliefs (you clearly have politics incorporated into your identity), I doubt you'll believe my explanation, but I'm writing this in the off-chance that Mr. Sampson sees this. He's embarked on a difficult path with his startup, and I sincerely wish him well. That's it.
https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/mesa-rally-...
Please don't lie and spread hateful rhetoric like the idea that BLM is "bigoted" (against whom, the police?). BLM activists actually were involved in a lot of the Daniel Shaver activism. It is a travesty that the cop that killed him wasn't held accountable, but trying to blame the BLM movement for that when then, and now, they're actively trying to make changes to that system, in ways that are helpful to people of all races, makes me think you're being driven by an irrational hate and fear of the BLM movement.
> ethnocentrism
This word doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. "Ethnocentrism" is an antonym of cultural relativism, which I guess could be seen as a sort of supremacy ideology, but not in the way you seem to be using it.
> Based on the logic of this movement created by people who don't understand basic stats, the discrepancy between men and women must mean that police are systemically sexist against men, right? Because only the outcome matters, and all explanations except bigotry must be ignored.
Certainly there are ways that society fails men, yes. It frames them as more violent and dangerous, and because of this I would indeed expect that (and the stats back up) that men are killed, by police disproportionately compared to women, basically no matter how you measure.
Literally the only substantial voice that stood up and went to bat for Daniel Shaver was BLM. You're right, police violence is far from isolated to Black people. Most BLM activists would agree that stopping police violence has multi-racial benefits!
I don't believe this is true. Can you like anything on BlackLivesMatter.com that touches on Daniel Shaver's death?
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/12/09/black-lives-mat...
https://www.facebook.com/JusticeForDaniel/photos/i-just-want...
| BlackLivesMatter.com
The movement is so much more than that website. There's also a big difference between black lives matter and Black Lives Matter.
What about climate change? Should they also commit meaningful capital and resources to that?
How should they balance those with other priorities, like their fiduciary duty to their shareholders?
Unless they have the same parents, they are not your brothers and sisters more than OP is. Imagine an us-vs-then based on skin color is extremely racist and should be criticized.
It's basic, morally right, and easily completed during a single lunch break. There's absolutely no reason to overthink this.
BLM and their cohorts were never elected to be representatives of black Americans. The default assumption of upper middle class whites who grew up in segregated suburbs is that they must be representative and most black Americans share their very radical views. I can assure you they do not and opinion polls show this.
I spent a few years in foster care and the best family I was in was a black family in Virginia where the head of household was a police officer and his wife was a public defender in a neighboring county. They and most of their church congregation absolutely despise black lives matter the organization, not the message obviously.
The organization gave itself that name to deliberately overload a moral message with their off-putting, alien, and radical ideology.
Your comment is proof that this strategy worked because if I disagree with any single element of the organization and therefore don't donate, according to your comment I am no longer morally correct and must not think that black lives matter. It's a simplistic and moralistic take evidence by your absolute moral certainty.
It's weird that hold this case up as an example of unreasonable behavior on the employees part when in actuality their requests are extremely normal and reasonable.
In the absence of any specific connection to your business, there are plenty of worthy causes (race inequalities, but also gender inequalities, world hunger, ...) and you can't demand that your company (or any company) actively contribute to all of them lest they be called out for being anti-X.
It seems that there was at the very least one instance of behavior that employees perceived as outwardly racist (the names list) and were seeking to address issues surrounding that behavior.
On the outside, it’s hard to know much more about the details, but it also would appear that employees took issue with other somewhat minor slights that may have amounted to a pattern of behavior, in particular relating to someone with a lot of authority at base camp, who was then given a pass under the guise of political differences.
The names list hasn't been clearly established as racist. If you have 10 times the European names as you have Asian names, is it racist against Asians, or were there "funny" names in all groups?
The perception of racism is not necessarily racism. That is precisely the point that is being argued. The claim of white supremacy does not mean that an organization is white supremacist. Big claims need big evidence. I haven't seen it.
Minor slights happen. They are inevitable in daily life no matter what your race, gender, sexual orientation or other identity. If you use minor slights to create an uproar in the context of your job, you are a bad employee who should be fired. Tying minor slights to genocide is one way of creating an uproar.
Singer had power and seniority at Basecamp. He once linked to a Breitbart page. While I differ with Breitbart on most issues, I do not see that as prima facie evidence that Singer is white supremacist or racist.
Just because Singer is a white male with authority does not make him, by definition, a white supremacist or a racist.
And if the only cure for that kind of "white supremacy" is replacing all the white males with any power or authority with people of other identities, then I'm opposed to that "cure," because it is a racist and discriminatory cure based on false generalizations about genders and racial groups.
With that framing, the perception of whether the list was racist does matter as it explains their motivation. Because they did perceive the list to be racist, it’s just not the case that they were taking issue with the idea of being race neutral.
Second, you are jumping to wild conclusions about what they were asking for. At no point did anyone say that “all white males with any power or authority” must be replaced. If that were true, it would stand to reason that they’d aim their ire at the entire leadership structure itself rather than on the one individual. Your blanket assertion may have some grounding in your personal experiences, but it is overly broad in this instance.
Finally, while the equivalence between minor slights and genocide has been made, that was not the reason why I brought it up. The reason why I mention minor slights is that, while they may be minor in isolation, when taken in context together they can reveal a pattern of behavior that is hard to explain to those on the outside, and thus is difficult to perceive to us as observers. In this instance it seemed that employees wanted to shave a forum to address this and were shut down.
I don't think we know their true motivation. Anyone can claim to perceive something as racist. We cannot control their sense of offense. The act they claim to be racist may or may not be racist.
But what advocates of critical race theory have found is that, by claiming that something is racist, they can bring pressure on their employers.
That is precisely what happened here. Basecamp is now under tremendous pressure. Plenty of ire has been focused on the co-founders as well as Singer. Singer has quit, though we don't know the facts of the case. Accusations of racism are fatal to one's career, whether or not they have a basis in fact.
Another word for "revealed pattern" is "narrative." Many narratives can be told about the same set of facts. And many of those narratives are deeply subjective, or driven by ideology.
I could take many minor actions by Jane Yang and others at Basecamp and interpret them as a power grab.
To be clear, I know that some people and companies do act in racist ways. Such behavior is illegal and should be punished. But the evidentiary bar to establish that is high. That bar has not yet been met here.
In this case, we have very serious accusations and very little evidence, evidence that can be interpreted in several ways. But Basecamp and Singer have already suffered serious consequences, and the claims have been aired publicly.
So they were able to create a scandal without going through the effort of proving anything.
And this is the crux of the issue. Ones entire interpretation of these issues relies on whether or not one believes racism exists as a structural problem or not. Opponents reduce this down to a simple difference of opinion, but if you see that the world treats certain groups differently than others, it is not mere difference of opinion, there are real, tangible consequences that go along with that disagreement.
The thing that you get wrong, that so many people get wrong on all sides of this, is that the issue at hand here isn’t about whether Singer is himself a racist person. When people speak of “white supremacy” refers to a structural system within society that treats people differently on the basis of their race, in a hierarchy that places white people at the top. It’s not a matter of individual intent, but the culmination of ways that people act differently towards each other that nets out to place people in different positions within society.
I think it’s reasonable to disagree on how you go about remedying that situation, but the assertion that “people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race” shouldn’t be that controversial of a statement.
The person(s) that attacked Singer used social justice activist techniques, claim of and demand for denouncing "white supremacy" in order to reduce a viewpoint opponents moral authority, where "white supremacy" uses the social justice unstated redefinition of the colloquial term to mean "policy or habitual behavior that could perpetrate outcomes not in alignment with social justice dogma".
This activist technique is a kafka trap with no good answer. Keeping that in mind its pretty clear where the accuser comes from.
As a side-note: a discussion/debate between viewpoint opponent break down if serious accusation are made without evidence, and a healthy discussion and work environment need to exclude such bad actors. Kudos to basecamp and coinbase for adopting policies that discourage such behavior.
If you agree with both of those statements, do you believe white peoples are still given a higher place in society? Do you believe that to no longer be the case?
I’ll limit this to the United States.
You are asking a question positioned using very low-fidelity and poorly scoped social justice dogma.
With Nigerians topping educaction and income stats clearly low-fidelity race characteristics is not a sufficient predictor of outcome. Likewise, asian americans have the highest median income so being majority does not predict the best outcome.
In addition to this, official identity based government and company policies create asymmetry in official hiring as well as promotion policies that favor BIPOC and women.
What does seem like a great predictor is being born into a family-focused culture where kids education is extremely important. This is a commonality between sub-cultures that do well, and skin color is no great predictor for culture. Some of the sub-cultures that does the worst have high rates of single parenting, including sub-cultures of white culture, and single parenting is also a great predictor of lower household income.
Call that social justice dogma if you want, but I’d consider it an objective fact.
Edit: because it seems to be unclear. The word “was” was in reference to the past. It’s an objective fact that there _was_ an explicit system of racial hierarchy in the United States.
When you think it's explicit instead of implicit you are in a minority even amongst social justice adherents. Social justice started focusing on "implicit" bias and racism because the instances of explicit racism in the 2000s were not numerous enough to support its activist objective of tearing down the system and replacing it.
The whole concept of "systemic oppression" is based around this realization, where social justice argue that capitalism fool people into being happy and content so that they don't oppose an implicitly oppressive system that traps them in a false reality.
> Call that social justice dogma if you want, but I’d consider it an objective fact.
The examples in my previous message show that it's neither descriptive nor factual.
Social justice prescribe a totalizing worldview that use an every-increasing set of politically motivated identity groups to further an activist objective. The objective is to tear down the system and the promise is a utopia once everyone agrees with the utopic vision.
Given the history of the United States, wherein there existed both legal and extralegal forms of racial discrimination, the primary assertion is that while the obvious forms of racial discrimination have been abolished, there continue be forms of systematic racial discrimination. These people assert that this is a bad thing and it should be corrected. This is not about bringing about a utopia, but about righting a wrong.
None of this is “totalizing”. Indeed, even in the past, during slavery and Jim Crow, you had examples of successful black people and other POC (Web Debois, Fredrick Douglass). The argument is simply that POC face barriers that white people simply don’t face, not that those barriers are impossible to overcome.
In social justice activism "racism" is redefined to mean "inequitable outcomes". So of cause with this change of definition you can say the "group" experience racism when you really just mean that one group does better than another. DEI is the prescribed social justice solution, ignoring how the equity doctrine has destroyed every society it touched.
If you use the colloqial definition of racism then affirmative action, diversity quotas, DEI preferential hiring&promotion are all widespread policies that discriminate against white people based upon their race. DEI programs also use negative racial profiling and stereotyping. The claim that white people do not experience racism is therefore objectively wrong.
So social justice is arguing for explicit racist policies to fix "implicit racism", which really means "equitable outcomes"
The notion that DEI advocates have redefined racism to mean “inequitable outcomes” is a framing that has been constructed by conservatives and IDW types, but it is _not_ what DEI is about.
DEI is about what _explains_ the inequitable outcomes.
Given the history of western societies and the United States in particular, it is reasonable to assert that there should be a burden of proof to show that there are no longer racial privileges rather than the converse. Especially when the same hierarchy is displayed when looking at patterns of racial inequalities today. Further, there is significant scholarship that draws direct lines between things like redlining, housing convenants, and sentencing disparities and those same racial inequalities.
There are really only two classes of descriptions that can explain such disparities.
1. All people are inherently equally capable regardless of racial categorization, the disparities we observe at due to barriers placed in front of disadvantaged groups.
Or
2. Some groups are more capable of others, either due to biological or cultural factors.
2 has played out throughout the history of European colonization in different forms, both as a “scientific” practice and through cultural chauvinism. Both are general regarded as white supremacy, because that’s a fairly appropriate label.
One place I do agree with you however is here: “The claim that white people don’t experience racism is objectively wrong”
The social justice side actually agrees with you and has just started an unhelpful fight over semantics. Whether you want to call is “racism” or “prejudice” it’s not like there is anything special about white people that makes it impossible to discrimination against them. That does differ, though, from structural level discrimination.
The second term of the social justice prescribed D(iversity)E(quity)I(nclusion) solution, equity, literally means redistribution of outcomes.
> The social justice side actually agrees with you and has just started an unhelpful fight over semantics. Whether you want to call is “racism” or “prejudice” it’s not like there is anything special about white people that makes it impossible to discrimination against them. That does differ, though, from structural level discrimination.
How are DEI programs, affirmative action and diversity quotas for hiring&promotion not structural level discrimination? These are policies and laws pushed by the government and corporations.
> The notion that DEI advocates have redefined racism to mean “inequitable outcomes” is a framing that has been constructed by conservatives and IDW types, but it is _not_ what DEI is about.
> DEI is about what _explains_ the inequitable outcomes.
There are more than 3 possible explanations. The most likely one is that your categories, race, are not well fitted to what you are trying to explain. For instance, Nigerians do incredibly well and are considered black and most of them came here not rich.
You are also comparing over timeframes that don't make sense. The america of today is not even comprised of the same populations, and the people that lived these injustices died a looong time ago. As recent as in 1950 89.3% were white with most of the remainder black. Today 60% white, 18.5% hispanic, 12.5% black, 5.8% Asian, 2.3% multirace, and 0.9% other.
Most wealth and status is also currently not gained through inheritance. Most get high status through education and wealth through work. This shows how bad it is that social justice activists push racial discrimination where status and wealth is currently gained through individual merit.
The children that integrated schools in the south are still very much alive, and aren’t even that old [1].
“Hispanic” wasn’t even a category in the census until 1970 (they were here, they just weren’t counted). [2] While there has been significant Asian and Latin American immigration in the interim, the stats you cite aren’t comparable due to differences in collection criteria.
> How are DEI programs, affirmative action and diversity quotas for hiring&promotion not structural level discrimination? These are policies and laws pushed by the government and corporations.
The government isn’t allowed to have racial quotas [3]. But I would cede that you make an important point here, that the proposed remedy mirrors the problem that is being brought up. I am not here to argue the virtues of such programs. There is a difference between identifying that a problem exists and agreeing with a proposed solution. My understanding is that you don’t agree that there is a problem, and that is the extent of my concern.
> Most wealth and status is also currently not gained through inheritance. Most get high status through education and wealth through work. This shows how bad it is that social justice activists push racial discrimination where status and wealth is currently gained.
This is a red herring, no one is arguing against education and work. Conservatives just want people to focus on those things in lieu of addressing racial discrimination. Also, treating inheritance as though it’s insignificant is a bit odd… 35 to 45 percent[4] may not be a majority, but it’s hugely significant.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Bridges?wprov=sfti1
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/03/03/census-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_Univ._of_Cal._v...
[4] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/01... "Inheritance Matters. An estimated 35 to 45 percent of wealth is inherited rather than self-made"
The supreme court ruling that ended school segregation in public education was in 1954. On the other hand the people classified as white as well as asian experience racial discrimination by DEI education and company initiatives right here right now.
> “Hispanic” wasn’t even a category in the census until 1970 (they were here, they just weren’t counted). [2] While there has been significant Asian and Latin American immigration in the interim, the stats you cite aren’t comparable due to differences in collection criteria.
This is as far as I can tell an admittance that you are making comparisons over timescales that does not make any sense.
> This is a red herring, no one is arguing against education and work. Conservatives just want people to focus on those things in lieu of addressing racial discrimination. Also, treating inheritance as though it’s insignificant is a bit odd… 35 to 45 percent[4] may not be a majority, but it’s hugely significant.
The social justice prescribed DEI solution argues for racial discrimination in access to education and promition&hiring. So the outcome-focused thinking of activists are pushing racial discrimination which is objectively not a way to reduce racism.
For the majority that get wealth through educational and work merit being racially discriminated against in those spheres cause harm. Even for people with inherited wealth, how many would still have any wealth if they weren't also successful at education and work?
As long as they have basic financial literacy around how to invest, education and work would both be unnecessary. It would be extremely easy to maintain their wealth.
> This is as far as I can tell an admittance that you are making comparisons over timescales that does not make any sense.
“Census data on race isn’t comparable over long time scale because of major methodological updates to data collection” => your statement is a huge logical leap.
> The supreme court ruling that ended school segregation in public education was in 1954. On the other hand the people classified as white as well as asian experience racial discrimination by DEI education and company initiatives right here right now.
And you are aware that school segregation did not, in fact, end in 1954, as I’m sure you read the article I posted on ruby bridges. It took decades to integrate schools, and in many ways they never were because of the way school district boundaries align with segregated housing.
DEI initiatives rarely advance strict racial quotas or thumb on the scale affirmative action policies. Indeed, the whole impetus for this discussion, basecamp, was an instance where people were bothered by specific behaviors they felt were discriminatory. As I’ve stated multiple times, I take no issue with you disagreeing with a specific set of policies pushed by DEI initiatives, but that is different from denying the existence of racial discrimination against BIPOC. The existence of policies that discriminate against one group does not preclude the existence of discrimination against another.
You are arguing that somehow implicit racism is stronger than explicit racism the social justice DEI solution furthers.
You also argue that on whole systemic racism through policy and habitual behavior benefit the whites that experience explicit systemic discrimination furthered by widespread DEI policies.
This is just not a very strong claim.
> As long as they have basic financial literacy around how to invest, education and work would both be unnecessary. It would be extremely easy to maintain their wealth.
The median pre-tax median inheritance is according to Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) $69,000 [1] (the average was $707,291, indicating a small percentage get a much higher inheritance). So 50% of people that inherit get $69k or less, which is not amount that sets you up to live off that asset.
Any anticipated inheritance is also commonly reduced by estate taxes, attorney’s fees, funeral expenses, probate costs, and paying off the deceased’s debts. Having to share the remaining money with siblings, grandchildren, charities, and any other individuals or organizations in a parent’s will could further reduce a child’s take. And a parent who has remarried might leave assets to a new spouse, diminishing or eliminating what children expected to receive.
> DEI initiatives rarely advance strict racial quotas or thumb on the scale affirmative action policies.
This is not accurate. DEI initiatives seeks to increase diversity in hiring by changing the hiring criteria to hire more of favored identities (inclusion) while promoting favored identities to achieve equal outcome (equity).
But DEI does not apply positively to black viewpoint opponents of social justice such as libertarians and conservatives. They are by social justice seen as not exhibiting an "authentic black lived experience". This activism is a terrible denial of individuality based upon race.
[1] https://www.newretirement.com/retirement/average-inheritance...
You are arguing that somehow implicit racism is stronger than explicit racism the social justice DEI solution furthers.”
An honest rewriting of my quoted text using your terminology would be something more like this: “It would be reasonable to say that the explicitly racist policies advocated by DEI as a remedy are not a proper solution to the problem, but that is different than claiming that implicit racism doesn’t exist”
And yet you’re here claiming that I argue the opposite. At this point you are just arguing in bad faith.
To restate, As clearly as is possible. If you want to assert “while structural racism exists, the policies prescriptions advanced by overzealous and self aggrandizing DEI groups cross the line” I’m happy to cede the debate.
> But DEI does not apply positively to black viewpoint opponents of social justice such as libertarians and conservatives. They are by social justice seen as not exhibiting an "authentic black lived experience". This activism is a terrible denial of individuality based upon race.
You can easily accept that they have a viewpoint while also noting that the vast majority of black people don't identify as libertarian nor as conservatives. Why do you think that a minority should be able to invalidate the majority’s opinion? Because it agrees with your viewpoint?
> The median pre-tax median inheritance is according to Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) $69,000 [1] (the average was $707,291, indicating a small percentage get a much higher inheritance). So 50% of people that inherit get $69k or less, which is not amount that sets you up to live off that asset.
The median inheritor doesn’t become wealthy through inheritance, sure, but they also don’t become wealthy through work & education either. Wealth is a heavily skewed distribution, so it makes little sense to talk about the median when 10% of the country owns something like 3/4th of the wealth. Assuming we are talking about someone who receives a non trivial amount of wealth through inheritance (ie enough for them to be actually wealthy, not 67k) then it is easy to maintain that wealth without work.
Systemic racism just means inequitable outcomes, implicit racism is an "invisible" enemy invented to justify an equity agenda not supported by explicit racism, so I do not see how one can embrace this without embracing DEI as a solution. If social justice used the colloquial definition of racism, which it doesn't, it would be ridiculous to claim that someone is inevitably and exclusively racist because they are white.
I am not saying we shouldn't iterate using the liberal system where corruption happens. However, a committee prescribing outcomes based upon an every-expanding set of politically motivated identity categories is way more prone to corruption because the power is unchecked. A core principle of the liberal system is to check power as it assumed people are and will be imperfect.
> You can easily accept that they have a viewpoint while also noting that the vast majority of black people don't identify as libertarian nor as conservatives. Why do you think that a minority should be able to invalidate the majority’s opinion? Because it agrees with your viewpoint?
Because telling someone that they don't have "an authentic black lived experience" if it doesn't fit an activist mold is both racist and harmful to people listening to each other to find better solutions. It is simply bad process to prescribe a solution while denying any negative feedback, but that is exactly what social justice and DEI does.
> The median inheritor doesn’t become wealthy through inheritance, sure, but they also don’t become wealthy through work & education either. Wealth is a heavily skewed distribution, so it makes little sense to talk about the median when 10% of the country owns something like 3/4th of the wealth. Assuming we are talking about someone who receives a non trivial amount of wealth through inheritance (ie enough for them to be actually wealthy, not 67k) then it is easy to maintain that wealth without work.
I do agree that concentration of wealth is an issue, covid in particular has transferred almost 4 trillion from the middle class to the oligarchs. That said, historically countries that adopted the equity agenda have not fared any better.
However, if only a percentage around 10% rely on inheritance for status&wealth while the rest rely on education and work then forcing equal outcomes through racist policies in education as well as hiring&promotion are gross miscarriages of justice.
I think you are right that that belief shapes how we interpret these issues. By racism as a structural problem, I assume you mean this:
> “people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race”
Society is not an actor. It is a collection of people, and the people are actors. Some of them are racist, and some are not.
I do not believe that every situation is permeated with structural racism that must be corrected, but I suspect that people who believe in structural racism tend to find it everywhere and use it to justify the changes they propose.
I don't assume that they had malicious intent. But I do think that they perceive situations through a distorted lens, which often leads to behavior that is harmful to the organizations where they work.
I think that Basecamp and Singer and most organizations and individuals deserve an assumption of innocence.
Racism has to be proven. Accusations must be backed up with evidence. And the burden of evidence is on the accusers. I think critical race theorists start with the assumption that racism is shaping the interaction.
It is not enough to say that structural racism exists and therefore we should believe that it shaped the behavior of people at Basecamp. You have to prove it case by case. Simply claiming structural racism does not justify enormous change.
Statistically, people of different races experience different outcomes in the US on average. But there is a huge standard deviation in those outcomes by race or gender; that is, any given individual may be doing relatively well or poorly relative to the average.
And I think that applying assertions about society and societal ills to individuals, their actions and specific situations is often misguided, because they may deviate wildly from the average.
But that is exactly what critical race theorists tend to do. They treat individuals as representatives of a larger social trend. A male represents the patriarchy. A Caucasian represents white supremacy.
But attacking an individual to remedy a larger statistical discrepancy is in itself a form of injustice. Especially when we diagnose the supposed cause of that discrepancy with vagueness, as a culmination of ways that society acts.
That is not enough to convince me of the claims being made against Singer and Basecamp, or of the rightness of the Basecamp employees in rebellion.
It would appear then, that we are at an impasse.
I think that is possible and that one could prove it statistically.
I do not think that, just because such behavior can be shown to exist on average, that is necessarily exists in specific situations. If you want to apply an anti-racist remedy in a specific situation, you should have to prove racism in that situation.
And I think that the remedies to specific situations will differ a great deal, depending on unique variables. That is, if a person proposes a remedy, they should show how it will fix the specific problem.
I do not agree with one-size-fits-all remedies that try to fix a social ill by turning a specific company on its head without factual evidence of racism in that company.
I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone was calling for singers job before nor during the meeting. All that happened was that a bunch of employees formed a committee that brought a bunch of issues to the fore. They took issue with singers behavior, and the company responded with “cease all of this discussion or take a buyout” and so they took the buyout.
All this amounted to the company backing up a senior employees behavior reflexively at the expense of lower level employees objections.
Maybe. Or maybe the company was already turned on its head due to the internal conversation. Such a radical reaction from the founders suggests to me that this was the case.
> I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone was calling for singers job before nor during the meeting.
Accusing someone of racism or white supremacy is effectively calling for them to resign or be fired.
> All that happened was that a bunch of employees formed a committee that brought a bunch of issues to the fore.
Right, but again, we don't know if those issues were valid or not. The "funny names" list is not nearly as damning as they seem to think. Given how much information has leaked to the media, I would assume that the strongest evidence they have of racism would already be public. And I have not seen strong evidence.
> All this amounted to the company backing up a senior employees behavior reflexively at the expense of lower level employees objections.
If "backing up a senior employee's behavior" means allowing him to disagree with others about whether his behavior is racist, especially in the absence of evidence that it is racist, then I think they were right to back him up.
Singer's resignation resulted from the show trial of accusations and media leaks, which is a well known playbook for advocates of social change.
I would love to talk sometime, if you’re open to it. Send me an email: krschacht at gmail
but it is anyway, usually
Relevant excerpt from It doesn't have to be Crazy at Work.
Yowchhh. Really really good find.
Social justice activism divides individuals by unchosen group identities into "oppressors" and "oppressed" which is in direct opposition to acknowledging a persons feelings as well as listening to their viewpoints. Social justice activism has due to this predictably lead to resentment and unnecessary conflict in the workplace.
You have a list of customer names that you mock? What kind of amateur, disrespectful operation are you running? Are you building a product or pledging a fraternity?
And how does any of that lead to talking about "White Supremacy". And how does voicing an opinion about such a subject seem like a good idea for the workplace regardless of if you think it exists or not?
For a company that has written a lot of books about how to build companies and cultures, this is...laughable.
Perhaps one step at a time, over the course of repeated conversations that keep dredging up more and more deep-seated resentments that have probably been festering for years and years, because of a longstanding social convention that we're not supposed to openly talk about these sorts of things at the workplace.
Or perhaps, if it's the kind of company where a list like that could continue to exist for so long, there was enough pressure built up that it was more like a levee breaking.
I don't know about "child" but there is a similar vibe here. This also comes through in blog posts and Twitter threads I've seen from some of the people involved. A certain assumption that their own account or opinion should automatically be accepted as default. Arrogance? Petulance? Entitlement? Somewhere in that space.
It shouldn't even be a surprise, really. Even if they were able to overlook political differences, DHH and JF were overwhelmingly likely to hire people who were like themselves in some ways. It's what founders and CEOs have always done, and has often been remarked upon since before they were born. "A fish rots from the head" is one of the less charitable forms. People's high self-image and approach to disagreement or confrontation seems to have been one of the (quite likely unconscious) selection criteria here. After that, a blowup of some sort was only a matter of time.
You may be underestimating the power of modern day PC.
I also think partly this is because being a remote company, these discussions, even with a Web Cam just dont convey the message much. Some of these message could have been in private with different colleague during coffee break or in pantry. So I felt it is also a failure or remote work. Remote doesn't work ALL the time, which is something DHH dont get. And VC are required for many businesses, which is something DHH dont get as well.
Another problem was that most of his political message, I guess you could also argue are glorified ads for Basecamp, attract the same people with similar political views. And many of them were sold into the vision, cult of whatever that might be as Basecamp. And the new policy was felt more like a betrayal of their belief. Hence the huge reaction and backlash that happened.
However, it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned. Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd. I imagine myself working at some of my earlier minimum wage jobs in college and putting forth such a requirement to my managers then. It's a non-sequitur.
When I talk to my family and non-tech non-coasts non-city friends about the sort of political polarization I encounter at my high-tech Seattle job, they often think I'm messing with them, that I'm being facetious or exaggerating. Unfortunately, I'm not.
It's all so tiresome. The increasing politicization of everything, and tech being at the center of it, made me realize I have no interest anymore in climbing the corporate ladder. I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.
It's not a random employee though. It's someone who is part of the Senior Leadership Team.
If you deny that it exists then how can you be trusted to do something if an issue does comes up ?
If I’m trying to count to 100 and someone says “Prepend, please say that white supremacy exists.” And I respond “I’m busy counting to 100 and will not comply with your wishes.” That doesn’t mean I’m denying that white supremacy exists.
It’s odd you would interpret it that way as it’s illogical.
If you do not acknowledge white supremacy exists and needs to be eliminated then you can't expect people to trust you on this issue.
And trust is a critical part of being a leader.
I’m not arguing semantics as my point is that there are many things more important than acknowledging white supremacy exists. This may not be true for others as it seems it’s super important for some.
But if I’m in the business of counting to 100 (or anything) I can be quite successful without including taking about eliminating white supremacy.
Note, I think that systematic racial inequity is bad and must be eliminated. But I don’t think the most effective way to do that is by talking about it all the time. And I think that I can not have any portion of my workday talking about it. This doesn’t mean I am for white supremacy.
I think, at it’s most basic, I don’t think silence is the same as endorsement. The world isn’t black and white (no pun intended) and everyone isn’t forced to choose sides. And it’s certainly not important to state one’s position over and over and over.
It’s hard to know, but I have one data point in my own self in that I really don’t talk much about anything and certainly don’t endorse white supremacy and I actively live my life fighting inequity. Someone saying that I endorse something because I don’t speak about it is incorrect as I know myself better than others do.
Following this logic leads to absurdity. Should people spend their days speaking for or against everything? What about people’s right to privacy?
I mean there’s so many example of how silence=support is illogical, I’m not sure how people can hold this opinion. This assumes that there’s a single set of priorities and white supremacy is near the top for everyone.
It’s also fairly odd in that it assumes that the whole world is in America so that even people in remote countries must make statements against white supremacy lest they endorse it. That’s just silly.
On any topic, only a few thousand or perhaps millions express a position. Does that mean everyone else is against or for? Does silence always equal endorsement? Does it mean opposition?
You haven’t stopped this conversation to call out how you recognize murder is evil and are against it. Does that mean you endorse murder? Isn’t murder important enough to speak out against? I certainly think murder is terrible and am shocked that someone would endorse murder through their silence.
Etc etc etc, there’s a million of these. Not everything has to be a conflict and not everyone owes me an answer. Sometimes I just don’t know and don’t get to know. I should only assume when necessary and using some evidence to support my assumption
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Argumen...
My choice not to dignify that question with a response is not an indication that I endorse white supremacists any more than my choice not to dignify a question like "do you believe the earth is round" indicates my belief that the planet is flat.
White supremacy is still very real in America and throughout the rest of the world. The idea that you’d brush off someone asking about white supremacy in the same way as a flat earth denier is absurd, and says more about your own position of priviledge.
Do you really deny that you have privilege? You’re both white and male, aren’t you? The way you talk actually says a lot more about you than you’re aware of.
Have a pleasant evening.
- What have you done to fight it? - Have you donated to XYZ org? - How much? Why not more? Surely you could afford it? - How much time have spent volunteering for causes that fight it? - How much? Why not more? Surely you could afford it?
If you anticipated this line of questioning would follow, where the person asking the question's intent is to test you, and shame you if you were to fail it, would you still engage with that question?
I get that it's super easy to just claim white supremacy is everywhere, but implicitly the claim is that someone put it there and is perpetuating it. At a company of 58 people, you're pointing at a very small group of people as the ones responsible for all of this supposed white supremacy.
Unless everyone swallows the Kool-Aid and apologizes for being so racist, someone in leadership will eventually have to say, "Actually, this isn't a white supremacist company." Otherwise you've essentially surrendered your company to the "woke" mob.
Due to rising costs, the company decided to outsource some production. The end product was just as good in quality and much cheaper, even after shipping and import taxes.
A few employees were concerned about outsourcing to that specific country and started to discuss and petition the senior executives.
The CEO clamped down hard and said it was a business decision and if anyone didn't like it, they could leave. No politics.
In the end, those employees are still here, but the quality of their work has definitely suffered.
Alternatively, if you can't feasibly mediate, because it's basically all your employees airing grievances at you, then you screwed your job up long ago, and it's time to cop to that. The longer you put off eating crow, the more crow you're eventually going to have to eat.
What you’re describing is “appeasement.” Presume they’re operating in good faith and that maybe they’re kind of right. So you cut a compromise, and sure enough, the white supremacy is still there! And what do they recommend? More appeasement.
I agree it was a management problem, but the problem is it wasn’t identified and nipped in the bud sooner.
Why? It is a tool to utilize confusion to remove the targets moral authority. Both yes and no are bad answers that make you loose moral authority, which is the point of the power tool.
Never trust anyone that uses such a tool, as it shows that the activist attacker is willing to smear individuals they disagree with using deceptive language in order to reduce the unlucky targets moral standing. Is this someone that is worthy of trust?
If it’s about my comment on trust: You are welcome to trust someone that use these power tactics based upon lies to undermine the moral authority of viewpoint opponents, I just believe there are so many people of better character out there to build a relationship with.
Social justice tactics when it boils down to it are effective, but not very creative. Domain specific language is coopted and it’s definitions changed to mean what’s useful for activism. Goal is to redirect as much as possible of an organizations resources and attention towards the ideology instead of whatever it used to do.
With your assertion in mind that there is no issues with the activist technique. Do you denounce pedofilia? Do you denounce defrauding elderly relatives? See how this activist technique works, no answer is good and the question is directed at you as a potential complicit person, and using it is in my opinion a sure sign of a worse character than what I’d like to engage with.
I then called your hair a bird.
Refer to the comment I replied to where you argue "No one was calling anyone a white supremecist", and then justified this conclusion by stating the social justice redefinition of the colloquial term:
> No one was calling anyone a white supremecist in the conversation. They were likely talking about white supremacy as a cultural and political force in the context of how the policy could perpetrate it.
To your other statement:
> all I've done is point out that you constructed an arbitrary binary specifically to decry the creation of arbitrary binaries.
There are many different types of individual viewpoints and behaviors, so a critique of or an unwillingness to accept a type of behavior normally means that you have tons of others you accept. Disagreeing being a binary choice is a social justice dogma that model the world very badly.
* Accept the claim that the company is and has been supporting white supremacy, de facto surrendering decisions on anything an employee suggests might support white supremacy
* Disagree with the claim
The redefinition of white supremacy (as you’ve defined it) is a bad faith rhetorical tool designed to create these kind of situations. Leaders are under no obligation to appease employees acting in bad faith.
First, you're creating such a stark false dichotomy that it's hard not to wonder if it's somehow deliberate.
Second, saying that white supremacy is present in the company is not the same thing as saying that the company is run by white supremacists. The term functions very differently in the noun sense than it does in the adjective sense.
Perhaps you might enlighten us as to why this is a false dichotomy, and what other options there are.
> Second
You cannot run a company that perpetuates white supremacy without implicitly supporting that white supremacy, whether you know it or not. I've already been clearly told that malice and intent are not required.
Or are you genuinely going to make the case that "someone who supports white supremacy" is not interchangeable with "white supremacist?" I'm not interested in debating your personal redefinitions of terms.
Since we've already touched on the subject of "bad faith rhetorical tools," getting on other people's cases for acknowledging that the English language is soaked in polysemy isn't exactly an encouraging sign. It's difficult to have an enjoyable conversation with someone who's brandishing a cape.
> The term functions very differently in the noun sense than it does in the adjective sense.
The terms don’t in the dictionary, so there’s no way to continue the discussion without debating what this commenter thinks these terms mean.
This isn’t my first rodeo, and we can all see what’s happening here.
Again this is all you projecting thoughts onto other people.
If I called you a pedophile, I imagine you wouldn't be super expectant of a productive conversation about my unique definition of the word or how I think it applies to you. You wouldn't care what I thought, because if I cared what you thought, I wouldn't have smeared you as a pedophile.
You're still mentally skipping the idea of systemic white supremacy and jumping straight from white supremacy to you are a nazi. But that jump comparison only works for white supremacist. There isn't a comparable systemic thing for pedophilia. We don't discuss systemic pedophilia and how society broadly favors pedophiles in the same way that we do talk about systemic favoritism of white people and culture (and even if you personally disagree that society does favor white people and culture, the conversation does happen). When the other person says white supremacy, this is what they mean: cultural systems and norms that favor white people and things associated with white people, often to the detriment of other cultures and peoples.
So again, you're presupposing someone is smearing you, when they've once again never claimed to have done that and further more actively claimed the opposite. And please note that now four different people have pointed out that no, this wasn't calling anyone a white supremacist. So perhaps it is simply you who is the one using a custom definition here.
Part of this seems to be that you keep insisting on making things about individuals, and not the company and systems itself. Consistently you've changed "the company's actions maintain white supremacy" to "the leaders of the company are white supremacists". That's two jumps: company and its actions to the leaders and then an ascription of intent. People can do things by mistake. Groups can do things unintentionally. You're assuming that everyone is presupposing fault and intent, and using that to ascribe nefarious motives to people who at no point appeared to ascribe fault or intent.
It's also totally unclear how
> * Accept the claim that the company is and has been supporting white supremacy, de facto surrendering decisions on anything an employee suggests might support white supremacy
makes sense. This is akin to saying "yes, we've made mistakes before". I don't see how that "surrenders decisions", I mean unless you mean that they're going to say this about certain decision but still assume they made the right decision (or maybe they did, but then they need to justify this).
I wouldn't have "denounced" white supremacy either. If these are the base conditions under which you're prepared to talk to me then quite frankly, fuck you. There is nothing to gain for me, and you're clearly not prepared to take anything I say in good faith. Okay, I might have in a leadership role to keep the peace as a matter of professionalism, but I'd also have started looking for a new job as this is not a healthy atmosphere. I don't want to work with people who think I'm secretly a white supremacist.
The problem is that I've seen many things being labelled as "white supremacy" that seem ... a bit of a stretch. For example people have argued that Alien (the film) is an example of white supremacy as the alien represents a stereotypical black women; "Black women have been portrayed in contemporary white social and political culture as super-fertile and indestructible breeders whose sexual reproduction must be controlled."[1]
When I first read that, it took me quite a while to realize this was even referring to the alien itself, rather than some character that got infected. It seems it purely based on the fact that the alien is black.
There are many, many examples of this, especially in the last year people have been going way to far in re-analysing everything through the lens of race, often with some very harsh words like "white supremacy". Sometimes this is a good thing, but often I find it's not. Either these are general problems that affect everyone (just black folks more, but that doesn't mean the core problem is racism), or it's outright nonsense like the above.
Now, I don't know what argument that person made exactly in support of "White supremacy existing at Basecamp", but if you make such a strong claim – which is essentially calling your leadership/coworkers white supremacists – then you better have some good arguments. I'm skeptical they existed; they're certainly not present in this article beyond wishy-washy "creating a space where people do not feel welcome".
And considering that this discussion left people "crying and screaming at the screen" it seems rather easy to make some people feel "not welcome".
The entire thing stinks; perhaps the leadership could have handled things a bit better here and there, but if you're not willing to take a somewhat nuanced disagreement in good faith then there's nothing you can do except nod and smile on every sort of nonsense they bring up, and anything else will upset people.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predato...
The US is the least racist nation in the world according to Pew surveys.
What we have an abundance in the US is people who, if racism disappeared tomorrow, would be out of work and have to find a new career. These same people are the ones who act as if the election, to 2 terms, of a black president translates to the US making no progress on race since the 60's.
I grew up in a mostly black county in Virginia. I know what demagoguery looks like, and witnessed it with the GOP for decades. The Democratic party has embraced it, in a big way, since Hillary's loss. It works to win elections, but at the cost of elevating racial reductionism in POC. And the more POC embrace racial reductionism, the more moderate whites will do the same, creating more white supremacists. I've already witnessed colleagues who are moderate getting frustrated in meeting where they are demonized, and next thing you know they are googling and listening/reading conservative authors who mirror their frustration and amplify it.
Singer didn't deny that white supremacy "exists". He simply stated, in my opinion correctly, that it's not embedded in American institutions. Because it's not, as evidenced by the fact that we actively import (to an extent unsurpassed by the vast majority of nations in the world) non-white immigrants to the tune of over a million a year.
My next door neighbor is an Indian immigrant family. My neighbor across the street is from Vietnam. Both are naturalized citizens, and this ethos is going to try to say that the institution that naturalized them is white supremacist. It's patently absurd and irrational, and appeals to gullible college students and losers who desperately want to externalize blame for their failures.
The founders effectively took everyone's voice away. I think that's a very consistent way to get people to leave - especially people who for whom having a voice is more important than working at basecamp
Obviously, you ideally want your job to be politically aligned with you so that your labor doesn't conflict with your beliefs. But today it seems like many feel so disconnected and disenfranchised from any communities outside of work they they put all their eggs in that basket, and that ultimately never goes well.
Setting aside the merits of all the underlying arguments, the founders were clearly only talking about their "voice" within the context of their employment at basecamp, not their ability to have a voice in all other possible contexts. And thus the following is a non sequitur:
> having a voice is more important than working at basecamp
Being an employee at basecamp is a necessary prerequisite for having a voice as an employee at basecamp.
I have trouble imagining how labor could ever lack a political dimension, and the distinction that presents itself to me between the past supposedly 'less politicized' workplaces, is that workers (or at least minoritized workers) were simply less safe to discuss politics and justice in this context that dominates their life and survival.
That's completely understating the entirety of what happened; the culmination of which seemed to be frivolous HR complaints. Has anyone disputed the details of the fuller context available through David's blogs and other sources?
> no one should be able to discuss anything "political" at work anymore
Can't they though? Here is what Jason had to say:
> 1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account...People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can't happen where the work happens anymore.
I totally get it. Toxic people tend to clump. And they eventually aim their toxicity at each other. You don't want them in the workplace or really, in your life at all.
> Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd.
Not only is it absurd, the whole demand to say such a thing was a Kafka trap to begin with.
> I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.
It's not a liability, at least not in the long term. The time when being 'woke' is beneficial to advancement will come to an end. Because if the fervor one has for politics is what a company values, then they'll get increasing fervor until the place is too toxic to be productive.
Your inability to generate a constant stream of passion for your opinions and hate for contrary opinions is a sign that you are normal. That you are reasonable. And that you are dependable. It's nothing at all to apologize for.
There will always be companies that have employees with different political, religious, and social opinions who will find common ground in their desire to build cool shit and provide value. Go find one of those places and be happy.
Finally! I have been pointing this out as being mostly a tech circle thing. But almost every time I get downvoted for it.
The question here is, why Tech? What is specific about Tech as an industry, and that is not just in US, it is also spreading in UK, ( or mostly English speaking countries ). I assume it has something to do with Social Media. But then other industry also have access to social media usage as well.
- list of funny names that is kept in some persistent form and circulates the company with full acknowledgment of the head people: Childish and extremely unprofessional, but still a typical mistake rather than a colossal disaster;
- politics and racism issue: looks like typical misunderstanding but on a very fragile subjects. Very easy to get into drama scenarios with this mix. Very easy to mishandle it. But it still seems that this topic is not normal workplace topic. If there is a serious issue in that matter, you go to some authorities. If you did not address it officially and decided to attack the head people - sorry, it's not the way. That might suggest that there was no real issue as there were no serious actions;
- policy change public announcement first then to your team: Yeah that's a big mistake, something that probably their books wouldn't even advise. Head people did not recognise that this is not the way to manage fragile topics.
Is DHH and Jason all evil?
- These are the same guys that give equal pay regardless of remote worker location.
- They were always believing in remote work, which is bigger problem for company and it's more of a benefit for the employees
- Many times were vocal about issues with big companies, where many others did not have enough courage to do the same
- Creators of a breakthrough tech stack and tremendous contributions to open-source
- Always happily sharing their knowledge
They made a mistake. But they don't seem to be bad guys here overall.
In this context, the article seems to be written by someone who had some personal issues with the guys and he found a way to "show'em all". Even if it tells his version of the story, to me it's at least unfair and biased.
And then throw the timeframe on top of it. If this stuff had happened over the course of a year, it might have been fine. But if it unfolds as quickly as it did at Basecamp, people don't have a chance to stop and breathe. It's just react react react.
I think they made more than one mistake. Overall, I think this situation really paints Jason in a bad light; I used to use Basecamp, but I actually know him more from all his interviews and writings about management and leadership.
I hugely disagree with the way that white supremacism has had it's definition widened within certain circles and how those circles are now attempting to push that definition into wider usage through the type of bullying that's on display in this very article.
For most people white supremacism conjures up images of nazi germany, the slave trade, jim crow, lynchings, the kkk, etc. Our society today does not resemble those in such a way that we should begin using that word to mean something totally different. It feels like an awful rhetorical trick where the emotional resonance of the older meaning of the word is felt by everyone each time it's used while meaning something far more subtle. We're dealing with something far more complicated today, and no number of performative denouncements will help us solve our problems.
There's a lesson to be learned here. I wasn't there, of course, but, based on reading this article, it seems that arguing semantics was possibly Singer's single biggest tactical error in that meeting. There were much more pressing issues at play, and choosing such a banal hill to die on sent a strong message to at least some portion of the staff. Perhaps not one that he would have wanted to send if he had taken the time to count to ten before opening his mouth.
It's like in that Hacker News commenting guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"There's not much we can do as a company to confront the white supremacist society we live in" sounds downright dismissive compared to "there's not much we can do as a company to support police accountability or any of the other myriad ways in which racism shows up in our society, since that stuff mostly happens outside our company".
If a group of people trying to boil the ocean are convinced that the basin of the ocean is just a really big pot and argue that anyone who argues otherwise is a BAD PERSON obviously it would be great if we could convince them that the part where they're accusing people of being BAD PEOPLE for thinking differently is the real problem and reassure them that they can continue to believe that the ocean is in a really big pot.
Except that these two things seem utterly tied up together in their minds -- they learned it because it's stated exactly that way in many books and other media (you haven't read the nytimes best seller Non-ocean-pot-thinking Fragility?). They think it's as true as 2+2=4 because the theory's origins are academic and we must believe science don't you know?
Attacking the definitional issue seems doomed to fail to me as well, but I can't think of any other way forward that isn't worse.
Beyond that, I think it was foolish to prioritize debating language in the first place rather than focusing on making employees feel valued and included. People in leadership positions hold a lot of power in shaping where the conversation goes, and they could've pivoted to a more constructive conversation about company values at any point. But rather than do that, it was more important to be right.
Like I don’t agree with him. And I do see how a funny names list is a form of “violence” in a way. I also think Singer is a tad misleading.
But he’s just like, wrong. You can have a discussion or a disagreement on this topic. The way this has all been escalated and framed as “you’re not taking a stand against white supremacy” makes my head spin.
Again, I’m a staunch leftist. I agree with a lot of the arguments made, but the way they are being made and the expectations on the employer are very confusing to me.
A lot of comments have said childish and I agree. Everyone looks like a horribly communicative child in this story, and it’s really uncomfortable to watch.
I in no way see how his comments were “very questionable”. I disagree with them? But I just like think they’re wrong.
“Very questionable” is going off on a tangent about (((globalists))) and a worldwide conspiracy network. This is a very uncomfortable shift of the Overton window for me.
If I worked there, I would've quit, or made plans to quit, immediately regardless of which side I was on or the nuances.
People read about this stuff because a civil war is interesting. It's not interesting when you're in it. If I worked for them, I might wait to quit and forgo the severance, because of the politically charged interpretations of people quitting without a job lined up. But I would make the decision to quit immediately, once it was clear 1/3 of the company was leaving.
A similar sort of situation is when you have a struggle over unionizing. I'm in favor of unions in the abstract, I guess. I currently have a union job. But a company that is in a battle over unionizing clearly has a toxic relationship between management and employees that has reached a breaking point. The rational response to to bail out.
Consider the phrase "We live in a democracy culture": You can practically assume that everyone the conversation believes democracy is the correct way to govern, and NOT believing that would be considered very far outside of the overton window. Even as Democrats and Republicans fight over voter ID laws, both sides claim their view is more true to democracy.
So similarly, while racism exists, we do not live in a culture where it is the norm to openly state that "White people are superior." Yes, white nationalism exist and it is a nasty idealogy, but the fact that they have to airbrush their ideology in "ethnostatism" is a sign that openly expressing white supremacy is an unmarketable idea.
This is what I take the phrase "We don't live in a white supremacist culture" to mean. It is a very different claim from "racism doesn't exist". However, I think a more empathetic thing to say would be something along the lines of "White supremacy doesn't define our culture. We live in a nation where this ideology is openly condemned by the vast majority people on the left, center, and right. However, that doesn't mean it is completely absent, especially in our past, whose effects still linger on today."
Once a harmful set of actions comes to light, it's your job as the leadership team to:
1. Apologize
2. Correct the wrong
3. Allow your employees the space to process and heal
a. Note: People are messy. Especially hurt people express themselves in ways that seem foreign to us. Listen to them
Rather than allow space for employees to reach catharsis, they shut down the employees internally. Rather than get their employees back on the company mission, they told them "there's the door". All while externally extolling the virtues of "staying out of politics" and gaslighting everyone.
They're within their rights to do that. Supposedly all of this passed internal HR/Legal review. It's just not the ethical way to deal with this. It's not what we expected from a company that we've long associated with being brash-but-ethical in their dealings
What you say is correct in really bad situations. Thing is, that I have trouble to see real issue in what has happened here. It somehow feels surreal that DHH and Jason were able to fool us all for years, and now it seems that they are being accused of almost being hostile to their employees. Everything arose around this darn name list. How this ended up with using words of "white supremacy" is beyond me, and genuinely feels as words misunderstanding or misuse. In a team with non-natives, it is extremely easy to have such misunderstandings. But it is also easy to not spot that misunderstanding quickly. And that someone misunderstood something is not a reason to apologize I believe. Also the way they tried to handle the situation, seems to me like they were stunned by it and it took them off guard, because they are probably not racists guys, and instead they are fully and deeply against such people. That's why further developments seem more random than professional or done on purpose.
I just had a situation in my team where we had a junior guy that we wanted to train. He was very hesitant to learn, he always knew better, and any PR feedback ended always with 2 hours-long calls, trying to explain him the comments there. He was always told that we want to get feedback from him, that he always will be listened and he was always assuring us that he is fine, that he finally understood the feedback and all. Guess what - today he told me that he leaves and the main reason was that he could never understand the PR and that he never could agree with it, and that he always felt that he can't say word and that he has to obey..... I'm feeling confused and cheated all day. I went far and beyond to make him feel as comfortable as possible, it took many overtime hours to stay with him to discuss stuff and then go back to do my tasks. I'm speechless right now, and trying to not loose my self-confidence as I literally don't know what I've done wrong.
I feel that their situation might be somewhat similar now:
1. Apologize - but maybe they don't see what for?
2. Correct the wrong - but what was wrong?
3. Allow the space for employees - what kind of space? How are they not allowed for that already? Do you mean doing some sessions and commit weeks to try to solve people's own issues?
4. Get employees back on board - ok they messed up with this one by posting the policy change publicly.
Not sure it was noticed, but DHH hasn't tweeted once in May. I obviously don't know the reason, but maybe, just maybe, he is trying to put all the pieces together to at least have an idea what just happened?
>Not sure it was noticed, but DHH hasn't tweeted once in May
It was definitely VERY noticeable, considering the case EPIC and Apple is going on right now.
After this, it's totally clear where this is headed. Why were you surprised?
You said he was hesitant to learn and always knew better. That struck me as a little incongruous? He was opinionated, and his opinions were different than yours. You wanted to do things your way, he wanted to do things his way. I imagine he might also describe you as hesitant to learn. From what you wrote, it really isn't clear which of you was "more right", but it's clear it wasn't a good fit.
For more context: I'm 8 years at the project, it's multi-stack, we have some conventions worked out through years that more or less work for us. You don't want to adapt new ideas with every new developer as that would become a mess. But we are also open for changes, but they have to be reasonable and worth spending time on them.
The guy is/was ok in regards of front-end skills, but he lacks a lot about how to connect the dots from business logic perspective. He never got the point about making code friendly to get through instead of easy to write at the moment when he was working on it. He also wasn't good at abstractions, and I didn't expect him to be since he was hired for junior role, but he either never wanted to accept that we want him to be better at it. One of many examples: he wanted to use BEM in Vue's single-file components. I showed that him that even Vue tells that scoping could be done by `scoped` attribute _or_ BEM. Since we use scoped, using BEM is overlapping the need of scoping. He was like "fine, but I will do it my way anyway, because I like BEM"... And then I will need to explain it somehow to some other developer who would ask - "Hey, why we have double scoping? What was the reasoning behind it?"
With the attitude "fine but I will do it my way anyway" I'm surprised you didn't fire him. Probably a good thing he left? It wasn't a good fit.
Whilst here at HN, different people have different viewpoints (not all of them the same) -- there are 1) some who think like those at Twitter, whilst 2) others see things more from DHH's and Jason's perspective.
And 3) some here at HN, seems you're one of them, understand both perspectives at the same time.
Why no people from the last two "groups", on Twitter? (at least I didn't stumble upon any such tweets)
“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
He continued: “Very often, if you express a dissenting view, you get called a Nazi. … I have not felt this is open territory for discussion. If we were to try to get into it as a group discussion it would be very painful and divisive.”
Singer concluded his remarks. Fried responded, “Thank you, Ryan.”
A handful of other speakers followed. Then a Black employee asked if the company could revisit Singer’s remarks. (I’m withholding the employee’s name and other identifying details out of colleagues’ fears that they could be targeted for harassment for speaking out.)
--
Interesting that comments objecting to political hyperbole gets the commenter suspended (leading to resignation) with his name all over the place, while those who called for his censure are deemed as needing to be protected from naming due to "harrassment for speaking out".
Lots of fearmongering in the comments about “woke mobs” here, and I want to offer a counterpoint to the characterization of the Basecamp employees who left as some kind of shrill hypersensitive scolds. Put yourself in their shoes.
You notice the company you work at has a circulated list of customer’s names, some of which make fun of your race — have been used to make fun of you since you were young. You go “hey this sucks” and it gets taken down. You point out that this is part of a pattern of societal behavior you’ve known your whole life, and that pattern has affected your life negatively and materially. This is not received well — combating a single incident is easy, but unraveling a pattern of behavior is an arduous, years-long, and sometimes unprofitable path. At an all-hands meeting, a higher-up not only denies this pattern exists, but any action taken to unravel it would instead target him instead. The Big Bosses do not refute this until much later, and only partially. Would you feel respected? How would you react if someone said you were acting like a child and demanding something unreasonable? How would you feel if someone told you that you’re only doing this to perform “wokeness?”
But I think things have gotten out of hand when at an all hands meeting people are debating topics like:
"we live in a white supremacist culture"
Or demands from one employee to another at all hands meetings to denounce white supremacy.
I doubt many companies could handle that right... and I'm sure many people would come away more hurt.
I know what you're really saying, which is that people on the right feel persecuted by being implicitly accused of being racists. And... y'know, that's fair. Probably 90% of the time in arguments like this that's an unfounded accusation made in bad faith just to score points.
But still... the treatment is to point out that, yes, you guys might disagree with us woke hippies politically but you're still on the light side of the force and care about the same basic morality so of course you denounce white supremacy. Right?
What's horrifying to us hippies is the extent to which so many of you simply won't, and want to turn it around into an argument instead. But you do, right? Denounce white supremacy? If your coworker demanded it, you might roll your eyes a bit but you'd do it? Right?
I'm old and never in my life have I ever been asked to denounce white supremacy. If someone asked me to denounce it, I'd be insulted that they asked. There's some serious implications behind asking someone that question that I hope would never apply to me.
I would be somewhat dismayed if someone asked me to denounce white supremacy, because I would hope that it would be obvious that I abhor white supremacy.
I don't think I'd be insulted, though--and certainly not to the level of refusing to do any denouncing. Of course it's wrong! Hope to live in a world where it goes without saying. Until then, happy to repeat as often as anyone cares to hear it.
It's way harder though as long as injustice is perpetuated.
So it's nuanced.
If my wife told me the neighbors got a BMW, I could reply that "Huh, their bank is going to lose all their money", mocking them to make myself feel better after seeing that I'm not that well-off to be able to buy such a car. IMO it would be an attempt by me to gain some superiority...
You're only asked if you're perceived to have done or said something someone else thinks wrong...
"when did denouncing white supremacy become something controversial"
I don't know what you mean by that, and i honestly don't understand who "you guys" are or the rest of your premise.
Don't you see you are creating white supremacy by demanding everyone persecute it? You create the demand.
Maybe if being racist becomes the new underground lifestyle like being goth, etc.
Would you though? Having a co-worker insist that you denounce white supremacy says far more about the co-worker than any refusal to play their little games says about you.
It's a loaded question, with no right answer. According to the article, the same speaker claimed that there was a culture of white supremacy at the company. There were demands to stop 'protecting' an exec who had expressed conservative views in the past.
Do you now or have you ever had sympathy for the positions of the communist party?
Well, do I mean the position that anybody who disagrees with the leadership should be sent to the gulag, or do I mean progressive taxation? Sorry, it's not clear--now answer quickly, before you're judged on your hesitation! Anything you say may be enthusiastically used against you in future discussions! Are you a racist, or do you admit here in public that this company has a racist culture?!
People in power do all sorts of stuff, to stay in power and keep others down.
White people existing is not "white supremacy".
White people existing in positions of power is also not "white supremacy".
"White supremacy" is an ideology that declares the White race as genetically superior. (Yes, I know the left tries to shift this as it sees convenient.)
Claiming that Basecamp has a problem with "white supremacy" would be a blatant lie.
Sure, if the other party apologies to me (a Slav) first for their bigotry, racism, and slaver history.
We do know the context. It was in the article. And without taking sides on this issue, just to clarify - the original question "debated" wasn't an ask to denounce white supremacy, it was the question of whether "we live in a white supremacist culture" and whether "white supremacy exists at basecamp", which are both very different from blanket denouncing white supremacy.
(And just to be super clear - this did lead to being asked to denounce white supremacy, and I get the impression the employees considered the response to this request inadequate, though in follow ups Jason did denounce white supremacy. I think the context of when/how this was asked is important, and luckily we do have it.)
Bullying people creates enemies, not allies. They might not be a white supremacist but they would not denounce them either because you are being so annoying.
As a counter example, lets say someone comes to you in the middle of your work and demand you denounce black crime. Would you do it? Black crime is bad, right? Why wouldn't you denounce black crime, are you pro crime? That can't be true, can it, why can't you just denounce it? Its just a few words, simple right?
Now, you would likely just see that guy as an annoying racist rather than someone who wants law and order. Now from that perspective take a look at yourself and see how people see you when you try to force random people to denounce white supremacy.
"Then why aren't you doing X?!" where X in this case could be "Fire this person", "Setup a committee overseeing all hires", "Commit to quotas", "Donate money to this cause."
Also reminds me of this "Yes Prime Minister" skit about leading questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
Politics have become so tribal, that even simple sentences no longer mean what they mean at face value. Instead, they more often signal membership in a group who holds a certain bundle of beliefs.
Do you think human lives matter...as in...all of them? Do you think men should have basic rights...as in...mens rights?
Did you cringe a little at the last few words of those sentences? Even though at face value, they are very agreeable sentences? I think similarly, middle/right leaning people who aren't actually racist, think that parroting a political phrase on demand at work, is signaling a bunch of other "bundled ideologies" that they don't want to be a part of.
One can empathically agree that such injustice, and any injustice, sucks, and still advocate compartmentalizing between institutions of the society writ large. That unprofitable path is not Basecamp's to bear. Not all injustices of the society receive a corresponding level of PR and therefore can be equally leveraged in the context of employee activism in a private enterprise.
If rank ordering of the issues of the society is left to the ripples made by affluential corporate citizens, that will introduce a host of biases that will alienate the full set of citizens of the democracy, and will likely create its own class of injustices.
The issue is not about surgically removing politics from work, it is to prevent its (mis)use as a backchannel.
To be clear, I feel equally strongly against corporate activism at the C-level or at the corporate identity level. But most employee activism is not only not a counter to that, it amplifies and parasitizes those very dynamics.
This will hurt Basecamp in the immediate term but over time they will be better off.
I'll leave it to the GGP to clarify.
Sure, as a poc I can empathize with this but to then escalate it beyond "hey this sucks, let's stop, let's be better humans" to godwinning it with real atrocities in the outside world is toxic to the workplace. I would not want to work at a place where a POC of my own color was constantly making everything out to be a racial issue, and saying that my colleagues were the worst and equating them to literal terrorists and nazis because they did an ignorant thing here or there, not the least because I'm sure that even as a conscientious person I make mistakes from time to time and I'd rather be treated with forgiveness than blame.
Being treated with forgiveness instead of blame goes for technical stuff and incident management, too. If you start doing this with social issues 100% the culture of blame will bleed over into the technical issues and it won't be pretty.
No?
Politics and religion: the two topics you avoid in professional settings. Over drinks? Sure. But not at work.
On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace.
This also doesn't mean that the Basecamp founders are responsible for systemic racism because they had a list of "funny" names and [gasp] employ at least one conservative.
What has happened to everyone? It's like we have taken the social media rage machine and applied it to real life interactions.
No, it's a class thing. Among unionised labour work has always been a political battlefield. What's new is that you know have a politically activist group of people within upper middle class white collar jobs who, traditionally were conservative in temperament because they were materially well off.
Professionals whose values do not align with their management have figured out that they actually have influence, and the top 1-10% have noticed that they can actually press the top 0.1% if they want to.
First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior. I think their attempt to cast this as “political” is deeply cynical; discussing how people behave at work will always be in bounds, even if it touches up against issues that are politicized. The initial trigger here was a discussion about the list of “funny names”; there’s no easy way to sweep that under the rug as off topic, since it’s explicitly at-work behavior.
Second, they did an end run around the employees. Announcing the policy to the world, and implying that the Basecamp workforce was having a problem focusing on their jobs was an asshole move destined to blow up in their face. Nobody likes feeling crapped on by their boss, especially not in public like that.
Honestly, it didn’t have to be about politics. Treating employees like that, especially ones with options, is typically not going to go well.
The current state of politics bled into this. There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture. It wasn't about what was appropriate or not and then handling it. The discussion went far beyond that.
> Second, they did an end run around the employees.
This was really surprising to me. I thought they would have posted publicly after all the employees had learned about this. This is poor change management within the company and a lesson I hope they learn.
You might feel the illustration is incendiary, sure, but I think coming down as hard as they did on it to a pretty valid concern of "hey maybe no funny names list" did no favors to those concerned, and subsequently doubling and tripling down on it has really really not helped.
Classic and indisputable example might be Germany in WW2. It wasn’t like citizens woke up and immediately decided that genocide was okay; they slowly were worked into finding it acceptable and palatable as a measure to endorse.
It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.
I've read a fair number of books on helping things through change. The pyramid being put where it was seemed like a bad idea the moment I read it. The way it was responded to is something I would have expected.
There is a lesson here. If you want to bring about change in others it's about leading them rather than saying what you want to say.
I don't find it challenging to make that argument at all.
"Laughing at names leads to genocide" to me implies that laughing at names is a necessary and sufficient condition to a genocide.
The pyramid of hate, to me, implies that laughing at names is a necessary but not sufficient condition of genocide.
Therefore showing the pyramid of hate does not imply that laughing at names leads to genocide, as it lacks the sufficiency condition.
Not so hard to argue.
A name like, say, "Fuk Yo" is accidentally similar to the English "Fuck you". It's kinda funny in a childish way, but I don't think that making fun of it automatically implies that they think these people are of lesser value. i.e. I don't think it's automatically racism in the first place.
It's inappropriate because making fun of your customers is never a good idea, and it's also inconsiderate and impolite. But that's not the same thing as racism, or evidence of white supremacy.
And maybe some employees who worked on that list were racist; there is no way for us to know. I like to opt for a more good-faith interpretation, which seems very uncommon these days.
The idea that this would "escalate" from a simple list to actual racism seems unlikely. Everyone knows the difference.
Also, the holocaust was a lot more complicated than this "pyramid" lets on. The Nazis took power by force, in some exceptional circumstances, and the Holocaust wasn't widely known among the German people. It's overly simplistic at best.
> It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.
I have never seen a single "slippery slope" argument that I found convincing, including this one. In every single case I've seen everyone is acutely aware of the difference between A and B. I don't consider it an argument, I consider it a fallacy.
Racism is the air we breathe. I grew up around mostly white kids, and there is undeniably more fear amongst those kids (myself included) when interacting with black people than with white people. It seems similarly undeniable that affluent white people are more afraid of african american people when its dark out than they are of other white people. When a black person applies to a job, their blackness is not neutral. It seems to me that most people have underlying feeling about blackness, and that people of color have to contend with that when they're going through their lives.
I'm not saying there aren't problems; I just don't see the connection between something like this list and the actual problems, and I certainly don't see a good reason for some of the strong and bold claims that are made about it.
I think that's a misinterpretation of what that graphic is trying to convey. The point isn't that people and groups that exhibit behavior at the bottom of the pyramid are on the march to genocide. It's that there's a spectrum of bigotry and discrimination, and each level of it that is tolerated enables worse behavior. It doesn't mean every situation is going to get to the level of mass-killings.
Normalizing bigoted behavior encourages more bigoted behavior. The same way that normalizing managers who scream and yell at people often leads to others becoming more openly belligerent or otherwise creates a toxic workplace.
Fourth, they retaliated against employees by taking away benefits in the most humiliating way possible, via the aforementioned disastrous public blog post.
And yet, people are still going to bat for them because...I don't know. It seems like a lot of people have a religious faith in the decision-making capabilities of men like DHH and JF. Seems like it might be related to some of the issues employees tried to raise internally.
I can think of a reason. To protect employees who are not part of the woke mob from being “canceled” by the woke mob.
I've worked for several companies headquartered out of different regions of the world. The amount of politics at work I've seen has related to where leadership is from.
This is not about Trump or Obama, that's easily avoided, it's about Identity Politics, which cannot be avoided:
They are arguing over Identity Politics and definitions of privilege.
"“The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”"
The Executive basically stated he doesn't believe the organization or it's culture is rooted in 'White Supremacy' - echoing the aggressive language used nowadays in Critical Race Theory.
The Employee, I believe mischaracterized that statement as 'the denial that racism exists' - which is an unfair, but also pointed out the denial of 'White Priviledge' - which is a valid point to make if one actually believes that.
The argument is existentially problematic - some people believe that groups are not inherently racist, others believe that if there are White executives then the system is inherently racist, going so far as to use terms like 'White Supremacy'.
This 'debate' is raging everywhere right now - schools, public sector, private companies, NGOs etc.
It's hard to rectify because those who don't see systems as overtly or fundamentally racist are challenge by those who do, and those who do, are inclined to believe those that disagree with them are basically evil.
It's a low-grade cultural race war unfortunately, pitting regular people against other regular people, often over some very abstract things, like naming things 'blacklist/whitelist' instead of 'blocklist/playlist' etc..
When in the history of the US has racial inequality not been an inherently political topic? At its founding, the statement "all men are created equal" was highly contentious.
When it was turned into one by politicians and activists, just like masks were.
I'm a firm believer that if you actually sit a few people down and try to have a sane conversation where people actually talk and don't spout slogans, you find that their views aren't all that different, then just put emphasis and importance on slightly different things, and have been presented with subsets of the facts that emphasize those preferences.
The problem is, we're going on a few decades of a concerted effort to confuse and separate us based on language, and specifically meaning of words. What used to be camps choosing words that placed their views in a beneficial light (pro-life vs pro-choice, for example), has moved to very purposefully continuing to use the same words on both sides but to re-frame them to mean something entirely different than intended by that side. For example, Black Lives Matter and how it literally means different things to different people, regardless of the originators intentions and protestations.
Information silos allow this to happen. If you can exert control over the information environment, you can change the definition of words, and then people can't even communicate correctly any more. That's a real goal of those that wield political power. Moderate is just another name for someone dangerously close to being a swing voter to them, so promoting enough animosity that even things overtly against your own interest are seen as the lesser of two evils is a winning strategy.
Lest you think I'm talking about the left or the right, they both do it. And lest you think "sure, but one side does it more", no, they both do it so egregiously that the difference does not matter, and all you're seeing is the effect of Knoll's law in action. Make no mistake about it, you're getting screwed from both sides. That you tell yourself that your side is the more sane one is just the fiction that lets you sleep at night (and hopefully that's all it's doing, and not empowering you to be a complete asshole to people just as screwed over as you are).
"Politicians and activists" obviously didn't politicize masks. No coherent reading of the last 2 years supports that conclusion.
It was the screeching Republican base, who decided on day one that the masks were a symbol of government overreach and I guess got Covid to own the libs.
The base is multiple tens of millions of people spread across the entire United States and in many socioeconomic strata. The only time anything gets as widespread acceptance by even a portion of the base like the mask thing is because a narrative was being pushed that most of the base was exposed to. That used to be a hard thing to do (easier if you could rely on a large religious bloc to see it one way), and now it's a frighteningly easy thing to do. That's the point.
Yes, more or less? I can't think of a single right-wing activist or politician who was truly rabble-rousing for the cause.
What other category would you put it in?
Equality vs hierarchy is literally the core of the difference between right and left, that is the definition of inherently political.
Since literally forever.
Like when wasn't it?
Let’s be honest - the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) committees that have appeared in companies and governments all over are simply a Trojan horse for far left progressive politics, and a vehicle to take over an institution by making a particular political ideology the official religion of that organization. DEI groups and policies usually serve to prevent any actual diversity, labeling dissenting thought as racist and coating their own racist policies (for example race or gender based hiring/promotion) in vague terms like “justice”. Usually those participating in DEI efforts are so distracted by it that they add no actual value to the business, and I’m sure the third of the company that joined that group at Basecamp were no different.
I’m betting Basecamp will pull through just fine without such toxic employees, and am glad to see companies like Basecamp and Coinbase take steps to keep from having their workplace and company weaponized by activists to serve divisive ideological purposes that have nothing to do with the company’s business.
> “The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”
Isn't this employee declaring that "white supremacy" is "blatant at this company" ? His reaction that such "white supremacy" and "white privilege" "wasn't corrected" made him "sick."
It's albeit not a direct demand that Ryan Singer be called out as a white supremacist, but it does seem to both imply it and express a strong grievance that it was not called out or corrected. Maybe you have a different interpretation of this?
If he made statements about white supremacy not existing at basecamp, then that was a horrible defense to accusations of white privilege at Basecamp. Shutting down discussions over arguments about phrasing makes it looks like Basecamp would prefer just to ignore issues with discrimination if they did exist.
I'm sorry, but do you or do you not know what was said at the meeting? Those two statements contradict each other, unless you're talking about two different meetings.
I quoted something provided by an employee who was there, at the meeting that this article is about.
I wasn't at the meeting, and it sounds like it was extremely charged. I don't think I can make nuanced comments about what was said there. But it seems clear that Singer made comments minimizing white supremacy in America, even his emailed reply does.
It was a bad idea and it wasn't handled well. But geesh.
Like it really doesn't matter what led to that meeting, because I've not seen a version of events where somehow that becomes not a disaster on your "so anyway we announced a policy about you in a blog post where we insulted a whole lot of you recently..." meeting.
The only justification for the DE&I committee is this list. The only other evidence of white supremacy is (lol) one guy saying he doesn't think it's there in the company.
Usually there'll be at least a claim of someone using the N-word, or employees of different races being treated unfairly. We can't even get that! This list existed, and was not handled well by management, and that's enough to accept that simply claiming the company is not white supremacist is too political.
Oh but the guy did share a Breitbart link once, I think, so the whole company was basically a half step away from burning crosses on lawns. Give me a break.
Still a far cry from evidence of white supremacy at the company.
It seems to me all these problems at Basecamp could have been avoided in the first place if these people were dismissed for their unhinged and cultish behavior as soon as they started to exhibit it. If they are suffering some sort of mental trauma the proper place to address that is therapy, not at work.
"Kinda sad, found out I was accepted into a twitch team because of my skin colour so that “diversity” can be preached & not for my values or the blood, sweat n tears I’ve put into my work. Plus then being left out of everything & watching from the sidelines continuously..." https://twitter.com/Sharesee/status/1389522366515056641
Also weird for someone to complain about "because of my skin colour" when she identifies herself on Twitter as "Bajan and British" first and foremost, not anything about her "values or the blood, sweat n tears".
The parent didn’t say inclusion is bad, but the execution of DEI policies is bad.
- Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff
- Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
- Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
- refused to reprimand said employee on the call
- had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Can't believe only 21 employees walked. What idiots these founders are. There is no way to defend this poor management even if you agree with the rule they tried to put in
The way in which DHH announced the _conversation_ he had with Salesforce was a thing of amazement all of its own.
"I thought YOU had class!"
This is really sad hearing about how crummy DHH and Fried are at one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity.
I'd like to highlight this. I'd like to frame it and tape it to the head of every founder and entrepeneur so they have to look at it constantly. Hell, everyone who ever has to oversee other people. This is absolutely the heart and soul of good management and being a good person, and everyone who thinks they're created a great workplace, but doesn't know this, needs to chant this 1,000,000 times.
Kind of gives the lie to the progressive, all-in-it-together environment they portray with their public image.
So, just like any other company really, except due to the excessive power of the top two execs, no recourse if you have a problem they don’t perceive as a problem.
If he was sick, whether physically sick because of their own actions or otherwise...sick is sick. Seemed like a no-win for him whether he could either refuse to show up because he is sick, or show up to at least listen to what's going on (assuming recording it wasn't an option).
Color me skeptical.
But totally hear what you're saying and appreciate your skepticism!
> (There is already so much bad, that his absence/presence is a moot point)
This dude is one of the two founders of the company and has a leadership/ownership responsibility. I don't think his deciding to duck out is a moot point at all. It's that exact attitude that led to what's happened there.
Maybe he was that sick, but I would be kind of pissed if I were one of the employees. The power dynamic is weird, because if a regular employee were sick they would definitely feel the pressure to show up at a desk, on camera, if they were trying to make their case in this meeting.
The article said they extended the buyout offer indefinitely, so I wouldn't be surprised if more people leave over the next few weeks.
Even if you weren't thinking of leaving, 3-6 months severance would be really hard to turn down, especially if you know you can get another job quickly.
Obviously, both is better.
> 50% off a gym membership
But I already have a home gym. Will the company give me a check to help pay for my next piece of equipment? Why do I have to go into town to the gym to make use of this benefit?
> Reimbursement of 25% off of Community Supported Agriculture
I've got an orchard with more apples and pears than I know what to do with each year. I consider rhubarb to almost be a weed at this point. I get free eggs from my neighbor (and honey too - helps with the aforementioned apples and pears). Could I get 25% off my next fruit tree purchase instead?
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Such benefits are entirely missed on me. I wouldn't take advantage of them and so they're not serving the purpose of the company to entice me to stay. They also are a little bit disdainful in that other people (yea, I know... the "someone else is getting something I'm not" is a hard thing to excise from the mind) are getting extra benefits/bonuses/perks that I'm not able to take advantage of.
A 10% profit sharing? Even if its worth "less" than those are previously offered - it's worth more to me.
Ironically it seems that, contra to the narrative existing in the minds of quite a few HN posters, it was the Brietbart quoting, "white people are the real victims of racism" guy who had spend over a decade being unable to shut up about politics in the workplace.
Bad
> - Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
I am not sure where you are getting this, but I might have missed it.
> - Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
Yes, on 90th minute - we are not sure what was said before that.
> - refused to reprimand said employee on the call
For what? I don't understand.
> - had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
We all can be sick sometimes, certainly would be better to it in some other way, but maybe he was just that sick?
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Pretty bad, especially considering comments from Highrise employee in this thread.
He was busy hitting Twitter pretty hard during the day, throwing some shade at Apple. No mention of company, employees, anything.
That's bad optics, regardless of how you're feeling. If you're sick, you're sick. If you're too sick to deal with the most pressing issue your company is facing, you should consider yourself too sick to devote chunks of time to Twitter feuds.
That is explicitly attention seeking behavior, and it’s a hard prerequisite to becoming a “thought leader” or even just famous enough that a three letter initial is enough to identify yourself.
There's a LOT of projection that has gone here.
The article really doesn't tell us whether that senior employee just went off on a political tangent for no reason whatsoever, or he was responding to an earlier made political statement that he decided to disagree with.
What the article does suggest is that that contribution by that senior employee was preceded by a discussion of the funny names list that involved the mentioning of the "pyramid of hate". That pyramid is already a political statement and should not, if the company were true to its new policy, have been brought up in the discussion.
(NB even David and Jason seem to have recognized this -- after the meeting, Singer was suspended; he's since resigned, but this is likely the only one of the several recent resignations that was not entirely of the employee's own volition.)
That's... a win?? I mean, I've worked at some companies where some employees, specially some which basically are activists disguised as developers/PMs/etc cause 90% of the management work because everything is an issue to them. It's tiring, really tiring, and some of these people have negative value for the company actually, from my point of view as a developer anyway.
I'm a developer. I love my profession, I want to build cool shit all the time, and learn, and progress. I want to build a great product and, if possible, earn a ton of money. I don't want to go to the office to discuss the issues of the society or try to fix the world. I do that on weekends and after work, in the right forums. I do not force my coworkers to "take sides"... either you're a racist or you're this other thing or if you don't say anything then that's conceding.. WTF!!! I just want to work, learn, and earn money. Fix the world in some other place, please.
Hope this makes basecamp even stronger in the long term.
Consider someone for whom "white supremacy" means "it is right and appropriate to act deliberately to create and preserve white dominance of other races". Versus someone for whom it means "privilege exists in many, though often subtle ways, and advantages white, male, older, cis, het people".
It's a lot like how "defund police" means radically different things.
CRT definitions of 'White Supremacy' are not about 'people acting deliberately' to support it.
CRT laments that 'regular people' doing 'regular things' act unconsciously to support oppressive systems, hence 'White Supremacy'.
Making a film about 'something' and hiring those people you know to make it, who by virtue of your social network might be 'mostly white' - would be an example of 'White Supremacy'.
Ergo - in their view, unless you are actively fighting to dismantle the concept of whiteness - you're supporting 'White Supremacy'.
I believe there is a kernel of truth in systematic, even unconsciously biased systems, however, I don't remotely agree with many of the assertions. Unfortunately, to disagree with their assertions makes you a 'bad person' in their view.
Have a read [1]. A thesis of 'self examination' i.e. a fairly progressive individual addressing their own 'white supremacy' due to their lack of active assertion of issues of equity etc..
http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/06/25/disman...
The people not dismantling the system are not white supremacists, they just don't believe we have systemic racism.
I'm definitely not a white supremacist (I'm not even white) and I can't find a single instance of systemic racism.
Sure, I met a bunch of racist individuals, but that doesn't prove systemic racism.
https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/05/05/veil-dar...
"The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when “a veil of darkness” masks their race."
> Creating that database enabled the team to find the statistical evidence that a “veil of darkness” partially immunized blacks against traffic stops. That term and idea has been around since 2006 when it was used in a study that compared the race of 8,000 drivers in Oakland, California, who were stopped at any time of day or night over a six month period. But the findings from that study were inconclusive because the sample was too small to prove a link between the darkness of the sky and the race of the stopped drivers.
> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day – around 7 p.m. – when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.
> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables – the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
> Institutional racism was defined by Sir William Macpherson in the UK's Lawrence report (1999) as: "The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."
Let's say there are 3 groups. One group is 60% of the population, another is 30%, and the last is 10%. If all three groups have the exact same predisposition to favoring members over outsiders, the 60% group will experience prejudice from 40% of the population. The 10% population will experience it from 90% of the population. The 10% group will experience >10X the incidence of prejudice unless group favoritism is <= 0, which is literally impossible.
If that's what you mean when you say systemic/institutional, it feels like a completely useless thought to me. I, and I think many other people, hear 'systemic', and think 'coming from processes, rules, or procedures defined as part of a system', not from the people operating it. To make a better analogy, when I hear systemic car problem, I think the engine, transmission, or some other component of the car, not the driver.
I definitely get stopped more often than my white friends (albeit it changes based on the country). I've been asked several times by police officers in Europe whether I was an immigrant from North Africa with the implication I was dealing drugs.
A lot of north africans immigrants in the country where I was actually deal drugs and I look like I'm from North Africa, so it makes sense for police officers to question me more.
This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.
I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
An explicit bias, held by agents of the state, affecting their behavior towards the citizenry with no regard to individual innocence. Congrats, you've demonstrated systemic racism.
> I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
Kristallnacht wasn't legally authorized, either, but it'd be an odd claim that it didn't reflect systemic anti-Jewish bias in Nazi Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
systemic: > relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part.
How many racist people are needed before it's not a particular part"?
I don't want the government to intervene between me and a drug dealer to prevent me from buying what I want.
I don't want the government to spend billions of taxpayers money (and incurring debt - and devaluing my money) killing dudes in the middle east. There were definitely economical and geopolitical reasons to do the war on terror, but that's not something I wanted. 9/11 was merely the reason to attack a oil rich country.
I don't think there is anything racist with any of these wars.
Black people are disproportionally poorer and that's why they're overrepresented in drug related crimes and jail convictions. This happened mainly because stable families were destroyed in the 70s thanks to welfare policies. I'm not the best at explaining this kind of stuff, listen to Thomas Sowell for more.
I'm against prosecution for any drug related crime - but if drugs were legal, I'm sure a portion of poor people would move to whatever shady business they can do as long as they can survive and conviction rate wouldn't change much. Maybe street scams, maybe stealing, maybe begging.
Sure, go ahead and push for an end on the war on drugs, but you have to solve poverty and stable families as well if you want to see meaningful outcomes.
I think similarly of the war on drugs. Sure, we absolutely need to fix the precursors to addiction and the things that keep it entrenched, in order to keep black people from being victimized by addiction and imprisonment at such a high rate, but isn't the fact that this obviously unjust, bastardized, and warped form of health policy is at all acceptable to many voters, partially because a lot of white voters don't see it as affecting their communities (even though it definitely does, trust me).
You can say the same thing about the basic conditions of poverty- if a huge chunk of the population did not identify the injustices faced by those who are impoverished as "black people problems", and if the other enormous chunk of americans didn't identify them as "white trash and black people problems", maybe our policies about for-profit schools, food stamps, and HUD, would look a little more promising.
I'll lay my cards on the table, I believe that most structural exploitation occurs on an economic basis, for economic reasons. I think economic class is the primary stratification that supports most of our unjust political structures. However, it is also clear to me that, at an ideological level, these unjust measures hide themselves behind racial boundaries and political borders, so they can remain palatable to those who might have the power to change them. In other words, racism wasn't a motive, but it is a hell of a shield.
It's now tiresome to hear the defense "oh defund doesn't mean _defund_...." -- then don't say it. If the charge of white supremacy isn't meant to insult people based on race (overt racism, itself), then maybe convey the thought more clearly.
I've shared and laughed at funny names in the past, as recently as last year. I can't imagine an official or permanent list such as the one pointed out here.
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It's really fucking hard to talk about stuff like this online or big groups. I would encourage people and companies to have small, offline discussions and start with humility and empathy as the guiding principles.
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I've typed and deleted all of this three times. Anything I say feels like not enough. People are people.
But what I really see here is the way power can blind. This situation was 100% avoidable but the dudes didn’t think the incoming fire was at their level.
Fried and DHH have been making “fuck you money” monthly, for well over a decade. And I happen to know what Ryan Singer’s salary was many years ago - even if he never did anything smart with it, and he is very smart, he has an impenetrable financial moat.
The money, combined with a measure of fame and influence, compounded by the fact that they have full control of Basecamp and by some intrinsic hubris is the reason this blew up in their face.
It’s a shit show but this will basically blow over. The customers mostly don’t care.
article - "he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company"
Not the same
>“I objected to an employee’s statement that we live in a white supremacist culture. White supremacism exists, and America’s history of racism still presents terrible problems, but I don’t agree that we should label our entire culture with this ideology.
From Ryan Singer.
> “I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
That looks much closer to "one of the senior management team said white supremacy does not exist" than "he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company."
Calling out a senior staff member when they state 'white supremecy doesn't exist' is 'appalling'....yeah ok bud
Yes, reading this entire exchange between Singer and the unnamed employee shows exactly why there shouldn't be political talk in the workplace. Disastrous indeed.
If you're curious to get going on this subject so as to not make these mistakes, "HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management" is a great resource.
"we live in a white supremacist culture"
Or demands from one employee to another at all hands meetings to denounce white supremacy.
It sounds like the old adage, "the architecture of the company mimics the architecture of the software," applies very well here. In this case, the company's stance on politics scales about as well as Rails.
Now, Shopify clearly has the capacity to pull this off. But a smaller company that initially bet on Rails and is now facing a mountain of tech debt might not. To be fair: it is possible to write Rails applications in a way that you don't couple every aspect of your application to Rails internals. But in certain crucial ways, Rails encourages doing exactly that - dragging the DB along your whole application, for example.
I've been a Rails developer for a couple of years and I left that ecosystem in no small part because a huge chunk of that community seems to treat "architecture" as a dirty word and monkeypatching as a solution for everything (and also indulges into making fun of PHP or Java a bit too much for my taste). Of course, everyone's experiences are different and you can do great stuff with Rails, but for me it's something I don't really want to go back to.
In hindsight, it was probably a bad choice. At the time however, it was probably a good one.
Besides, things like AirBnB are the exceptions. Most sites don't get anywhere near the traffic they get, and Rails is often a good choice. Is it imperfect and are there trade-offs involved? Of course, but there are with anything.
No disagreement here. But the argument was made that Rails "scales pretty well" and I believe this is wrong — and I don't even mean in terms of performance (that probably too), but also in terms of architectural complexity. All these problems are solvable of course, but Rails makes it IMHO harder than some other technologies.
I don't doubt there are certain roadblocks though, and that some things fairly "simple" could be very hard and complex in Rails. I just never encountered them.
I've certainly seen a lot more overly complex crappy bespoke solutions when Rails + a few modifications would have been much better. This is like the old Greenspun's tenth rule: "any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." – there are a lot of "ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of half of Ruby on Rails" out there.
Right now I mostly write web stuff with Go, which is the exact opposite of Ruby/Rails in almost every way. In spite of being so different, I'm fairly comfterable with both approaches, and I'm not entirely sure what I prefer yet (even though I've been doing this in Go for 6 years now); I certainly spent a lot more time on basic stuff that Rails just provides.
What I'm criticising is that a lot of the official guides (and/or DHH himself) often lead to problems down the road. For example, it is encouraged to do things through model callbacks. Except, once you have your send_email logic in a after_create callback and you figure out that you actually need to create users in different contexts too - e.g. in bulk updates if you need to import some data, where you don't want to always send an email - it will be painful to rewrite your code since you have no abstraction where that code should reside. Even DHH recognised this problem, when he pushed through ActiveRecord::Base.suppress [1] which was consided problematic by most everyone else (including the Rails core team). A better architecture would have a "service" or "concern" layer that would handle such things, but "the Rails way" doesn't advocate for anything outside of models, views and controllers. Though, to be fair, many real-world codebases do include such a service layer - but it's done differently everywhere.
There is also no abstraction for request validations. You're supposed to do all your validations in the model layer. But what if you have multiple requests mapping to the same model layer? Maybe the validations you want to run if an admin user updates a table are very distinct from the validations that should be run for a regular user. Again, while you can use ActiveModel objects for that, Rails doesn't particularly encourage this design and you can end up with a lot of coupling between your persistence layer and something which is essentially part of the business layer, and that can be hard to unentangle later.
Another famous problem IMHO is (by default) every single test loading the whole Rails context. This makes fast unit tests basically impossible and therefore TDD painful (which, IMHO, is particularly bad in a dynamically and heavily monkeypatched language - if you don't have static guarantees, you at least want to be able to test your changes quickly).
All of these are things that in other ecosystems - for example Spring - are handled much better. Now, I have criticisms about Spring too (slow boot times, excessive use of reflection, Hibernate is a mess, etc.) but at least it gives you some good tools to cleanly separate different layers of your application. For example, validation is generally done at DTO level, long before any of your data ever hits the database.
[1] https://medium.com/spritle-software/rails-5-activerecord-sup...
Actually, Ruby on Rails in general is often "Rails + these 20 gems that everyone uses". I remember someone likening getting started with practical real-world Rails development as starting in Game of Thrones in the middle of season 5, which sounds about right to me.
Source: I worked at Airbnb for five years and a very early team member told me this.
There are few stories that grab attention like hubris & comeuppance.
LOL, that's a hilarious way of putting it, but I think it's more about whether people keep learning and growing as they age or decide that they already know everything they need to.
If you stop learning and growing, you're going to be left behind by the people who don't.
When you grow older, you gain more experience, and if you're intelligent, probably gain some wisdom along the way. You either trust that inherently imperfect knowledge, or you throw it away and learn everything anew together with the younger generation.
We're mostly trained to treasure knowledge and experience, even if the errors accumulate and times change.
Sounds a hell of a lot like the house cleaning needing to happen is at the top.
That quote is the clearest indication that this isn’t a politics issue, it’s a management issue. This sort of “I don’t think it’s an issue so let’s not handle it” attitude applies just as much/more to actually getting work done. Classic bad manager 101 stuff.
You can have good success by being a bad manager of course! My bet is that there’s a lot of great ICs that counteract whatever messy people mgmt stuff is going on.
If an employee calls another employee on racist acts and this is true, fire the racist. If it was a lie, fire the accuser. It feels easy and natural to just take the accusation very seriously with very serious consequences instead of framing this as a political discussion.
There is no reasoning with idiologues as reason does not enter into dogmatic rhetoric.
Act decisive as it will only get worse, and never apologize.
In my company I regularly remind our employees that we are not allowed to insult customers, ever. I even try to find the good in everyone. People have competing priorities, personal issues, etc. You never have the whole story.
> Calling someone or a policy racist would fall under insults.
How can a policy be insulted? Policies are not people. I don’t see how calling a policy racist falls under ad-hominem.
Take a look at the comments in this thread, and figure out the ones that are created with a throwaway account.
Add to the fact that Fried and Hansson are supposed to be thought leaders in (alternative) Silicon Valley Company Management and Philosophy.
That’s a whole lot of “severance” to pay out.
Regardless of what happens to the company, their reputation as Leaders/Managers will take a hit.
The fact that Hansson “peaced out” and left Fried to Moderate the meeting at such a critical time doesn’t bode well either.
Any power struggle inside an organisation can quickly turn into mutiny...
That’s a bad take. Everyone I’ve ever heard mention those books has talked about them in a very positive light. I’ve never heard anyone describe them as lecturing.
The books aren’t what earned them enemies. Their behavior in the last week did. I’ve seen a lot of people on Twitter badmouth Fried and Hansson who admired them deeply until now.
Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence.
At some point can we all admit that the most narcissistic, dramatic people are overly-indulged by this garbage?
I'm at a startup now, but left a company in February that got torched by this toxic BS. My favorite moment was sitting there, and having a coworker (US born, but of Arab descent) who grew up in an extremely wealthy neighborhood with immense privilege, lecturing a blind white male employee about how much privilege he had, and then going on to talk about how white people were uniquely tainted by the slave trade that some of their ancestors engaged in. Naturally, he didn't seem to realize that the African slave trade was invented by his Arab ancestors. Nor did he see the irony in the fact that holding a person responsible for horrible action of people who look like them is the same way of thinking that leads bigots to blame all Arabs for the actions of the 9/11 hijackers.
Seeing good companies get torn to shreds by this campus idiocy reminds me of how insulated academia is from the real world. The absurd, essay-driven philosophy masquerading as social science makes it impossible for groups of humans to achieve anything productive. Nobody ever noticed this before, because in the pseudo social science world they inhabit, productivity isn't a thing.
What does this have to do with academia?
But this definition is, ironically, the polar opposite of free speech.
Losing your livelihood, being bullied, death threats, mob harassment etc are not acceptable responses to ideas or opinions you don’t like.
This is obvious, but I'm not sure how it pertains to this discussion.
No they don't; we're talking about verbal disagreements and resignations in the workplace. None of these things deprive anyone of their First Amendment rights. If someone verbally disagrees with you, they are not infringing on your right to free speech; by insinuating that they are, you are taking an anti-free-speech position.
the OP said “harassment isn’t acceptable.”
you said “why is that in the discussion?”
I said “bec some ppl here think it is.”
you respond by quoting free speech case law.
We’re not arguing about the merits of how the SCOTUS rules on the 1st amendment. It’s a discussion of the appropriate response to encountering someone you disagree with.
You calling my employer now and telling them they should fire me is not an appropriate response no matter whether or not it’s protected by the first amd.
No, I didn't. You are making this up to win an argument. There is no reference to case law or SCOTUS whatsoever in my comment. What a bizarre fabrication. I see there is clearly no point in continuing this if you're going to argue in such bad faith.
Moreover, a response you deem "inappropriate" is subjective. Either your free speech is being denied or it isn't. My boss can fire me for saying a lot of things they don't like; that doesn't infringe on my right to free speech. This is the way it has always been.
That’s specifically not the discussion: you quoted the part of the OPs comment that called out the inappropriate behavior many like to engage in and agreed that it was wrong, but questioned its relevance to our discussion, it’s relevant bec many ppl don’t see it as inappropriate. Whether or not it’s legal is an entirely different discussion.
That is what you are trying to do here, and it is nonsense. Just because you feel outnumbered does not mean you are being harassed or bullied. If I swear at a customer and they complain to my boss, that does not mean I'm being harassed or bullied. How utterly childish.
Soo in your opinion this is ok? I’m so confused...
Where do you think this ideology and hypersensitivity originated?
""they assume racism is present in everything and look for it “Critically” until they find it.""
that doesn't seem like the scientific method to me. am I the dumb?
edit: also the founder of the linked site is critical of Critical Race Theory - so maybe there is bias in this article. Whatever, I asked for a place to start - so, thanks again.
It’s basically all target painting.
Edit:I’m getting pretty heavy downvoting without any responses... anyone interested in actually explaining why they disagree?
I've been in academia for more than a decade. We're a regional school with lots of foreign students as well as commuter students. The professors that I've interacted with regularly (and are in a dept that deals with that stuff) have never been anything but professional and they understand the importance of rigor. I've yet to see them make emotional caustic and overreaching claims because they can. I suspect most of academia is like this, you just don't hear about it, cause it's boring. If you desire it, you too can work at bad wages for 2 decades before hoping for tenure at a place you barely get to choose.
Many of these terms that cause so many issues are those that are working jargon within a domain and make sense within the context of that domain with lots of awareness of the terminology, but when they are extracted out of that context and used by people (for a variety of reasons) for political and cultural battles, it becomes an issue.
So academia is perhaps responsible, but all of academia is not.
Now the priest hand down by divine inspiration. Don’t question the orthodoxy.
I like to do the "Muslim test" on these things: replace "white people" (or "men", or any other group) with "Muslims" and see how it sounds then. If it sounds yikes then it's probably not a good thing to say.
I use "Muslim" because there's been a lot of discussion surrounding that in my own country, but you can use "Jew", "black", etc. as well.
It's easy to forget how sweeping statements can be received by its targets. I think we've all been guilty of this sometimes. The only time I've ever had a HN comment moderated is when I made some overly general statements about British culture. Mea culpa.
It's only natural to make mistakes, and that's okay. The difference is that I've apologized for it and realized my mistake, rather than double down hard (in my defence, as an EU expat living in the UK at the time, I was rather ... peeved ... about Brexit at the time, the surrounding debate regarding EU migrants, and various people ranting to me about this, as were most of my EU expat friends).
I vote things like the Green party and Socialist party, and the only time I've been directly involved in political activism was to campaign in favour of an asylum centre in my home town after idiots started opposing it with all sorts of bullshit. It's perhaps a bit said that this needs to be said, but I'm hardly some alt-right troll. But I find the messaging on these kind of things increasingly tiresome and frankly toxic.
As for the issue with Muslims, people actually do hate the religion more than the race. People have no issue with non-Muslim Arabs or northern Africans, they mostly dislike Muslims even white ones.
Exactly. Our lack of education and portrayal by media has basically informed the West that Arabs are Muslims and are synonymous!
Why do you feel the need to justify one over the other?
I can choose to be a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Atheist, Agnostic, or any other religion. I can't choose to be black or white, or Asian or European.
Criticising people for their ethnicity is essentially always wrong. There is very little – if any – nuance that applies here.
Criticising religion is a lot more nuanced though; for example I don't think it's especially controversial to criticise Matthew 25, where Jesus says that "A woman a should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet."
I don't think it's especially controversial to criticise Christians who believe this either (many don't, but some do).
It gets a bit more murky if you start criticising the entire religion on the whole for containing this sort of stuff. Personally I feel that's unfair, but I don't think it's "hateful" either as it's still criticising ideas rather than people.
And it's of course bad if you start criticising people on only being adherents to a religion, without any nuance or recognition of the many different interpretations. But even then, you're still disliking people for ideas they hold and are free to choose, rather than attributes beyond their control. So while still bad, I'd consider it "less bad".
You're talking about criticising with arguments (using Christianity and a quote). The arguments may be bunk (taking a quote out of context - something that happens all too often amongst Islamophobes), or it may be spot on.
There's a world of difference there.
1) Jesus did not say this, Paul an Apostle of Jesus Christ did. 2) This is not from Matthew 25 but from 1 Timothy 2:11-12 and is one of Paul's letters to Timothy. https://nasb.literalword.com/?q=1+Timothy+2%3A11-12 3) Matthew 25 consists of the parable of the ten virgins, parable of the tenants and the judgement of God. https://nasb.literalword.com/?q=Matthew+25
If you're going to use the Bible to make a point, at least make the effort to accurately do so.
Groups of people are comprised individuals, with large degrees of variation in any group. Using averages can be important for some things, but context and nuance matters a lot. Not every white person "holds most of the wealth and power". Most don't have any. Perhaps it increases you chances of acquiring wealth or power, but that's a completely different thing than supposedly holding it just because of some "membership" based on ethnicity, religion, sex, or anything else.
This is such a narrow view of the world; undoubtedly it makes sense if you're raised in some urban middle-class family, but a lot of white people's experiences are vastly different from that, and not only are these experiences ignored, they're met with strong hostility. Why do you think rural US, often impoverished white communities who certainly didn't get the best deal, are so hostile to all this kind of stuff? Hell, even "racism" (for lack of a better term) is a thing, "three nippled inbred cousin fucker from Alabama" and all that.
So no, it's not the same thing. Because context matters and who is saying it to whom matters.
If you get jumped by several guys from an oppressed group at that moment in time and in that place they have a lot more power than you do. Just like in code that context exist within the broader global context where you correctly point out that there are power differentials.
I also grew up in the south like you did but I grew up in a trailer park. Kids like you with houses on the bus made fun of kids getting on from the trailer park.
My point is that socioeconomic status is dramatically more predictive of failure or success in the United States than race is. Geographic location is also a huge predictor. If we're going to reduce things down to one dimension we should focus on class.
But it's still "punching", whether it's punching "up", "down", or "side-ways" doesn't strike me as especially important. Maybe "punching down" is "more bad", but IMHO both are bad and we shouldn't do either. Yet it's still not only commonly done, but also socially accepted. "stop whining, it's not as bad as [..]" doesn't make it okay (not what you said, but some people have, indeed, this is essentially what the entire "#NotAllMen" meme is).
I mention this because it's another dimension of context which gets badly overlooked when people discuss divisive issues that are dependent on specific places and histories.
Yet if you drove through my hometown, the chances of whether you'd have an encounter with a police officer would depend on the color of your skin and the type of car you drive. And store surveillance watches people closer depending on the shade of their skin. And local jobs are gotten depending on who you know, which is a fun way of saying "operators hire the children of friends, and white folks hang out with white folks."
So you say you aren't privileged, but there sure does seem to be a hell of a lot white privilege floating around despite your protest to the contrary.
Oh, but you say "what about the inbred cousin fuckers?"
Racial minorities get discriminated against before you know where they're from. It's why prejudice is a problem, but racism is systemic by default.
Who wins with this? No one wins, no one has anything to gain. It's just venting and only breeds resentment. People turn this in to a "I'm oppressed more! No I'm oppressed more!" contest. That leads to nothing good. Accepting that racism exists, is bad, and should be addressed _and_ opposing this kind of stuff are not mutually exclusive. I think it's entirely consistent with the values of treating people as individuals.
When all messaging is race-focused and people are constantly antagonizing against a certain group, then don't be surprised if people, especially lesser advantaged ones, will feel left out, and that's not even all that unreasonable.
You don't empower a group of people by kicking at another of people group.
People talk about "white privilege" as if that's somehow a problem. It's not; it's how everyone should be treated. That this doesn't happen is horrible, but I resent this usage of "white privilege" that almost tries to to guilt me for being treated with decency, or is being used to dismiss the very real problems and challenges people of all backgrounds are facing (including white people).
Congratulations, you hit the white supremacy apologia trifecta.
You could have scored bonus points if you had also included "not all white people" in your reply.
Did it ever occur to you that the reason that we have civil rights movements in the first place is because the state and corporations DO NOT "treat people as individuals?" Maybe you haven't noticed, but this is why people are pissed off in this day and age. It's why they have these discussions, and it's why they aren't willing to just ignore casual racism in the workplace.
Discussing factual information is not "kicking at another group of people." You can have ALL of your feelings hurt for all I care if it means that people aren't getting targeted by cops and harassed by store employees for the crime of being black and existing in society. White folks have been resenting discussing the problem of systemic racism and the role they play in it since Reconstruction. People are done tiptoeing around the issue so you can feel good about yourself and pretend everything is fine.
But yeah, I'm a racist "white supremacy apologist". Sigh. Do you not realize how massively toxic you're being here? For all your talk about "diversity" and "inclusivity" ya'll seem very quick to exclude people.
> You could have scored bonus points if you had also included "not all white people" in your reply.
Yes, "not all white people" is perfectly valid. Just as "not all men" is, or "not all Muslims are terrorists", or "not all blacks are criminals".
We're on the same damn team for crying out loud, I already said these problems need addressing, repeatedly, we just don't agree on some aspects regarding the best messaging and strategy to solve this problem.
This is like a football match where people keep tackling members of their own team. Maybe it would be better if I just succumb to the "violence" of staying silent if this is what you get if you do try and speak up but don't agree on some comparatively minor aspects. Your comment is certainly a lot more "violent" than any form of silence is.
You crossed several circles deeper into hell with this comment. We're trying to go the other way, for what should be obvious reasons, and you don't need any of this to make your substantive points. Nor is it in your interests, because it only discredits your argument, which is particularly bad to the extent that your argument is true.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It’s kinda like the ppl who say insults have power and then in the same breath say ACAB or “Kill the Pigs” if you believe words are powerful and can turn into actions why are you saying such inflammatory hateful things?
Just that there is a difference between punching up vs punching down. There is a difference because insults hurt when there is a history behind them. Just like a white guy calling a white guy the 'n' word doesn't hurt nearly as much as calling a Black guy that same name.
What is likely to happen is we will always see it moving forward, but eventually (outside of extreme circumstances like violence), these things become less powerful as the novelty of the charge wears off.
Yes, technology can exacerbate the dynamic in Peter Turchin's "elite over-production." This article describes the class dynamic well.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa...
This isn't the argument actually being made here, so if that's what DHH thought when he shut the thread down then that might explain part of the outcry.
The argument is simply that the behavior everyone claims to decry (e.g. racial violence) starts somewhere, far below violence. "Funny names" turn into off-color jokes. Off-color jokes turn into jokes with a darker edge. Then it turns into "just asking questions", and before too long your organization is acting as much as a group radicalization effort as it is a business.
This still isn't "cause and effect", where anyone who chuckles at a funny name is fated to be building the next Stormfront unless stopped by an intrepid band of culture warriors. But we've known since Ben Franklin that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, so under the 'pyramid of hate' argument, a company trying to foster a safe workplace for all workers should strive to keep potential racism from turning into a problem by enforcing standards of workplace conduct that don't wait for actual racism.
Just like we build secure software by building security in early into the release process.
Just like we build functional and well-integrated software by building the testing early into the release process.
Just like we avoid pest infestation by keeping the food off of the tables and floors. On and on it goes.
The standard we walk past is the standard we accept. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRQBtDtZTGA
Funny. That's the same thing the right-wingers are saying.
> Just like we avoid pest infestation
Well that's a nice phrase for a discussion of genocide.
Your wording seems to have an unstated but implied meaning to it, but I am not getting what it is.
Could you explain the implied meaning if you intended one?
This is just a rehash of broken-windows theory, whether its proponents know it or not. The Hutus and Tutsis didn’t start with some off-color ribbing and escalate from there.
There is zero evidence behind the “pyramid of hate” — it makes a shallow kind of sense, but has no basis in the real world. An equally valid hypothesis is that harmlessly blowing off low-level steam prevents the atrocities higher up in the “pyramid”. Things only really get bad when people are encouraged to form and defend identities around characteristics like race, religion, national origin, etc. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what this kind of hysteria promotes.
I'm sorry - I need help in understanding how this "equally valid". To me this seems like a justification ex post facto to defend "jokes", but it seems to fly in the face history. I find it hard to reconcile that post-slavery attitudes about race in America came about because people were no longer allowed to make jokes. Alternatively this kind of explanation hand waves away the cultural history that makes those jokes funny in the first place.
To note, I believe that DHH handled this situation horribly which has caused the situation to escalate to epic proportions. The adult thing to do when you come across a rather juvenile list of "funny" names to accept that you were wrong and move on. To try and defend this kind of juvenile behavior leads to nonsensical arguments about why it's someone's right to make lavatorial jokes during standup.
On what basis are you making your claim that allowing people to openly make offensive jokes prevents higher level atrocities?
The null hypothesis is that jokes neither promote nor prevent genocide, and I see no reason to reject it.
Again, the 'pyramid of hate' logic does not claim that jokes necessarily lead to genocide or that jokes are structurally required for genocide.
Just that they can be one of many causes of erosion of the social boundaries that ensure people think of each other as people rather than dehumanizing others. It is only to the extent that jokes become a tool for hateful sappers to undermine your team that they start to become necessarily problematic, but you shouldn't let things get to that point.
Offensive jokes are very highly context sensitive.
People can be offended very, some may argue too, easily.
Other people are very difficult to offend.
Hard to know.
Humanizing the field of play can do a whole lot of good. Can get people talking in real terms and being OK on those terms.
An overly fenced field of play can see building of tension despite the very best intent.
There can be solidarity in all that. Just being people, same as any people is often solid grounding.
Atrocities are harder in such a scenario. Everyone is more human, do unto others makes more sense when the others are similar, humans, wanting, needing similar things, running in similar ways.
"Those other people" can often be the start of something really ugly, depending on just what gets attached to "other."
We are as offended as we think we are. I am not marginalizing it at all! Being uber offended sucks.
But, we do have options. We do manage our response to others. We do have control over how we see others, can relate to them, see it from their view.
Humor is one of the more powerful ways to do that. It can bridge gaps, open doors, humanize others, make the very ugly, foul, something that does not own us.
We have to be careful with "openly" and "offensive."
The subset of expression sure to not offend is quite small.
The scope of possible good, or at the least not nefarious intent is just as large.
Both hypotheses are extremely difficult to prove or disprove and most likely, neither is strictly true. Human society is complicated / varied and I find it quite possible that there are times where hatred progressed both directions on that pyramid. There are also probably times where good natured blowing of of steam help prevent difficult situations from devolving and times where it inflamed hatred.
I don't understand what would make one theory "ex post facto" and the other not since both have similar temporal positioning...
But I don't think the point was to justify the jokes, I think the point was to call into question the epistemic justifications.
> To try and defend this kind of juvenile behavior
What defense was offered? This list was openly acknowledged as unprofessional, inappropriate, and something that should have been caught sooner.
This is exactly what he did.
> To try and defend this kind of juvenile behavior leads to nonsensical arguments about why it's someone's right to make lavatorial jokes during standup.
He didn’t try to defend the list he just didn’t believe the idea that this list had some sorta deep seated root in racism. There were just as many “funny” Anglo/European names as Asian/African/etc from what I understand. He called out ppl trying to act self righteous when they themselves participated in the list making in the recent past and said this list is not proof of deep-seated racism in the company. That wasn’t good enough for the activists so they revolted.
ETA: people are logging their disagreement in downvotes but I haven’t seen a counter argument to this at any point in this thread, I’m ok with the dv, just interested in hearing the opposing view.
Surely you mean Rwanda?
Perhaps it didn't "start" with "off-color ribbing" but the usage of 'jokes' (see: Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) to desensitize people to hatred towards the Tutsis is well documented.
It was unpopular to speak out against this sort of thing, and certainly was something that got worse over time.
Further, racial violence in the Americas didn't start with jokes either, it started with the genocide the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and continued with the trans-Atlantic slave trade ...
Hutus and Tutsi violence didn't start at jokes. It started with German and Belgian colonists literally preferring one group over the other. Raising animosity between two groups of essentially genetically same people.
Hutus used the identity cards colonists left to target their purges.
I'd say those influenced genocide way, way more, than some radio jokes.
Edit: I think it's easier to believe that if we didn't make a jokes here and there we could have prevented an atrocity. It's an easy and quick solution to a complex question.
I think the situation was way more messy and way more muddy. Jokes didn't help but stopping them wouldn't have stopped the genocide.
It's fair to at least 'talk about' the 'pyramid of hate' and maybe 'believe in it' so as to 'make a point'.
But I don't think it's ok to accuse regular, well-meaning employers of 'holding up systems of White Supremacy'.
It's also basically tone-deaf for an executive, facing a 'sensitive moment' to challenge claims of racism with 'reverse racism' - even if the executive might have a rhetorical point - it's just going to inflame the situation.
I think the execs should have basically 'not acted out of contempt', said some conciliatory things and moved on. Even if they had a legit point to make, they're supposed to be 'bigger than that'.
So I'm not sure if it's worthwhile to dig into the rhetoric, but rather, they should have just found a way past the issue.
Finally, it's a good example of how toxic this stuff can be.
And they were made in the context of a general propaganda/hate campaign. The medium is the same, the context couldn't be more different.
It's the context that matters 100%, not the medium (jokes in this case) in and of themselves.
When you get sucked in by a US-centric ideology that is almost entirely based out of US universities you get these glaring holes in these theories that don't make sense as soon as you move them to another country.
Explain to me why this movement hasn't caught on in Brazil? Or any of the other numerous South American countries which were huge destinations for African slaves? I don't see this crap happening in Columbia.
This is all just elite overproduction with a bunch of professors who 40 years ago still thought communism was a great idea indoctrinating kids who have a naturally conformist mindset.
Google and Amazon can afford to have this crap but startups can't and that's why you're seeing it evaporate from the small companies first. Let the unproductive all talk no walk poser engineers obsess about this instead of writing code. The rest of us will get to work somewhere else.
This is a gross misrepresentation of events.
They were colonized by European countries, who imported African slaves, to work alongside the SAmerican slaves for their economic exploitation.
Where did they come from? Europe.
The elite/exploiters are never the majority, in fact, they kind of need to stay “tiny”. That’s how power and leverage work, and even the concept of scalability in capitalism.
This definition was invented by Nazi Germany and led to countless horrors, are you sure you want to continue to use it?
Utilization of the pyramid of hate in this way makes me feel like it's just a retroactive justification of hypersensitive behavior amongst overly fragile employees. Honestly a lot of times it's not even hypersensitivity so much is just overt paranoia.
You're on the money about encouraging people to form their identities around these characteristics.
Instead of having a conversation about excessive police militarization and police brutality directed at all American citizens we had it around one group. In the US 75% of the people killed by police each year are not black and nobody knows their names because the media has caused Americans to think that it's a issue unique to, rather than disproportionate for black Americans.
Instead of having a unifying and inclusive movement for police reform we got a politically weaponized racially polarizing movement.
Yep. Watching (unarmed, white) Daniel Shaver weeping and begging for his life as he crawled on his hands and knees down the hallway before officer Philip Brailsford executed him with a spray of bullets — that was as clear-cut a case as you could get that the police in many districts are NOT policing their own as much as they should. In many ways, there is a straight line from Brailsford to Chauvin: a cop with lots of citizen complaints and a bad attitude ends up killing someone who didn’t need to die. Race, even when it is a factor, is an unnecessary distraction from the bigger picture.
The concern was that some of these “funny names” were based on laughing at other people’s race, national origin, etc. That’s the opposite of promoting it.
Umm, isn't the notion that catharsis is an effective method of anger reduction also at best controversial?
If this is such a common path, why have I never heard of it happening?
How common is this chain of events? What are some documented cases?
In mind, there plenty of other good reasons to promote good workplace conduct and prohibit racist speech.
Aren't you (or whoever makes these claims) purposely stopping the "pyramid of hate" where you see fit? You could go on and say "people who joke", "people who talk", "people who meet". You just set the bar where you find a culprit/cause you are willing to demonize, as if it was that clear cut
My friend, I truly wish interpersonal interaction were 'clear cut', but that is not how things work. And merely wishing that things worked this way does not make it so.
Constant bashing of white men on company calls. Exceptions if you were openly non straight. They also loved talking about how inclusive they were.
Constant mocking of customer base, who was mostly traditional white people.
I figure out quick I was hired only because they were desperate for someone with experience.
Which sadly meant hiring an undesirable.
At some point if I really need a job I may need to put on a dress.
I’d be mortified if I worked with someone who thought like this, and I’m glad I don’t.
“Pretending to be trans for (reason)” is a really really common way to mock trans people and I think you know that.
Even today there are companies, especially in the tech startup scene, which actively discriminate against "cisgender white males". It is extremely likely that even today, people put on the mask of the currently favoured sexual identity to land a job. Not to mock trans people, just to get ahead in life.
Staying quiet on identity politics and just focusing on the tech stack got me into trouble with management.
Hiring was based on race and sex. This was company policy.
They put money were there mouth was and hiring a TON of fresh out of college JR’s. Only had a couple of senior people and they were very overwhelmed.
Product was in bad shape because of it, which is how I came in.
You give some examples.
You close with a baldly transphobic sneer.
Really?
Laughing at them and pretending that they have it easy by "wearing a dress" is absolutely bigoted, sorry.
> reasonable conclusion from the way the person's workplace is structured, and the way their coworkers judge their coworkers
and
> Chuckling at the idea that trans identity amounts to "wearing a dress" is not a "reasonable conclusion", it's a hurtful caricature.
The workplace they described discriminated against the dominant white male identity, and waived it for people who deviated from it in dimensions including gender, sexual preference, and race. It is reasonable to conclude that their workplace would welcome or tolerate a dress-wearer as well, being a deviation of Western male fashion norms, with no comment on its relation to trans identity specifically, or even cross-dressing, which you somehow inferred.
To be charitable, sibling comments have made this inference as well, but I disagree that this inference is reasonable. As you mentioned,
> the idea that trans identity amounts to "wearing a dress" is not a "reasonable conclusion", it's a hurtful caricature.
It's fine to describe your relevant personal experience in an HN thread. What's not fine is doing the equivalent of arson (or criminal negligence). No more of this please. We've had to warn you more than once before. That's not cool.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I find it pretty hard to believe this went down the way you say.
> Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence.
So in your ideal professional environment, name-calling would be fine?
The blind employee is married to a woman who immigrated to the US from Japan. He was being lectured by a young semi-useless data scientist who grew up in a wealthy suburb just outside of Dearborn. I'm totally making all of this up in your eyes because you don't like what you're hearing.
Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable.
I notice you didn't reply about the name-calling.
Is that a quote? It sounds like you are paraphrasing your perception of someone's point in the least favorable possible way. If the guy really said "white people are tainted," then he might suck and I hope you pushed back.
We've had to ask you several times in the past not to do these things. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site to heart? We'd appreciate it. We're trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck, if possible, and using HN for these acrimonious battles contributes to destroying this place. The site guidelines are the way they are for good reason and they need to take precedence.
And if you actually employ someone who perpetrates violence or harassment, then it really doesn’t matter whether they were prompted to do so by a list of names intended as a joke.
That person (a) needs help and (b) probably shouldn’t be kept as an employee for the safety of your workforce.
I kind of can’t believe we live in a world in which we can’t acknowledge that keeping a list of funny names is disrespectful to our fellow human beings, without then jumping to genocide as the justification for why we shouldn’t do this (and subsequently implying anyone who advocates otherwise is this pro-genocide).
"My suspicion is that this is a weird tic of campus politics that has followed graduates into the professional arena where they unconsciously started deploying it in less appropriate contexts. If you’re in a dorm at a fancy college and you can convince an administrator that something is racist, the administrator will probably put a stop to it. At the same time, “this is bad for poor people” just isn’t going to get you far as a campus argument. After all, these schools more or less openly auction off a number of admissions slots to wealthy donors (while, of course, practicing affirmative action to keep things diverse) so they can hardly take a hard line on class politics."
Adults understand that dehumanizing someone is one path along the road that ends in violence.
We all know that smaller things can lead to bigger things, but the smaller thing is not the bigger thing.
Unless the transitivity is close to 100% then unbounded conflation just introduces its own unjust currents, turning attempts at constructive change into a bog of dysfunction.
If this is how these two are going to manage after decades at this, maybe they should bring in some executives willing to do the actual work of managing instead of bungling it themselves.
ik its not exactly relevant to the article but I want to know...
But to the issue itself. I've read what I can about it and it's tragic. I'll start by saying that I believe the founders had the right to make the call that they did and give them credit for offering severance packages to those who disagreed with their decision. However, the whole affair is a disaster and a cautionary tale. It seems to have started out with good intent. A group of employees wanted to create a more equitable workplace. They found a list of "funny" customer names and realized that this was a bad thing to have. The founders agreed--mocking your customers is a bad idea. The question is what happened next. I was unaware of the idea of the pyramid of hate. It kinda reminds me of Yoda “Fear is the path to the dark side … fear leads to anger … anger leads to hate … hate leads to suffering.” It looks like the implication is not that funny names === The Holocaust, but rather that a certain context is required for something like The Holocaust to occur. I believe that idea is true, but am not sure if this was a productive path to take. It seemed like the company had decided that the list was bad, to discontinue it, and to move on. The call not to fire whoever made the list doesn't seem to be a bad one. Contexts change and people make mistakes. If people evolve that should be encouraged. Where it seems that things fell apart is in how the CEOs responded to this. It's a really difficult issue and it would seem that discussion could have led to some mutual understanding. Moving to cancel social-political discussion in response (and to announce it in a blog post instead of internally) strikes me as where things took a tragic turn. While it's possible to have a policy of not discussing partisan politics at work (for example, it's not allowed for federal employees), not having discussion of equity issues at work is more problematic. Because for some employees, it's not just a question of doing their job and talking about these things in their own time--because for some, it effects their ability to do their jobs. For an in-person company, there can be something as simple as bathrooms. I'm a heterosexual male and never thought about there being a need for unisex bathrooms until an LGBTQ+ group at work pointed it out. Now in our building we have some. It doesn't effect me, but it means a lot to them. I can picture a woman wondering if she didn't get a promotion because there was something that she wasn't doing at work or if it was because of her gender--for her, it's not an abstract sociopolitical question--it's a question that has an impact on her ability at work. Or, if she's in a meeting and she finds that she's being ignored when she speaks, but men of similar ability are not, then it's not just an abstract issue, but a question of how she gets her job done. I am not even saying that if it happens that men are doing this that they are sexist--they might simply be oblivious to it. By my personality, I have a tendency to talk over people and have to remind myself to let other people talk (I think it's a good idea because then I can hear ideas that I might not have considered and sometimes save myself from doing something dumb). I hope that it's something that I never get called into HR about and would much rather a coworker told me if it was a problem. I think there's a worthwhile set of discussions about workplace culture that are worth having about what it means to be professional in the workplace. Of course there are cases that can go too far. But, a lot of it just strikes me as being polite to people. If someone wants to be called Robert instead of Bob, then if it makes him happy, ok. Other things are related to questions of cognitive bias. For example, if if I want to hire someone, it's pretty natural to use my network. However, maybe I can surface better candidates by searching more broadly. Am I using a good set of criteria in hiring?
But, back to the list. Without seeing it, it's not possible to judge whether was it just in bad taste to mock customers period, or did it have racial overtones in the "funny" names for some racial groups. A lot of the interpretation hinges on that. Also, the perception of whether it was racially motivated or not (unless it was particularly blatant could also vary depending on if one was a member of the targeted group or not. But from the exchange on white supremacy to occur and for such a large fraction of the company to quit, then it would suggest that there were deeper issues at the company and that the CEOs didn't want to engage with those issues.
While I seldom partake in threads, I do read and save interesting perspectives and opinions on topics I am interested in for more personal dissection & discussion (with myself and close friends), and I found your comment to be valuable and worth reading, so thank you for sharing.
Where my dad came from (Scary Gary) you voted Republican because up until about the 1960s, they were the party that cared about immigrants and wanted them to succeed. So, when he moved to a similarly Republican state in the 80s, he remained a Republican. The Republican is not a werewolf boogeyman around here. I made the mistake once of saying that I was a "closet Republican" on HN and I got downvoted so fast that I lost all self-confidence for about a year.
I went to a student Democrats meeting on my local campus. Now I know college political groups are a unique demographic and I get why these people (these people, yikes) feel this way, and those that I talked to were completely rational; like I could be and was one of them.
But when we were asked at the beginning of the meeting why people were Democrats, the very first person responded that they were a Democrat because they were not a racist.
The tactlessness, the arrogance, the naivety, and immaturity were so concentrated in a single sentence that I wish I could have left. But I stayed and learned even if that tribalism is toxic and wins no friends nor understanding nor ultimately progress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
So for someone to say they aren't Republican because they aren't racist is hyperbolic, but it isn't wrong.
What is Scary Gary?
It really says nothing about the potential of the parties today. If you are so ideological that you can't see that calling people you just met racists is a bad strategy, I don't know what to tell you. Want to play a game of prisoner's dilemma?
Scary Gary == Gary, Indiana, a burb of Chicago. It met the same crisis as a lot of Rust Belt areas and if you watch a youtube vid of it today, you'll see why it's scary. The Jackson family was from there, left for the same reasons (well...).
Yes, I agree it doesn't persuade anyone to call them names. I don't excuse that behavior. But again, it isn't wrong to say that the GOP uses racism to this day to win votes.
Do you believe that the Democratic party doesn't use racist rhetoric? I don't even want to make this an us vs them whataboutism.
Now, in response to that you sort of just wave around and claim all parties use racism. But that's not actually true is it, there is no similar concerted strategy on the Democratic side to stir up racism to drive votes- and this is born out in the numbers where one party has a very out of the norm demographic appeal.
That's still not an actual response to what I posted, it is what we all know to be whataboutism. Nobody wins by playing the "they do it, too, but better" card. It just makes the losing party look incompetent and a little evil.
The more likely explanation to contemporary GOP success is that Nixon (& others) were very effective appealing to suburban demographics (where the top issue was the economy). It took decades after for the South to gradually become a GOP stronghold, and it is very debatable which specific policies were the cause of that.
People point to figures like Strom Thurmond as evidence of a Southern Strategy, but there were several Democrats who did things like filibuster the civil rights act & endorse segregation. Prominent Democrats such as Robert Byrd & Richard Russell Jr. were fighting Nixon's party at the time. It's safe to say that at the very least, the existence of a "southern strategy" is not something that can be accepted at face value.
First, under what circumstances would you swap political parties? This is an exceptionally rare circumstance; I don’t see how it could ever happen in any kind of significant way. People change to third parties (eg whigs to Republicans) but leftists and rightists rarely “switch sides”. Party affiliations are a big basket of beliefs, not just single issue.
It’s self serving in that the popular narrative is all the “bad” Democrats (southern racists who blocked school integration, civil rights, etc) all left for the Republican Party, leaving the Democrats racist-free. Pretty convenient.
In reality I think that there was very little party switching; racism just became politically anathema in the civil rights era (which is one of the greatest things about America) and all the OG racists - the Robert Byrds etc. - had to stop being publicly racist. This and shifting cultural norms meant that Boomers were much less racist than previous generations and Gen X even more so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Democrats#1933%E2%80%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
Strom Thurmond is very notable example:
> While a President of the United States can, under our Federal system, do little or nothing about street violence, the Arizona Senator will predictably call attention to such lawlessness. While earlier Republican candidates doubtless realized that white Americans have no great affection for their Negro fellow‐citizens, they refrained from exploiting those antipathies. This restraint was, indeed, part of the “Establishment” agreement on how elections were to be conducted.
> This year's experiment, then, is betting that there are many Americans — among them many who have hitherto voted Democratic — who are willing to give their votes to a man who promises to keep Negroes in their place.
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/09/06/archives/whats-the-mainst...
Quit. Life's too short to waste time at a company that's forgotten it's purpose.
This ideology borders on cult like.
A good sign that you are dealing with an irrational ideology is non-sensical, illogical and inconsisten rules. For example, in this article, "Black" is capitalized everywhere its mentioned, and "white" isn't. There's nothing logically consistent about this, because it's a borderline religious ideology.
Going to quit after vacation this summer by just not showing up. See how long that lasts
"white" isn't capitalized because it doesn't bear as much similarities to those words, as "white" is not a cultural identity.
It is precisely the same as black. The mental gymnastics on display here are astonishing.
A good number of major publications have posted explanations for the editorial change:
https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-e...
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
Race is a social construct and the reason these newspapers chose not to capitalize white was because it's historically been capitalized by white nationalists. It's also historically been capitalized by black nationalists. That's what ethno-fascists do. They reduce reality down to singular dimensions and obsess about them as they tell everyone to blame their problems on that reason.
Like they did in Germany they point to a group in that case the German Jews that is extremely culturally similar to another group that has less money per capita and then tell them that the explanation for these folks having more is they've taken it from you.
They spend decades creating an entire ideology and mythology around this notion.
Sound familiar?
I first noticed the capitalization of black when I was in college in the early 2000s and was enrolled in several black studies courses for my electives. A few extreme radicals there insisted on capitalizing black because they spent so much time around black nationalists.
I'm glad these journalistic institutions found a compelling explanation for doing what they were being told to do by activist groups. It's absurd and ridiculous and it looks like religion. What's next are they going to demand we all capitalize God too, like the oppressive evangelical churches of my childhood made me do? Those same churches also told me that I couldn't use the word lucky and I had to use the word blessed instead because that's what identitarians do: They coerce your speech so they can coerce your thoughts.
I know this was a long rant but it's pretty awful to see this stuff get defended with anything looking like logic when it's absolutely not.
But Black is a cultural identity in the context of the United States. Blacks, or African-Americans, are ethnically distinct and have shared history, culture, and language. In 1840, almost all blacks in America were slaves. In 1950, almost all blacks were descendants of slaves. At either time, almost all of them would have spoken English as their first language. At either time, most would have been born in the American South. Most importantly, at either time would have identified with each other on the basis of those shared traits.
Whites, on the other hand, are comprised of distinct ethnic groups and had their own communities throughout American history. Go to any major American city and you’ll find neighborhoods that are historically Italian, Irish, or German.
Your take is "I have an opinion!"
Here’s quote from an article written by John McWhorter, a prominent Black conservative who happens to be a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford the subject[1]:
“But what about the black business districts that thrived across the country after slavery was abolished? What about Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright and Thurgood Marshall, none born in Africa and all deeply American people? And while we're on Marshall, what about the civil rights revolution, a moral awakening that we gave to ourselves and the nation.”
“My roots trace back to working-class Black people - Americans, not foreigners - and I'm proud of it. I am John Hamilton McWhorter the Fifth. Four men with my name and appearance, doing their best in a segregated America, came before me. They and their dearest are the heritage that I can feel in my heart, and they knew the sidewalks of Philadelphia and Atlanta, not Sierra Leone.”
“So, we will have a name for ourselves - and it should be Black. "Colored" and "Negro" had their good points but carry a whiff of Plessy vs. Ferguson and Bull Connor about them, so we will let them lie. "Black" isn't perfect, but no term is.”
Are you better qualified to say whether Black should or shouldn’t be capitalized than a Black English and linguistics professor at Stanford? Is your take more academic than his? And if so on what basis? Because it doesn’t seem to be based context or history or what Black people call or have called themselves.
My claim and one his claims is simple: there is a culturally distinct group within America that is called African-American and Black and that the B should be capitalized. Whether The better is Black or African-American is up for debate but only within the African-American community. It’s our right to determine what the proper term is. In the meantime, the consensus is that you should capitalize the B in Black when referring to black Americans who descended from black slaves in America.
[1] https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/why-im-black-not-af...
I’ll say whatever someone prefers though. Capitalizing “w” in white is a bit creepy to me though and has echoes of promoting the idea that all “whites” are the same.
1. Forms where the person in question just fills it in themselves (generally the option is Black/African anyway)
2. Discussions about groups of people in which case the labels are descriptive and fairly easy to navigate.
2. Usually the discussion or writing would not be limited to ADOS. I’ve very rarely seen writers attempt to divide the community like that. As I said though, I’m fine with capitalizing it if that community wants it.
You could make a lot of the same statements about “whites” becoming one community in america. That said I don’t think capitalizing the W looks good, it’s weird and seems like something a white supremacist would do.
But go where? Where can you go to escape this insanity? It seems to have taken hold everywhere (except, I guess Basecamp?)
But seriously if you want a company that bans politics, you can join coinbase, or you can join plenty of companies where they do hold optional DEI meetings and so on but don’t push it on the employees other than having them take a basic written anti-sexual and racial harassment test yearly or whatever.
Ultimately if a company actually is significantly hurting the ability of their employees to get work done effectively they’re going to be out-competed in the marketplace.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044726.
- Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff
- Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
- Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
- refused to reprimand said employee on the call
- had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Can't believe only 21 employees walked. What idiots these founders are. There is no way to defend this poor management even if you agree with the rule they tried to put in
de·fund; prevent from continuing to receive funds
Courtesy of the dictionary. This is not hard. Stop entertaining people who redefine words.
It is very similar to people who say "I'm not racist, I don't think I'm superior to anyone and the dictionary definition of racism is to assume superiority based on race" (this is more or less a direct quote from Pauline Hanson, an Australian Senator who is wildly racist).
What I have found in discussions with people who I think are racist, but who deny it, is that they have an emphasis on personal agency and personal responsibility. So while they might be able to happily have black friends, they see, for example, disparaties in incarceration rates not as a social problem but as an aggregation of personal failures. If one believes that a particular race is, on average, more likely to commit the types of crime for which one should be incarcerated, and one sees incarceration as an "inferior" way of life, then the logical conclusion is that they are racist.
An interesting thing to note about analysing racism this way is that it can also uncover racist attitudes in the very minority populations who are being discriminated against.
Also "defund the police" is a shorthand that typically means "reduce direct law enforcement funding and instead fund other community engagement programs". Of course we need cops, but we don't necessarily need them all armed to the teeth in riot gear showing up for a drug bust (sub-question: do we really need drug busts at all?), and maybe they're not the best first responders in domestic disputes, and so on. Most people for whom "defund the police" is a catchcry recognise this, because there are very few true anarchists in society (and anarchy is kind of where "left meets right" in the political spectrum anyway, which is why libertarianism is such a dangerous and insidious ideology).
> If one believes that a particular race is, on average, more likely to commit the types of crime for which one should be incarcerated, and one sees incarceration as an "inferior" way of life, then the logical conclusion is that they are racist.
You can try to argue that crime rates show disproportional racial representation for a bunch of reasons. Claiming anyone who states the facts is racist is wrong.
Yes those are the "few anarchists" I was referring to. From what I have seen of people discussing the "defund the police" movement it's about a dramatic reform of law enforcement, including much less emphasis on armed police storming about the place.
> You can try to argue that crime rates show disproportional racial representation for a bunch of reasons. Claiming anyone who states the facts is racist is wrong.
I didn't claim anyone stating the facts is wrong, I made the claim that when people attribute a statistical anomaly like disparity in incarceration rates to an aggregation of personal failures rather than a systemic problem, they are logically being racist (even if they don't see it as such).
If you had told me this was written by some troll to make BLM look bad then I'd believe you. To be fair, there are some good things in that article too, it's not all bad; it contains some anecdotes worth hearing, but that doesn't follow that the conclusions are also good.
This is also the same person who cited Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong as inspirations, by the way.[2] Yes, really, that Mao. I genuinely thought this was inserted by a vandal on the Wikipedia article when I encountered it last week, but the source pans out.
I mean, people don't just get these "abolish the police" and "BLM is a Marxist organisation" out of thin air. Granted, there is a lot of bad-faith trollism from Tucker Carlson and similar people, but if your message is so confused, easily misunderstood, and your leadership says things in support of the most extreme interpretations then quite frankly, you have no one else to blame but yourself.
[1]: https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/04/abolition-and-reparatio...
[2]: https://time.com/5171270/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors...
I don't understand why people are so resistant, or even outright hostile, in making the social justice movement (including the sentiments BLM expresses) more effective. If you truly care about social justice then being as effective as possible should be the #1 priority, no?
I don't care much for BLM not because I don't care about their goals, but because I don't think it's very effective for a number of reasons. Yet every time I raise this it's either dismissed like your comment does, or met with a surprising amount of hostility. Aren't conversations on how to best affect these kind of changes super-duper important? It appears not, and it seems BLM has become the goal, rather than the vehicle to get at the goal.
It's best to think of any popular movement as directional - for sure there are individual people in the Defund movement calling for 100% abolition, and others calling for demilitarization, or redirecting of some funding - as of right now, they want the same thing as far as first steps go. If they're successful in redirecting some funding away from police, the non-abolish crowd will move away from the movement and they'll become increasingly irrelevant when it's 10 anarchists arguing for no police instead of massive protests.
Again, you're confusing an organization with the movement. The organization has only minor impact on the actual movement. It's like saying that a group named "Democracy for America" reflected what people in the US believed about Democracy.
> Aren't conversations on how to best affect these kind of changes super-duper important? It appears not, and it seems BLM has become the goal, rather than the vehicle to get at the goal.
I support BLM, but I'm not sure I support the goals of the BLM org. Mostly because I barely know them (I realize I could just go to their webpage and read them). I do know what most people I associate believe BLM means though.
Now this does mean there is a problem in that different people have different interpretations of it. But honestly this is always the case for any type of social movement. There's a base for the support, and then a bunch of splinter ideologies.
Define "racist"
"Reform the police" is much more universalist term that people across multiple political spectrums would have gotten behind (and it's still memorable).
I'm not sure why it wasn't used instead.
Policing organizations/unions/departments have refused to change, evolve, or improve their behavior.
Personally I'm a big fan of requiring a much, much higher standard of training than police have now. Especially when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. The best way to minimise the consequences is to ensure that we have maximised their skill potential with the forms of intervention which have the least risk of permanent consequences.
I take it you still stick to the original definitions of "fun", "garbled", and "terrible", then? Good on you.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/defund
> : to withdraw funding from
and "withdraw" does not mean "remove completely"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white%20supremacy
> 1 : the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races
> 2: the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races
https://web.archive.org/web/20200901223507/https://www.merri...
> and "withdraw" does not mean "remove completely"
It certainly _can_ and usually _does_ mean remove completely. Examples:
- "I'm withdrawing my student from this school"
- "The peer review committee has decided to withdraw this erroneous paper from publication"
- "I would like to withdraw $100 from my checking account" (It means the _whole_ $100)
- "He is experiencing heroine withdrawal symptoms" (after not having _any_)
Obviously one can withdraw all of something, but I'm skeptical of it meaning "all" by default.
If you used "withdraw the money from my account", that would imply all of the money. Of course, any customer service person would still want to confirm that by asking for more information before handing your balance over...
"Defund the police" can sound extreme, or counterintuitive, or downright confusing. But it seems urgently important (to me) to understand why so many Americans feel so strongly that they use such intense language, propose such radical changes, and demand something that doesn't make sense to me.
Clearly, there's something I don't "get". It's infinitely more compelling to me to try to "get it" and understand others' viewpoints, and uninteresting to understand why the words they used don't match a conventional definition.
The onus is on both parties to communicate effectively and find language that removes ambiguity. Unfortunately, I think some degree of sophistry is occurring to use ambiguity as a motte and bailey.
Effective communication is nowhere near the same as using transparent / effortless language. "The medium is the message"—phrases like "defund the police" and "Black Lives Matter" arrest the attention in ways that "we should reconsider the financial resources allocated to law enforcement" and "I value the lives of Black Americans as equal to those of White Americans and, moreover, those Black lives have historically been undervalued and oppressed" simply do not (and I can't even make a claim that that's what those phrases mean—you'd have to ask someone, and try to understand what they meant).
The effectiveness of communication is nontrivial. There's a reason for the long history of poetry as a way to communicate emotions, a way that tends to transcend the effectiveness of plain language to convey intense emotion in an intuitive form; and that reason is decidedly not that artful use of language removes ambiguity.
Ambiguity highlights precisely the points at which we fail to understand one another, and point to the most critical opportunities to clarify what we mean to each other.
If I withdraw money from my bank account, I still usually have money in my bank account also. If we withdraw funding from a authoritative service that serves a public function but has also been leveraged oppressively, it doesn't mean there is no funding
That doesn’t mean that I can define words however I like. Since defund has a well and consistently used definition I think it’s going be hard for the connotation to change so that “defund police” means something other than defund police.
disingenuous (adj) giving a false appearance of simple frankness
obstinate (adj) pertinaciously adhering to an opinion
pertinacious (adj) marked by an unyieldingly persistent fixedness (as of opinion, purpose, action) that is often annoyingly perverse in fact or in appearance
It looks like you simply googled those words and copy-pasted the definitions. I can do that, too (using a more credible dictionary vis-a-vis American usage, to boot. Mine’s MW, yours is Oxford, which is very British; we’re discussing an American company):
white supremacy (n) the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races
defund (v) to withdraw funding from (as a government-funded program)
This isn’t a helpful approach. Prescriptivist appeals to the dictionary and dismissal of others’ viewpoints are not ways of listening to the perspectives of others or empathizing with different experiences, and seem to be actively preventing constructive discussion in this case.
Agreed. On the flip side, I think it’s just as unhelpful an approach to co-opt a generally understood word (or phrase) and then (unbeknownst to the majority of peers) expand its definition to capture even mainstream behavior that might be construed as undesirable even if not obviously unacceptable, and then beat the same peers in the head with it when they express confusion at the changed meaning of words (or phrases). It’s a cheap rhetorical trick, and gets us further away from collaboratively solving very real and important problems in a pluralistic society.
That said, I respectfully disagree that it’s “just as unhelpful.” Pedantry over definitions distracts from the underlying issues, while new and inventive and nonstandard usage of language can spur critical analysis and jolt us out of our familiar understanding.
Telling someone “defund isn’t used that way” shuts down the conversation. Demanding we “defund the police” makes me want to start / pursue / expand the conversation: what the heck do you mean by that?
Edit to add: my response sounds overly academic. Another way to put it could be: language is confusing, and it can be problematic if we make it more confusing. But, sometimes I need to get a bit more confused before I can see things in a new / different light, and language can be an effective tool to achieve that “good confusion”
I understand that that’s the intention behind this strategy, but in practice it actually comes off as a shock-and-awe guerrilla tactic to argumentation that alienates rather than invite collaboration. Again, if the goal is actually to get people to buy into new ideas, attacking them (which is implicitly what happens when you expansively redefine “white supremacy”) is just not a good strategy.
> Telling someone “defund isn’t used that way” shuts down the conversation.
Right, and it sounds like the goal is to maintain open conversation! Constantly demanding that people use your definitions and argue with you on the terms that you unilaterally set is an awful way to maintain open dialogue/conversation with people that might otherwise be open to changing their minds. Insisting that people simply must accept whatever new rules of engagement is en vogue just exacerbates polarization and mistrust.
So yes, it’s just as, if not more unhelpful.
That’s a good point, and I’m not sure I have a good answer to it! I believe rhetorical guerrilla warfare is an intentional and important tactic. My gut tells me part of the goal is precisely to make me and others like me feel uncomfortable: I generally have the freedom to not feel alienated, but that’s not a privilege afforded to vast swaths of our society who are historically disadvantaged. I can only imagine the alienation I would feel as a Black engineer—but as a White engineer, I feel right at home on my team of other White engineers, and alienation is something I can just choose to walk away from. Not so for others…
Still, I know that’s not a satisfying answer / response to your comment. You’re right that feeling alienated doesn’t make me more inclined to have open minded / collaborative discussions, in general. But given the structural imbalances at play, I emotionally feel that the graceful and “right” way for me to engage is by listening despite my discomfort, as a tool for learning the perspectives of others not just theoretically, but experientially.
:shrug: None of this is easy…but it’s important to me to pursue mutual care and understanding with as much good faith as I can muster, even when it’s uncomfortable for me.
Playing rhetorical tricks in an attempt to “make people uncomfortable” just muddies the water since everyone sees what’s going on. At best, nothing changes, and at worst this strategy just sets us back.
As long as we continue down the path of polarization and resentment, the further we stray from solving our problems as we remain in the status quo. In the status quo the biggest loser is the very person that stands to benefit the least from the status quo. From what you’ve told me, you’re probably not going to be the loser there.
Shared definitions is the bedrock of human communication, and absent that, we’re no better than chimps just grunting past each other.
Yep! It was a failure of all parties involved that the two competing definitions of racism weren't laid out on the table, when people started getting huffy.
> Shared definitions is the bedrock of human communication, and absent that, we’re no better than chimps just grunting past each other.
(laughs) Lay it on thick, why don't you?
I will say that from the transcripts (and from the way conversations have been going in this thread), the way this usually starts is that one party unilaterally sets the rules of engagement and more or less demands that others accept those terms, and when the others push back on those rules, we all take a step back and admit “failure of all parties”.
It would be a lot easier for us to collaborate on these problems if we can be honest with ourselves about who the aggressor is, and who’s caught on the defense in these kinds of heated exchanges in workplace debates.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it's clear from your comment history that you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for. (Actually a lot of the time we don't know, or care, what they're battling for. We care about HN not becoming a flamewar hell site.) If you would please stop doing that and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044182.
That depends very heavily on the nature of the injustice, doesn't it? I mean, take Godwin's perspective here: that's literally the logic that gave us the holocaust!
Implicit in your statement is the idea that the "injustice" might "suck", but not so much that it's worth blowing up your employer. Which is to say: you really don't think this injustice sucked very much. Well... some people disagreed. And they were willing to quit over it.
Isn't that an existence proof that your intuition is simply wrong here?
You're both misreading and over-reading.
The comparison is not between how much the injustice sucks vs. the cost of blowing up the employer. It is a) whether all injustices have equitable access to pressuring employers and b) whether parasitizing any organization to advance a cause, however honorable the intentions are, is a fair game despite the negative externalities.
If any cause fails either of these criteria, it is bound to be creating its own injustices.
I think your conclusion is also obviously false. The access that the civil rights movement eventually acquired at many institutions did nothing to increase the injustices faced by LGBTQ group.
So while unequal access can create further injustices, it is not case they always do. I think that the linkage you are calling out tends to arise when the two groups are in conflict.
Um... I completely failed to follow this. Are you talking about Godwins law? What is the logic that literally gave us the Holocaust?
> Isn't that an existence proof that your intuition is simply wrong here?
I believe you have an error in your modal logic. Existence proofs can only disprove 'all/no X are P' statements and prove 'there exists an X that is P' statements. The claim you cite is of the later form.
Generally, the way to disprove such a claim is to assume it is true then reach a logical contradiction.
The point being (which of course isn't that a modern holocaust is brewing) that if injustice sucks, it should suck for everyone everywhere and it should be allowed to discuss it in any forum. Arguing otherwise isn't arguing for "compartmentalization", it's just arguing for the perspective that the injustice doesn't suck.
Pretending that THIS is "literally" why the Holocaust happened borders on anti-semitism.
The Holocaust happened because enough peoole there were willing to accept bad things being done when they were done to unpopular groups. The lesson to be learned from it is that even if someone is unpopular, we need to be strive to treat them with humanity.
Also let me just note that your casual attempt to accuse me of antisemitism in a thread LITERALLY ABOUT people being casually and unjustly accused of white supremacy is just "chef's kiss" level hypocrisy. Well done.
Yes, that is what I said was the cause.
That is different from what you said which is that people protesting in their personal live but being unwilling to discuss as part of their professional lives (i.e. compartamentalizing) was the cause.
Those germans should have been protesting and fighting back wherever possible, but it absolutely wasn't a limiting of protests to non-professional contexts that caused the Holocaust.
> Also let me just note that your casual attempt to accuse me of antisemitism in a thread LITERALLY ABOUT people being casually and unjustly accused of white supremacy is just "chef's kiss" level hypocrisy. Well done.
I stand by the assement of the stance that I put forward; it borders on anti-semitism. It sounds like that stance might not be one you intended to take. If so, I suggest re-reading what you wrote to see how it appears you are taking that stance.
If you disagree with my assessment of that stance, please explain whitewashing the german response to the rise of the Nazis doesn't border on anti-semitism because what that stance equates to for me is saying: "The germans didn't believe reprehensible things or disregard the humanity of those headed to concentration camps, they just let their professionalism stand in the way of speaking out against the Nazis."
I appreciate that you may be arguing a minority position in this particular thread (at least from the portions that I've seen), but that doesn't absolve you of needing to follow the site guidelines, and your comments have been noticeably more flamey than many others.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046069.
It's not possible to call it from outside, but there was no actual racist behavior cited, apart from the list of funny customer names, which is not really racist (more culturalist - if that were a thing), but it is a terrible idea anyway.
It sounds like a bunch of people got upset and quit over white privilege and the usual similar nonsense. Good riddance, why would you want activist employees like that?
The context it was said in made the statement rather jarring. I am all for their initial stance of "no politics" etc, but their all-hands was a face palm all around.
A lot of the framing around implicit bias and white privilege is actually straight up generalizing about a group based on skin color. That's racist. This business that it's not racist if it's against white people is seriously wrong - and racist.
Employees calling the organization 'White Supremacist' is the thing that should be 'jarring' or at least controversial. There are arguments to be made, sure, but the language is fairly extremist.
> To which Singer responded: “I said we have different ways of framing … If you want to debate whether it exists anywhere, then yeah. But not here at this company, not with the people I associate with.”
Edit: to add quote
So yes, the article does claim that he said this. Obviously he contests this, but it appears to be just his word alone against other people who were on the call. The balance of evidence does not appear to be on his side, here.
Anonymous sources are the norm in all kinds of reporting; there is no real reason to be surprised that no ex employee is volunteering for the kind of harassment that signing their name to this story would draw in, especially now that Breitbart and a variety of alt-right grifters have decided to take big, public pro-Basecamp and anti-“woke” worker stance. It’s easy to say “if it’s real they would say so publicly”, but honestly the vast majority of us here, myself included, would not do so if it meant getting harassed by the Breitbart crowd.
This of course does not mean that this is real. Just because I could imagine myself being an anonymous source in such circumstances does not mean that such sources exist. But in this case we can be savvy media consumers and look at the official pushback from Basecamp and those named, and the pushback is incredibly small in the number of contested details. Singer corrected literally one quote on the record. This implies to me that Newton is largely on the money in terms of factual events.
Also, the flip side is also true; we don’t seem to have a lot of current of former Basecamp employees coming out to defend the company and decry these articles as being wrong. Instead we have ... silence. Now everything I said above about wanting to be anonymous is still true for these hypothetical people as well, but if you’re going to complain about the lack of people on the record attacking the company, then surely the lack of people defending the company (executives excluded, natch) on the record should also be a data point, should it not?
> I objected to an employee’s statement that we live in a white supremacist culture. White supremacism exists, and America’s history of racism still presents terrible problems, but I don’t agree that we should label our entire culture with this ideology.
His reply was focused on white supremacy in America, he didn't mention a misunderstanding about referring to just the company. There's that other quote from him, but it's strange his entire reply focused on the country if he was just referring to Basecamp.
And in the meantime his interlocutors have acted to remain anonymous... I grant benefit of the doubt to Singer.
And either way, I believe that kind of conversation doesn’t belong in public channels at work. They make project management software. The company doesn’t need to be political activists. That’s my belief and I am entitled to it.
It’s also ok to disagree with that. If social activism is important to you, you can find ways to align that with your career. Good on you for doing that, and good luck.
However, saying that all companies, as well as all of their members have to align with your view of the world is crazy talk. I expect more companies to do this, and you can choose to not work there.
'White Supremacy' classically means men in Pointy White Hats.
The CRT people now use it to mean 'regular white people' because they, in their regular, day to day actions, uphold oppressive systems i.e. 'White Supremacy'.
The denial is usually of the later, not the former.
Many progressives are now using the denial of the later, to imply denial of the former, as a kind of bad faith rhetorical weapon, which I think is unfair.
> “I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
I was not the one dismissed him, nor do I work at basecamp, nor am I Ryan Singer, so I can't be sure that's why he was suspended...can only guess with the same information available to you.
This is the problem with cultural Marxism / “wokeness”. It’s a sanctified, totalizing ideology that admits zero daylight between “100% agreement” and “you are a white supremacist/literal Nazi”.
In that way it functions exactly like a “state religion”: in public, you’re either a true believer, act like one or are mute and don’t give away your position. Soon they will make you mouth the words or face denunciation. Perhaps we are already there in the vanguard of coastal tech companies.
This whole thing is counter to the very spirit of liberalism.
Could you help me understand why you feel "cultural Marxism" is so, totally, totalizing?
It simply means that the ideology won’t stop until it has transformed all of culture. The progress thus far has been academia -> journalism -> tech companies. It’s coming for the rest of society. There is no area of life or society that this ideology does not claim to address.
You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?
So let me get this straight: You're railing against an ideology that you claim has progressed through a large section of society, and you think it is bad, and you think, presumably, that society ought to not be like that, at least in these many areas. And your criticism of that ideology is that it claims to address many areas of society?
> You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?
You missed the bit where I used the word "sanctimonious".
The irony of this whole section of the thread in the context of racism...
I call it “cultural Marxism” because unlike plain old Marxism, it has relatively little to say about the redistribution of wealth and other economic interests. In this way it’s made itself innocuous to corporate America, which would otherwise mobilize its immune system to reject the ideas outright.
Case in point: I recently sat through some corporate training on privilege that did not, once, mention wealth or economic privilege.
Cultural Marxism redefines the oppressed and oppressor along the lines of identity rather than economy. This makes it much more palatable to a capitalist society.
"That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist."
This kind of gaslighthing though.
"My opponent disagrees with me and is therefore a White Supremacist, or at least close to one!"
If one person says 'this org is racist because of white privilege' - it's possibly contentious, but not unreasonable to suggest that this statement is racist in and of itself.
Just because you might deny 'reverse racism' exists, doesn't mean that it's true, it's a denial, not a disagreement.
Also, indicating that 'this office is not a place of white supremacy' is not 'denying' someone else experience, or their position that 'racism exists'. It's an observation of the nature of the ostensible problem.
It's not 'wilfully ignorant' it's more like 'wilfully insensitive / disagreeable / inflammatory'
No-one likes being told they're wrong, which is why the capitol riots happened on 6 January and Trump still got so many votes despite being an abjectly horrible president, and the head of a party that does nothing for the vast majority of its constituents.
If you believe the company founders, in the face of being told they occupy their position 'due to privilege' is 'right about everything' then you're the problem.
Telling executives that they are 'denying racism exists' when they are actually only denying that it exists at the company is obviously straw manning.
If you're of the position that 'anyone who questions claims of racism is a white supremacist', then you're entitled to that position, but it's 'war language' that is driving a lot of irresponsible toxicity in the workplace.
Singer's quote:
“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don’t believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
He wasn't talking about the company, he was talking about society. Unless you think he was saying they "live in" the company ...
Saying he got sacked for questioning it at the company is a spin added later by his apologists.
To the extent that white supremacy is synonymous with racism (which, at least at this point in history, I think is arguable given the fact that we live in a world dominated by the vestiges of the British empire, and that structural inequality is almost entirely against non-white people globally) then people who question the claim of racism are at the very least inadvertently advancing the causes of white supremacy.
Those with historically unassailable, unnamed, and most sensitively, unearned, prerogatives, become understandably if unfortunately upset when this state of affairs is questioned.
While they retain a platform and resources to do so, they lash out.
The details will vary; the attempts at spin and chaff will vary; the root issues are no mystery.
We're in a moment of cultural shift.
Those who perceive themselves rightly as historical "winners" are going to fight "loss" of status, control, hegemony, pick a word.
All the more so, to the extent that they are prone to understanding the world in terms of zero-sum games.
(As others have noted, the Basecamp trashfire has nothing to do with "politics," that's one transparent attempt at spin.)
Weak leadership that fostered a political culture that they eventually lost control of, and a workforce so engulfed in politics that they lost sight of focus. DHH playing sick is just the Cherry on top. I can't say that I don't feel an enormous amount of that petty German word towards to founders who love to preach about company culture having this blow up so spectacularly.
I'm beginning to understand why Andy Wingo emphasized filtering out fash when doing your hiring: https://www.wingolog.org/archives/2017/09/04/the-hardest-thi...
Really? Someone who writes that is where you're looking for guidance? Words fail me to describe how appalling this is.
Free clue: You can believe in strong free speech protection without being fascist. You'd be amazed at how many people do so - who believe in free speech on principle, not because they want to be able to say their secret horrible beliefs out loud. Putting them in the fascist category merely shows that your brain has turned off, and you're willing to harm completely innocent people in order to try to protect against your current bogeymen.
Did you read the rest of the blog post? Or did seeing "<my dearly held American value>=fash" stop your thought? As Andy says, free speech really only works in a context where everybody is of equal power. In an asymmetric power context, speech against those with less power is objectively more damaging than speech against those with more power, and is therefore more legitimately subject to restriction. Tolerating speech against the marginalized thus pulls society further in a pro-fascist direction.
You should really consider whether it makes sense to be more appalled by someone calling out tolerance of hate speech as fascist, than by the hate speech itself.
Yes, I read the rest of the blog post.
I see a couple problems with your position here. First, fascists - real fascists - aren't free speech advocates. They restrict the speech of their opponents. So calling someone fascist because they advocate free speech is rather off. In fact, your position is closer to the fascist one.
Second: "fash". Part of the fascist playbook is short, dismissive, contemptuous labels for their opponents. It's part of the dehumanization process. And here you are, doing exactly that.
That's two different parts of the fascist methodology that you (and the blog poster) are exhibiting. You might think carefully about that. When opposing tyranny, be careful of the methods of tyrants, lest you become one.