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Comment by dnissley | Hacker News Reader

I'm a pretty left leaning person and I mostly agree with the things he's quoted as saying in this article.

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.

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It's a fair point, and I too have a tendency to get annoyed at politically motivated language drift. But it's a thing that happens, and it's been happening since the dawn of time, and I'm personally pessimistic that there's much that can be done about it. Might as well curse a puddle for being muddy.

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."

The problem is the definitional issue is the foundation of many of their arguments. If you give in here, then it's much easier for them to convince you that something must be done.

"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".

I guess? Though I'm not sure that arguing about the name of the ocean is actually the easiest way to convince people not to get hung up on trying to boil it. Even when fuzzy language is directly responsible for sucking people into a boil-the-ocean mindset, I've never seen anyone actually succeed by choosing that plan of attack. Usually it just results in people talking past each other.

To awkwardly extend the metaphor:

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.

It's tricky though, because I could make a series of arguments that sound reasonable individually or out of context, but when made together in a specific context, they take on new meanings. Without more context, we end up inferring quite a bit based on the info presented to us.

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.

It occurs to me now that this somewhat resembles the squabble over the “commons clause” and whether or not software using it is open source.

If you start calling modern social justice issues with a term without that historical "baggage", then it would quickly be dismissed as [first world problem](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=First%20Worl...)

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