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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad these shakeouts are happening

I'm not a cis white male and I'm not internalizing oppression

but obviously (to almost everyone) these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own

if anyone hasn't been exposed to this experience, the people that want corporations to "use their platform" for things unrelated to revenue are also believing that all aspects of life are political for people that aren't "cis white males" and if you're any combination of minority/woman/LGBT and disagree with that then you're "internalizing oppression" because to them we can't have independent thoughts. For me, these "allies" are worse than the silent apathetic people as well as the overtly prejudiced/racist people. Primarily because they're unpredictable and even more reactionary to having their world view challenged.

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> I'm not a cis white male and I'm not internalizing oppression

The “internalizing oppression” thing is such a disgusting accusation. It’s just a way for the activists to trade on the moral authority of pretending to speak for their group, even when they don’t represent the views of their identity group: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang

So why don't people in those groups speak out against it?

When Reddit hired an admin with repeated links to child molestation, moderators of trans communities like r/LGBT staunchly took the position of the admin and called anyone speaking out against it transphobic. (The admin is trans).

It kinda feels like law enforcement. The good apples aren't speaking out about the bad apples. If you see activists using your group to advance an agenda you disagree with, eject them. Don't just let them do their things.

“They” are speaking out about it

Their comments are greyed out, at the very bottom of all the threads, invisible, collapsed, flagged and otherwise censored

And this is also one of those moments, so just add it to your generalizations so that you don't come to the same broad conclusion

I mean, every survey we do on these things indicates that like 80% of any given minority group doesn’t tie the progressive line on whatever issue (e.g., “abolishing the police”). I’m not sure what more needs to be done to “speak out”. It’s not like each race has a president that can speak on their behalf (although I probably shouldn’t give the woke folks any ideas).

Do they tie the progressive line on "Make the police accountable and maybe not spend mountains of money on buying them tanks tanks and maybe not let them literally get away with murder?"

Or is that not a 'progressive' line? (In which case, why the hell haven't we gotten it yet?)

I think the likely explanation for this conundrum is that people don't support <whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position>.

> Do they tie the progressive line on "Make the police accountable and maybe not spend mountains of money on buying them tanks tanks and maybe not let them literally get away with murder?"

If you’re asking “do black Americans want police reform”, then probably yes considering 90+% of all Americans favor police reform of some kind. So to answer your other question:

> Or is that not a 'progressive' line? (In which case, why the hell haven't we gotten it yet?)

Not uniquely, no. Why we haven’t gotten it yet: probably because our politics are broken by intense partisanship among other things. Frankly this isn’t a corporate issue (beyond some shallow virtue signaling), so it just doesn’t become a legislative priority.

> I think the likely explanation for this conundrum is that people don't support <whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position>.

This is a well-documented dodge. Leftists have been very clear that they want the police abolished. The media tried to make that message more palatable in advance of the recent presidential election by suggesting it was a euphemism for moderate police reform, and leftist activists clarified that they literally want to abolish the police. This is very explicitly not a caricature.

> Leftists have been very clear that they want the police abolished.

Citation _very much_ needed.

In my experience this is not a position of the left, beyond maybe some fringe <0.1% groups.

Stating that as a "position of the left" as a fact merely reinforces what the GP said: "I think the likely explanation for this conundrum is that people don't support <whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position>. "

This is not definitive or representative but it is one very public example

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

Would a link from someone who doesn't want the police abolished persuade you, or have you already decided those people on the left do not count?

What a silly dichotomy. Just because you aren’t convinced by N=1 doesn’t mean you’ve closed your mind to a possibility. Can we grow up?

Leftists have been very clear they want police held accountable.

There are views on all ends of the scale. Most, even conservatives want some police reform.

This is the whole point we're arguing about up front. That activists have a oversized influence on what we discuss.

Less than half of black people support defunding or reducing the police presence but that conversation has smothered all discussions of more realistic and popular reform.

"Leftists have been very clear that they want the police abolished. "

No, most aren't crazy enough to think that abolishing the police is better than what we have.

Instead, they ask to "defund" the police, and then redefine "defund" to mean that many of their daily services should be given to others more qualified for peaceful resolutions, without carrying weapons, and police should be available for backup of those situations.

I personally remain unconvinced, and I think we'd see a lot of the people doing those services injured because they went into dangerous situations without adequate protection. But I can't deny that the police have shown a lot of poor judgement over the years, so something needs to change.

Who do you consider to be responsible for CHAZ?

A simple question. But since this question was +2, and is now -2; I guess there are a lot of people who don't want it to be asked..

I think the best reforms are make police officers pay for their own insurance, break up the union, and pay officers more to compensate for the reduced job security.

I also wonder if better vetting and training would help, and of course increase pay accordingly.

“Instead, they ask to "defund" the police, and then redefine "defund" to mean that many of their daily services should be given to others more qualified for peaceful resolutions, without carrying weapons, and police should be available for backup of those situations.”

I’m so tired of these rhetorical games. It’s dishonest and we need to stop accepting it as a legitimate form of discourse. No respect for people and politicians who do this.

>Leftists have been very clear that they want the police abolished.

Lazy rhetoric will always let one down in a big way. At the very least, as one is making broad, sweeping generalisations, one will totally miss what the real issues are, and the real problems.

>whatever strawman of the week is used to attack a caricature of a position

Is it really a strawman when a non-negligible number of people in your political camp espouse a position without so much as a hint of irony or exaggeration? Denying the existence of the radicals won't win you any credibility with fence sitters and moderates.

Progressive activists get more air time than they have political power. It’s like how, if you watched the mainstream media before Super Tuesday, you would have thought Elizabeth Warren was a front runner for the nomination.

But, like with the democratic primaries, voting tends to collapse the bubble. Concrete example of this. Progressive Asian organizations attacked Andrew Yang for his normal Democrat take on the police: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/activists-andrew-yan.... But of course Yang is the overwhelming front runner among actual Asian voters in NYC.

Another example is NYC Pride banning the NYPD from marching in Pride: https://www.gaycitynews.com/nyc-pride-overrules-membership-v...

> Less than a week after Heritage of Pride (HOP), or NYC Pride, announced a ban on police contingents through 2025, the organization’s members voted on May 20 to allow the Gay Officers Action League (GOAL) to march armed and in uniform — but HOP’s executive board subsequently stepped in and set their own policy.

Progressive activists really do believe the things they say. Usually they don’t get their way because it’s a democracy and actual voters don’t support those things.

As to “straw men”—I was rankled last year when my law school faculty declared themselves “gatekeepers of white supremacy” in a school townhall meeting: https://jonathanturley.org/2021/05/27/brandeis-dean-declares.... People told me, “well most liberals don’t think like that.” I suspect that’s true, your average Biden voter doesn’t. But there’s 14-15 elite law schools in the country, and the faculty of at least one of them does think like that.

This activist mindset isn’t widespread, but it’s often concentrated among people who have significant platforms. A lot of faculty, young political staffers, etc., do think like that. It’s not straw-manning to call out that behavior.

Your average Biden voter is either not a leftist or probably voted against Trump. I was with you until that point, because what you're pointing out is that the US is intensely conservative on a national scale, especially compared to Europe. Biden would be center right, at best, in Europe.

Biden would be solidly left on social, cultural, and immigration issues in Europe. E.g. Democrats are freaking out the Supreme Court might uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks (with exceptions for health and fetal abnormalities). But that’s a couple of weeks longer than Germany, France, Denmark, etc. Likewise, France and Germany openly reject multiculturalism, which would be a far right position here in the US. France’s center-left Macron sounds like a U.S. Republican when he complains about “woke American culture.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...

Biden is probably median in terms of economic issues. You have to distinguish between what Biden says he wants and where the U.S. is currently. The US is obviously significantly to the right of Europe on economic issues as a starting point. But Biden’s proposal for a 28% tax rate (closer to 35% factoring in state taxes), or his proposals for major hikes in the capital gains rate, are well to the left of where Western Europe is right now.

Thanks for clarifying this, I have often been suspicious of the claim that Democrats in America would be considered center right in Europe, and you list concrete examples of left-leaning political stances in Europe that would be far right in America.

This is very true and I think people forget that they have the support of almost all mainstream media. This gives the very false impression that they (and their ideologies) represent the majority of the public - but in reality, this is far from true.

Look at ratings for national sports (MLB, NBA especially) lately. This year's Oscars had the worst rating in history. Coca-Cola's sales plummeted after their "woke" employee training was exposed. Same for Disney. Same for Delta. Parents around the country are descending on their local school boards demanding that Critical Race Theory be abolished.

On the opposite end, when the left tried to "cancel" Goya for supporting Trump, it backfired. Sales went through the roof.

These people are a tiny minority of the population made to seem much bigger and more accepted than they really are by media, politicians and (most unfortunately) Universities - which have become Socialist re-education camps.

> So why don't people in those groups speak out against it?

One example: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/11/901398248...

3% of US Latino adults use the term "Latinx". 20% do not use it, and 76% have never heard of it. Anecdotally, in Latin American countries, most people either mock it or have never heard of it.

But this doesn't stop anglophone woke activists from trying to impose this word on Latinos.

I was so surprised at this Latinx controversy because I learned it from a Venezuelan refugee (to the US) about 8 years ago. I didn't hear it from some "woke" white person. It's wild that it turned into a big internet controversy.

The statistics suggest your experience is atypical. It’s not that controversial IMO; it’s just a particularly egregious data point on the list of data points that suggest the woke don’t actually represent the groups they purport to speak for (which is the principal rationale behind their bid for social power), contrary to the impression we’re fed by the media. See also the statistics on black support for abolishing police.

The statistics also suggest that anyone who uses the term, Hispanic or not, is atypical.

Is this in any way surprising? In Latin countries, everyone is used to gendered nouns as that’s a core feature of the language. In Anglo cultures it is not.

Most Latino people are also less "touchy feely" about these subjects. See for example the brouhaha around South American football players like Edison Cavani using words like "negrito" in affectionate terms.

South and Central America have bigger fish to fry than worrying about prudish neovictorian attitudes.

Your not seriously saying that Latin America does' not have racist attitudes and systemic racism?

Maybe you should ask some of the indigenous peoples oh wait the colonizers pretty much wiped them out didn't they

Latin America isn't North America. There were large populations of agrarian peoples used as a workforce by the Spanish. And these people weren't wiped out in most cases. They mixed with the colonizers to varying degrees and are now those you call Latinos. The reason people from the older Hispano-American colonies often look *nothing* like Spaniards and Portuguese people is simply because they're partially or fully indigenous.

North America remained available so late to colonization because the Spanish saw it as worthless as it didn't fit at all with their latifundial industry, precisely because it lacked the population and the farming that could easily be converted over to estates.

> Latin America isn't North America.

A significant part of North America is also Latin America, and vice-versa.

> There were large populations of agrarian peoples used as a workforce by the Spanish.

Therr were large populations of people virtually (and sometime precisely) enslaved by the Spabish as agrarian workforce; they weren’t always specifically agrarian (any more than any other preindustrial population, including the colonizers) before that.

And, yes, through enslavement and other mistreatment, they, and even moreso their pre-conquest identities and cultures, were often wiped out. Sure, there are some remnants and admixture with the colonizers and other imported subject populations; that’s true of the native subjects of genocide in the parts of North America colonized by the British and French, as well.

> ...oh wait the colonizers pretty much wiped them out didn't they

Latinx is a term invented and used by US cultural colonialists, that's both subjugating and xenophobic.

What does the Spanish/Portuguese conquest of Latin America have to do with the use of "Latinx"

Sure, tell me: What does the Spanish/Portuguese conquest of Latin America have to do with the use of "Latinx"? It doesn't help it, it does it. There are different native ethnicities still living and trying to maintain their culture and then US cultural imperialists go put everyone into one bucket and call it a day.

That wasn't the comment I was responding to was it. my comment was about Spanish and Latin Americans in denial about racism and their colonial past

I remember when I first saw latinx, I thought it meant something about a Latin mixer or Latin cross exchange, or cross pollination. I had no idea it was a regex metacharacter for `a` or `o`, essentially latin[ao].

Thank you for finally providing a definition.

Latin[ao] sounds like Spanish slang for "latinized"... I could actually imagine this catching on more than latinx.

It also makes more logical sense.

I don't think changing the language is necessary, but if we're adding regex to English. COUNT ME IN!

Oh dear god no, any random passerby could say something requiring exponential time to parse. :P

Though I'm an American, I speak a little German and have friends who speak Spanish/French/Italian (either natively as they were born in a country that speaks those languages or they learned it). The thing that has always perplexed me about "Latinx" is that the those pushing that formulation are grafting what is a Germanic language construction onto a Latin-based word. It makes no sense, and it's non-pronounceable (or at least difficult to pronounce) in Romance languages.

Latinx came from LGBT Hispanic people. Probably it was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn.

Latine seems to be more popular outside North America. So Latinx is an English word mostly. And I think it became popular in writing before anyone much thought about pronunciation. A bit like Latin@.

>Latinx came from LGBT Hispanic people.

I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language. Do you have a source?

>Probably it was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn.

Which is ... also a Germanic construction. Those words are not pronounceable in Spanish, Italian, or French. Is the idea that you just "imagine" that the word is spelled correctly when you pronounce it and this is just a thing you do when writing it?

> > Latinx came from LGBT Hispanic people.

> I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language.

Children of Hispanic immigrants often feel more comfortable with English than Spanish yet many will still identify as “Hispanic”. So the word is more understandable if you see it as a product of a predominantly Anglophone Hispanic subculture

I thought about that, but the claim was that it came from that community, which is still hard to believe when it's a language construction that is really only common in elite white circles, evidenced by the polling data cited up-thread.

The polling data cited up-thread doesn't even include "elite white circles."

>3% of US Latino adults use the term "Latinx". 20% do not use it, and 76% have never heard of it.

Who is using this term if it is not people who it is ostensibly used to describe? I can venture a guess.

All of these meaningless labels were given to us by the so-called "elites" to keep us distracted... that same distraction is what allows of the continued manufacturing of consent.

I haven't seen it used much, so "a handful of people" is also an option.

But who are "US Latino adults" to begin with? This kind of statistic is based on an egregious confusion between ethnicity and citizenship, familiarity with languages, "communities" and subcultures. Labeling people (particularly other people) is problematic in itself.

"Latinx" is a sophisticated word from and for sophisticated people (such as the mentioned LGBT activists, who are often ready to adopt neutral replacements of masculine and feminine words); its usage should be considered an indicator of such sophistication (do you find it proper or silly?) and social contexts (who would you call "Latinx"? What would they think of you if you did?), all quite orthogonal to people's identity.

Are you using "sophisticated" as another word for "elites"?

Culturally sophisticated, enough to care about such things.

But I suspect there are many people who consider anyone smarter than them "elites" regardless of their actual social standing.

I said Latinx is an English word mostly.

Many Hispanic people are natively bilingual. Many speak English primarily.

Folx sounds like it looks. Womxn sounds like woman or women usually. Latin@ depends on the speaker. Latinx rhymes with Kleenex.

That's a pretty common misconception, but the correct pronunciation of Latinx is (lah-tinks).

It was supposed to rhyme with "thinks" from its inception.

I went to CU-Boulder and a part of the Latinx community, trust me, this is a quite hurtful anglo-ization of our tribe.

I honestly can't tell if you're trolling. "La-tinks" is just as much of an anglo-ization as pronouncing it like "Kleenex". There aren't a lot of cases in Spanish where three consonants are mashed together. Especially not ending with an "s" sound.

In fact, Spanish syllables only end in up to two consonant sounds (nearly always "ns" or "ks"), unlike English which can end in up to four consonant sounds (e.g. "texts").

Texts might end in four consonants in some underlying representation, but does anyone actually pronounce it that way? I think I reduce it to “Tex” unless I make a conscious effort to enunciate.

Yeah that's probably the case - I'm in the same boat (two consonants as in "tex" unless I consciously try to enunciate it in full).

Three consonant endings do get routinely pronounced in full in English though, e.g. "thinks".

I’m still skeptical it came from Hispanic people at all and not some handful of rich white sophomores at a private university, but it doesn’t actually matter because it is used far more frequently by wealthy whites than by any of the victim groups they purport to protect.

> Latinx rhymes with Kleenex.

...which is probably a big reason why it doesn't gain traction. It doesn't make sense as a word in any language. It feels like a foreign object pushed into the language by someone who is obviously out of touch. One could easily come up with something that at least reads and sounds like a word: Latinoa, Latinem, Latines...

Another big reason is that it doesn't solve a problem that most people have. If you look at Urban Dictionary, you see that many "up-and-coming" word creations are solving actual semantic problems, gaining traction organically, from the bottom-up. This is how language changes naturally.

On the other hand, the hypothesis that "generic masculine" forms are harmful is borne out of academia. It is entirely speculative and for practical purposes, unfalsifiable. Most people have to be told that the "moral" position is to comply with such language changes "from the top", for some perceived "greater good". Appropriately, have a word for this: newspeak.

I would claim "womxn" is not pronounceable in many other languages as well. My native language is German and whenever I see this I can't help but wonder how anyone would voluntarily agree with such an unelegant abuse of a word.

I'm not a language elitist or anything, but it's not a secret that language evolves towards easier and quicker pronunciation. And enforcing the opposite for ideological reasons is not just a bad idea, it's also doomed to fail.

>I'm not a language elitist or anything, but it's not a secret that language evolves towards easier and quicker pronunciation.

What I find pretty funny about this whole discussion is that German is a language that seems very tuned to allow for additions of language. Meaning, if you want to "invent" a new word, the German language has a lot of tools to allow you to do that. Which probably explains the root cause here for why "Latinx" exists at all.

Let’s not forget that womxn is actually allegedly transphobic, as Twitch learned the hard way recently.

I always pronounced it as Latinsk, which funny enough is the Danish word for Latin.

As a native speaker of American English, I find Latinx to be either unpronounceable or lacking in an obviously correct pronunciation. Is it La-tinks? Or Latin-exks? The natural English construction of an adjective derived from “latin” that lacks gender would he just “latin”, not “latinx”, as English doesn’t have gendered adjectives in the first place.

(I don’t really understand how “Latina/Latino” came to be used for this purpose to begin with.)

I think it's just more political correctness gone wild. The vast majority of Spanish speakers in America are from Mexico but it somehow became derogatory to refer to them as "Mexican". How is that any different than calling somebody a Puerto Rican or a Brazilian? It simply denotes their place of origin.

>The thing that has always perplexed me about "Latinx" is that the those pushing that formulation are grafting what is a Germanic language construction onto a Latin-based word.

To be fair, English is extremely accustomed to etymological chimeras. A large portion of it is made of Old French, Latin and to a lesser degree Greek stems with English and Norse affixes/suffixes. Which is a perfectly valid way to import words while preserving the overarching grammar.

The problem with Latinx specifically is that it's closer to a regular expression than English.

The large number of people I know who use that term, though, are [that word you will apparently be annoyed that I use ;P] and not white allies or something. Also: I feel like maybe you are mixing up Latino and Hispanic? Someone can be Latino/a and simultaneously Anglophonic. It doesn't surprise me that people who are Hispanic don't care as much or even find the construction annoying, as it doesn't work well in their language... but why, exactly, does that matter?

I'm Peruvian and married to a Colombian and have never heard of this. On the other hand, right across the Hispanic world it's very common to use @ for gender neutrality: nosotr@s, latin@s, etc.

Interesting, how do you pronounce those words with the @ in them?

It's only for written communication. When speaking you either use the gender neutral(male) form, or a conjunction of both. e.g.: "latinos y latinas"

That's so much more elegant!

What's the proper pronunciation for those words?

> I'm Peruvian and married to a Colombian and have never heard of this.

That’s not surprising, since it’s purely a product of “woke” culture in the USA, and the only people who use it are either multiple generations removed from their “ancestral” country, or have degrees in social sciences from Ivy League universities (or both).

That's pretty genius IMO, given how the @ symbol looks a bit like both an 'a' and an 'o'.

I was surprised to see it used on the article itself.

Tons of people DO speak out against it. I'm gay and I never read r/LGBT because it's such a shit-show of radical conformity. r/ainbow was started basically as a revolt against r/LGBT mods, and there are other places like r/gaybros and r/gaymers.

r/LGBT basically got taken over by shitty mods, all they really have going for them at this point is their easily searchable name.

Same here. I was in SF and was "outed" as a centrist. I was labelled a Nazi a few times on Twitter - by people I knew, in real life, within proximity to my friends circle.

I ultimately had to move out of SF as I felt incredibly out of place simply for not being far left. I'm no conservative, and I've seen plenty of hate for being gay from the right. But the last 5 or so years, much of that hate is coming from the far left now.

You see exactly the same thing in ecology/environmental circles.

If you're concerned about climate change and resource constraints but you don't see a problem with migrating or bringing seven billion people up to American consumption and carbon emission standards, I don't know what to tell you.

Neoliberalism has infected every progressive movement and it's disgusting.

Its not that easy to get rid of sticky activists. And it is also not easy to explain "You are not representing my views" without being attacked as either stupid or uninformed. I totally understand that after a few of those experiences, reasonable people just stop to voice their opinions, because the dirt fight is usually not worth it.

I am a member of a minority group (disabled), and I see it very often that activists pull "me" into other activism simply because they are also catering for a minority group. I am expected to support them all, just because I am disabled. This is so weird and patronizing, it killed my remaining sympathy for the left in the last 5 years. I used to vote for the left. Watching the fallout of political activism has made me a non-voter.

"I am expected to support them all,"

This, and the "If you're not with us, you're against us" attitude both disgust me. And I've yet to meet someone like that that didn't cherry pick some "other" group to vilify, making them hypocrites.

But I do wish you'd vote. Please look beyond the left/right politics and vote for someone who you think will do the most good. That said, I fully understand if every single candidate looks like they'll do more harm than good, and you just can't bring yourself to support any of them.

Growing up the goal was to try and treat everyone like equals. Not judge each other on color/etc. Get away from segregation and hate.

Now that viewpoint is consider radical right and will get you all the unpleasant labels.

> But I do wish you'd vote.

The problem is that candidates are becoming more extreme to cater to the more extreme parts of the electorate. That doesn't really moderates a real choice when deciding on whom to vote for.

I was with you until you made it political. I'm a member of a minority group and I'm fed up with wokeness.

People like John McWhorter have described wokeness as a religion. That's a characterization that I agree with, and a religion isn't countered by being a Democrat, Republican, Independent or apolitical.

I found the walk-away movement appealing when it first started. I agreed with the criticisms of the left. But the movement turned into switching uniforms ... walk across the field from the Dem side to the GOP side. It was more political than helpful.

One of McWhorter's suggestions is that more of us need to tell the people in the religion, "no."

> So why don't people in those groups speak out against it?

You are asking why minority groups don't speak against dominantly rich, white and male majority?

>You are asking why minority groups don't speak against dominantly rich, white and male majority?

No. You've lost the train of conversation being developed in the replies.

To paraphrase gp, he was saying : "So why don't people in those [minority] groups speak out against [others in their minority group with extreme views]?"

See that context of minority identity group criticizing their own group from the prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27401731

Generally these activists are 'second tier' who want to usurp the perceived dominant rich white male. So they're usually rich white but female, rich male but Jewish, white male but unsuccessful, etc, who feel they deserve the easy success the rich white male has. They project those feelings of failure onto the marginalized groups they mean to represent.

The minority groups often have totally different values then the activists ( who share the dominant value system and consider themselves and the minorities they represent the losers of that system ).

The gay comedian Andrew Doyle does a good job as https://mobile.twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath

That was all really good. I didn’t have high hopes for humor going but some are fairly clever. Sadly rare.

Most people, unlike the activists, aren’t that politically involved. My parents are immigrants from a Muslim country, and are annoyed that progressive activists like Ilhan Omar have become “the face of Islam in America.” They tuned in long enough to vote for Biden in the primaries when it seemed like a progressive might win the nomination instead, but they’re not going to go out there and stir things up.

The other problem is that the media narrative is controlled by white progressives who amplify the activists. Nobody invites my dad on CNN to express his view that he’s faced remarkably little racism living in America since 1989, most of that time in a red state. Nobody has my mom on TV defending Trump’s law and order stance and complaining why it took Biden so long to condemn rioting. Instead you have talking heads with degrees in cultural studies subjects that my parents wouldn’t even have allowed their kids to major in. FFS, 40% of men voted for Trump. When was the last time you ever saw one on TV?

It’s been nice to see some normies speaking out about this. Zaid Jilani, who grew up as a Pakistani kid in the south, is one example: https://mobile.twitter.com/zaidjilani. Wesley Yang is great, and Matt Yglesias has been willing to broach the subject as well. Every now and then Fareed Zakaria on CNN chimes in with a take, like during last summer when he noted “hey immigrants actually love America and think it’s pretty good.”

But center-left whites people need to defend their turf. The progressive left tries very hard to act like they’re speaking for all “people of color” and draw moral authority from that. They will amplify and retweet a handful of say Asian activists, and because there are so many more white people that really skews the perception of what Asians actually think and want. I think often times center-left white people are too scared of being labeled conservative to push back on that.

> But center-left whites people need to defend their turf.

As a center-right white person who was abandoned by the Republican party years ago, I wish the center-left good luck with that.

My wife insists that I vote, so in national elections, I vote for a moderate in the primary that has zero chance at winning, and then a third party candidate that has zero chance at winning (my state and congressional district vote over 10pts more Democratic than the national average, so no need for strategic voting).

Not arguing with the sentiment, but pushing back on using Reddit as an example. The likelihood of the behavior we see on Reddit being attributable to actual humans or humans acting in good faith/not purposely sowing division is rapidly approaching zero. If they aren't a bot, they're a troll, and not the edgy comment kind. Also, Reddit does have verifiable problems with moderation, specifically little/no oversight of mods and a small handful of mods overseeing the vast bulk of subreddits.

Sounds like a modern version of "false consciousness" which some left wingers were using to explain why some people they thought to be natural allies didn't agree with them.

Heh. I misread that as "false conscientiousness". I've been calling presumptuously speaking for another "white knighting". Your take isn't so generous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness

FWIW, I'm optimistic that it's a generational cohort thing. Plenty of boomer activists know what's best for other people and will selflessly nail themselves up on a cross for your benefit. Why aren't you grateful? Sure, others do it too, but it's somehow different. Feels more like oversteer than preaching.

Am very political. I've witnessed this many times. It's a recognized problem.

The new hotness in activist circles is empowerment, helping people find their own voices, making the space for them to be heard.

Change is painful, slow. But it's happening.

You know... someone told me was looking for someone you can be offended on behalf of to make yourself feel morally superior to other people.

Have you heard that some people call this the white savior complex? Crazy right?

It’s a spin on “false consciousness,” an old Marxist bit that they used to explain why anyone would dare to disagree with them.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be such an ideologue that you have to project on other people.

I believe this is one Yglesias' best writing. Simply because he has captured so vividly the wide gap between activists and the group that they speak for.

The woke left of today remind me so much of the ultra right-wing religious nut jobs of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Morality extremism always leads to a lack of tolerance, suppression of independent thought, and manners of totalitarian BS being imposed on those who don’t want it. It’s always bad.

Mandatory Terry Pratchet:

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

Link appears paywalled

The article says the primary reason people exited is that the memo was seen as shutting down unionization activity.

> these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own

How do statements like this fit HN's guidelines?

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

EDIT: Perhaps the thing to do is to write to the mods at hn@ycombinator.com.

> However, several current and former employees told TechCrunch that they believe Medium’s mass exodus is tied more to Williams’ manifesto, dubbed “the culture memo,”

A perspective.

You chose one of several from the article.

These are related controversies. The opposite of unrelated.

>> However, several current and former employees told TechCrunch that they believe Medium’s mass exodus is tied more to Williams’ manifesto, dubbed “the culture memo,”

I don't understand what that quote represents to you. Do you think the word "culture" necessarily refers to the 'culture war' kind? The word describes many other things, and corporate culture is a long-standing, well-known management concern.

> A perspective.

> You chose one of several from the article.

The effect on union activity seems to me to be by far the predominant reason presented.

I don’t have an opinion on the word culture, the word they chose

I find it congruent that some former/current employees find that memo to be the catalyst, as their perspective matches other catalysts in other companies

I am a cis straight white male, but I do have colleagues who are gay, lesbian, trans, and/or non-white, and all of those who I've spoken to on this topic do not agree with your take here.

It just goes to show you that everyone is different, and there's no such unified thing as "what gay people believe" or "what black people believe". Some like that their employers make business decisions based on the personal ethics of those in leadership positions, and some don't like that. That's just life, I guess.

I appreciate your contribution to this thread

I like your conclusion: it isn't unified. There is a lot of pressure to conform to certain buckets and it also still can be an absurdity to do so.

I just have to laugh when I see "cis" used.

That's like using the term "Black Crow" to describe the vast majority of crows, simply because a "Blue Crow" [1] exists, yet consists of a very tiny fraction of all crows.

Let's say 99% of crows are black. Then there's no need to call them "Black Crows" as there's a very low probability you'll need to point out the color of the crow.

Just say "Crow". Or "male" / "female". No need to throw in "cis" unless you're simply trying to demonstrate your conformity to the new fad of wokeism.

In which case, ya lost me as someone who will take you seriously.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Crow

That's a bit silly, especially given the context.

If I were talking about black crows, in a conversation referring to blue crows, it might be relevant to be specific and say "black crow".

Regardless, why would you dismiss someone's entire opinion based on something so insignificant as that?

"I want to buy a widescreen TV" "You idiot! 99% of TVs are widescreen, let's stop talking now as I can't take you seriously."

Also your stats are wrong. According to the census, it's more like 8-9% of US citizens self-reporting as homosexual/queer [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...

They are trying to realize the politicization of all institutions in service of political revolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_ins...

Also see this article from 1999 when all this was getting started:

https://www.hoover.org/research/why-there-culture-war

Somehow I went all of the aughts and half of the 2010s without noticing

That makes me feel a lot better about the viability of any of this

Can I ignore it if I stop noticing and caring about politics and modern inclusitivity pushes?

I have my doubts but I’m willing to try! Its just other people shoving it in my face that I don't get to inherit American dreams because I’m not a cis white male and keep reminding me, not that I would want to be. Any accomplishment I have must be broadcast! Any setback must be broadcast as well! Doesn't feel like privilege. I dont want to be a role model I just want to blend in and make money and enjoy the same vices as everyone else.

It started even before, I remember most of these discussion being around in the mid nineties.

They're not at all ineffective, they took hold in school and accademia and produced a generation of person deeply sensible to the topic of equity and social issues, which outrage quite easily and can be brought to bear to a wide range of causes from truly important battles to cancelling people for a shirt a friend gifted them.

The delay you see is not because of the technique not being viable, it is because in culture wars you need quite literally to grow your army, as people get entrenched in their ways after a while.

I have to point out that your second source is a conservative think tank, and if you're conservative it generally means that the status quo is in your favor ("you like/are happy with the status quo") and any challenge to it looks like the start of a revolution.

Interesting article, though.

Your assertion isn't true, as was explained to me on HN recently. Conservatism in the US has nothing to do with conservation, it's more synonymous with economic liberalism in Europe: small government, low regulation, wealth makes right.

On a personal note, this war on words has turned me off from most debates because hollow sophistry is deemed a virtue by the loudest voices. Excluded middle, and all that.

> small government, low regulation, wealth makes right

How does this explain their stance on issues like gay marriage, trans rights, abortion, and criminal justice? We really have to stop saying that American conservatives are primarily motivated by small government.

>Conservatism in the US has nothing to do with conservation, it's more synonymous with economic liberalism in Europe

This is a very popular cliché, and while the conclusion might hold, the logic doesn't, in my opinion.

If the US did have true conservatives, then they would be conserving what is in the US, not Europe.

And I think it's widely considered that the existing order in the US has more elements of economic liberalism.

On the other hand, the Republicans who like that sort of thing seem increasingly marginalized anyway, so as I said, the conclusion may still be correct.

Not my concern really, but if you need to comment that someone else used a conservative website as a source for something and that’s “an issue”... you might need more conservative sources in your own reading.

> Not my concern really, but if you need to comment that someone else used a conservative website as a source for something and that’s “an issue”... you might need more conservative sources in your own reading.

The reason I would raise an issue with most conservative “think tanks” as sources for fact claims is that I read, and have for years read, their output extensively. The same is true with center-right (liberal) and progressive think tanks in general (there arr a very few exceptions in each category.)

If you are using them as fact sources, you might need more outlets that aren’t ideological propaganda mills in your own reading.

Hoover Institute is about as high quality intellectual conservatism as it gets. They're part of Stanford University. The institute has been around for more than 100 years.

Yep, via Entryism:

"Entryism (also spelled entrism or enterism or called infiltration) is a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism

This is for every framework (left, right, economical, ecological, etc.)

If the framework gives you direct power over other people, you want the framework applied everywhere: work, private life, politics, etc. The people at the forefront of these frameworks use the rest of the group as a stepping stone to their personal power and the framework to enhance their importance (any other positive and negative effects of the framework aside, those I don't want to judge).

I agree. Except this:

> these "allies" are worse than ... overtly prejudiced/racist people.

I disagree. By my reckoning, there just isn't a comparison, by almost any metric of societal damage. Of course, it doesn't have to be a contest. That's not the important thing.

Its the unpredictability to having their world view challenged that I called out and already clarified. Those are completely related thoughts separated by punctuated. There's no point in trying to find other metrics I didn't specify at all.

Overt racists are dangerous like bears. The danger they present is obvious to anybody with sense and they're not pretending to be anything other than dangerous.

The aforementioned "allies" are dangerous like bear-traps. Ostensibly they exist to deal with the bears. But they lay hidden in the brush ready to take off the foot of anybody who missteps, bear or otherwise. And you probably won't notice one is around until somebody steps on it.

This matches my experience

>The aforementioned "allies" are dangerous like bear-traps. Ostensibly they exist to deal with the bears. But they lay hidden in the brush ready to take off the foot of anybody who missteps, bear or otherwise. And you probably won't notice one is around until somebody steps on it.

This is an apt analogy.

Funny how you neglected to mention the harm non-overt racists cause, and how it's often difficult to detect the danger they present.

I would wager there are more non-overt racists out there than counter-productive allies.

The danger they present is nil until proven otherwise.

> Funny how you neglected to mention the harm non-overt racist [...]

Funny how you're taking this gripe up with me, not the commenters above mine to whom I am responding. I did not set the scope of this branch of conversation, yet you insinuate I am responsible for it. Buzz off.

I guess the prudent thing is to burn all the witches then.

One of the principles of medicine is that the cure should not be worse than the disease.

At some level of activism, the remaining non-overt racists will be less harmful than the obsession to root them out.

Companies already pay a ton of money for sensitivity and diversity trainings that either do not work or even worsen the atmosphere of the workplace. This money could have been used for a better purpose than lining already fat pockets of Robin diAngelo and her peers.

Maybe, but you’d have to back that up with at least an anecdote. I agree with OP and the fact that most racists are extremely poor and rural with no power makes them a downward punch for most people.

>most racists are extremely poor and rural with no power

[[Citation Needed]]

The rural poor have plenty of power on both a federal level (each California House representative is responsible for 65 times as many people as each North Dakota representative; numbers are similar for Wyoming, Montana, and plenty of other rural areas) and state levels (thanks to the magic of gerrymandering.

There are all sorts of racist rich people. I grew up in a well off suburb in Michigan that was significantly more than 90% white (though adjacent to a more diverse larger city) and full of overt racism, to say nothing of the more subtle forms.

> The rural poor have plenty of power on both a federal level (each California House representative is responsible for 65 times as many people as each North Dakota representative; numbers are similar for Wyoming, Montana, and plenty of other rural areas)

So what? This is the result of a compromise established in 1776 to keep states with lower populations from unilaterally deciding to leave the Union when they lack representation. Do you propose ammending the constitution?

I don't think its possible to amend the constitution in such a way as to remove the disproportionate representation of low population states.

Personally I would be happy with making house seats exactly proportionate to actual population and adding one senator for every 5 million residents.

So North Dakota with fewer than 800k people gets 2, Washington State with 7.6M gets 3, California with 39M gets 9. This still gives ND 1 senator per 400k while CA has to settle for one per 4M but this is better than one per 20M.

This is an incorrect understanding of the 1776 compromise.

The original "compromise" is that each State gets at least 1 seat in the House, and equal representation in the Senate (2 seats). That is separate to the 3/5ths "compromise" related to the voting franchise.

The house of representatives was always supposed to grow with the population. This changed in 1929 due to an Act of Congress to limit the total to 435. Unsurprisingly, it was done because a Republican Congress would lose representatives otherwise. [1]

What has happened is that by artificially limiting the size of the House to 435 representatives, areas of greater population density are now under-represented.

In a rough approximation:

1. The House is supposed to represent the people

2. The Senate is supposed to represent the States

3. The POTUS is supposed to represent the nation to other nations.

Due to the now unrepresentative nature of the House, the people are under-represented in that balance.

The fix would be to expand the House membership, effectively by using the minimum size of a seat (eg the smallest State is guaranteed at least 1 seat in the House and seats cannot cross state lines).

That size could be used to determine the number of seats in total.

Based on that, the number of seats would be somewhere around (US population / Wyoming) = (328m/578k) = 567 seats.

You gotta come visit rural Appalachia and see if you still think they have any power.

We have turned our poorest, most vulnerable populations into the enemy. We did it in the 80s/90s with young black men, then in the 2000s with Muslims and we’re doing it again but this time it’s “racists”. Because we have to have an enemy.

This is not a defense of racism, but it is a defense of the people being made into the target.

Targeting groups based on what they innately are is wrong. Targeting them on what they choose to be is reasonable. Racists are not a demographic.

I've spent plenty of time in Appalachia. You can only help people who want to be helped. The Obama administration wanted to retrain coal miners to new.jobs to help them and they (and.the politicians they elect) rejected it out of hand. They've had decades to change and have actively opposed it. This is fundamentally on them at this point, just like a good chunk of the rust belt suffering is because states and people had decades to try to diversify into something other than automobiles and decided not to.

Plenty of racists are well off. It is silly to assume that only the socially marginalized are susceptible to bigotry.

That is incorrect. The source of it may vary but the results are the same.

Educated and well off people might have a superiority complex and they can be both racists and classists. And poor people can be ignorant, even more so when isolated, which is a catalyst for racism.

I agree with the “class” part. And that’s what it always is. Everybody looks down on somebody and that almost always gets conflated with racism.

I agree with GP. The antagonistic "allies" push away neutral people, turning more people against the groups they're supposedly trying to help. Overtly prejudiced people do the opposite, with neutrals seeing them as obviously wrong.

These ostensibly "neutral" people are in fact biased by their lifetime of experience and the way they skew in light of this confrontation is very revealing about exactly how. No one is introduced to the idea of, say, microaggressions, institutionalised racism/misogyny etc. as a neutral bystander. They have a stake in it whether they've acknowledged it already or not. No one is "pushed" away; they choose, informed by their experiences. And if someone is "pushed" towards maintaining a status quo that some of the most marginalised people in the world think is unfair, maybe they should think about why.

> No one is introduced to the idea of, say, microaggressions, institutionalised racism/misogyny etc. as a neutral bystander. They have a stake in it whether they've acknowledged it already or not.

This is part of what I'm talking about, the inability to understand neutral people. It presupposes they already agree with the concept, same as original sin from religion: You need to have already bought in to these concepts before the preaching means anything other than "you're stupid/evil", and the preachers don't understand why the nonbelievers don't like being called stupid/evil.

I concur with the parent comment. A lot of these groups show such a deep religious fervour to their "ideology", that any slight disagreement to them on any topic is not allowed. They will hound you out, suppress your opinion if you don't subscribe to the groupthink.

Twitter is a pain to use because of this behaviour, I wouldn't want the culture in my workplace to be like it.

Not to make a statement on the rest of the thread, but you're using Twitter wrong.

I've never had to deal with shitty people or shitty behaviour on Twitter. How do I do it? The unfollow button. I also don't look at replies to famous or controversial people's tweets.

The problem as I see with Twitter is, if I am following an expert in some field I am interested in, say cryptography. I love their tweets about the subject, papers they share etc. I love their expertise in cryptography but I am not the least bit interested in their political inclinations or social view. When I follow them, I am exposed to all of it though; the only way to escape is to unfollow them but at that point the platform loses value to me.

Also, with the algorithmic field based on likes, even if I am not following someone, someone I follow might like tweets from a new crusade happening and they enter my feed. It seems like there are one or more groups out with their pitchforks on some issue. While I support activism for causes, when the activism is such that it hounds out any divergent viewpoint, it becomes toxic and I would rather not see it.

The thing is, when the social justice left do things that are actively prejudiced against and intentionally hurt the minority groups they claim to be helping, you just don't hear about it because one of their core beliefs is that they're always helping by definition and they have enough power over the mainstream discussion that it's impossible to challenge.

For example, one of the last things the Labour party, who're the more left-wing of our two main parties, did when they had power here in the UK was write a special exemption in anti-discrimination law to deny trans women access to rape and domestic violence services at the request of a feminist lobbying group. (As in this was literally the stated purpose according to the official guidance accompanying the law when it was proposed.) Any discussion of how this happened or the lobbying group behind it was explicitly forbidden in the left-wing and feminist publications and communities with any reach. The press only turned on the Labour-linked lobbying group in late 2019, over a decade after the original law, when they started lobbying the Conservatives over the same anti-trans cause. The discussion of this has been so warped that the established social justice left view on the whole thing is that it shows transphobia is a right-wing thing and proves any attempt to equate the left with them (not just over transphobia, but any attempt to claim they're comparably bad in general) is a dangerous false equivalence.

HN should be a place of justice and sharpening of ideas. Thank you for participating in that.

Allies and racists both exist on a continuum, do they not? A single individual will take actions that are both helpful and harmful in different measures to other people and groups in society.

Some racists are going to be net benefits to society. Their racist views may be limited, unintentional, unexpressed, or any combination of the above. While their works may be helping minority groups directly.

That's just one example of the presented framework breaking, but there are many more permutations. Hopefully this is enough for us to agree that a blanket statement like

> these "allies" are worse than ... overtly prejudiced/racist people.

is, if not inaccurate, so imprecise as to be meaningless.

>Donald Glover is right — I’m sick of white people canceling things on my behalf

>I’m tired of being told to change my views by white people who think they’d make better Black men than me

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-glover-cancel-cu...

I'm so tired of these smug oppressive clowns who claim to represent progressives, the left, minorities, and the oppressed.

There's significant funding and political force at the local, state and federal levels that, if allowed, would "ban" LGBT existence and put Christianity as the U.S. official religion. Along with every other crazy idea you can think of. Luckily, there's funding and work in opposition.

People can be very comfortable sitting on an unbalanced rock, until it tips.

When reason fails, use fear or violence eh?

The US is in a bad state today because people have forgotten how to speak to each other respectfully, they don't agree to disagree, they violently disagree. Fear mongering and labeling will only make things worse.

Both sides need to stop explaining, justifying and funding their bad apples by pointing to the other.

In medical terms, stop tying to cure an infection with another infection of your own.

I'm sorry the current state of the US has nothing whatsoever to do with a breakdown of dialog. Nobody looks at a Lion closing its jaws around an antelope and thinks gee what a failure to communicate there. If only they had talked it out.

40 years ago the right wing decided to build its platform on a combination of white people, Christianity, and conservative social and sexual mores.

This went swimmingly for a while but none is the fastest growing religion, white people are headed to be the largest minority instead of a majority by 2040s, and more liberal perspective on sex is becoming increasingly common.

https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christ...

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-tps...

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-...

To be specific we have gone from half of people believing homosexuality should be accepted to 72% in the last 20 years. White people are slated to become merely the largest minority by 2044, and Christians went from 77% to 65% in 14 years.

If your bread and butter is white people, who have strong feelings about sexual mores and jesus by 2044 you are going to be looking at 10% of the population down from closer to 50% in 1980. Hell leave out the sexual mores and white Christians are sliding from 64% heading towards 25%. The republican party hasn't had anything like an acceptable game with any other group in decades.

They are losing the country because they built their house on sand and they are freaking out about it instead of making a coherent plan half their party is already off the deep end and wont be dragged back.

Agree with everything there. For now Republicans play the demographic hand that they're dealt with today. So do the Democrats in other ways (with all the respect due to African-American voters from Georgia, I think their opinion matters a lot more than that of many other democratic supporters). It's important for both parties' survival to shuffle where the puck actually is on election day, not where it'll be in 2044.

> It's important for both parties' survival to shuffle where the puck actually is on election day, not where it'll be in 2044.

Also consider that many politicians in power (especially at the national level) won't be alive in 2044. It's worth it to the conservative ones to slow the rate of change a bit, even if they know that some changes are inevitable.

"The republican party hasn't had anything like an acceptable game with any other group in decades."

Trump's record with Hispanic voters was actually fairly good, though not great. Many Hispanics do not even consider themselves people of color and Democrats cannot take this fairly huge group for automatically granted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths...

https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2020

Hispanics and Black Vote for Republican Party

2020:32% 12%

2016:28% 8%

2012:27% 6%

2008: 31% 4%

2004: 44% 11%

2000: 35% 9%

1996: 21% 12%

1992: 25% 10%

1988: 30% 11%

1984: 34% 9%

1980: 37% 14%

Trumps record with Hispanics is only average even grading on a curve and life isn't graded on a curve. Objectively 32% is garbage. Trump got only an average of 25% of nonwhite voters and 58% of white voters in 2020.

Once you have as many nonwhite voters as white you need 43% of the non white vote plus 58% of the white vote to win the popular vote.

"The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia."

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

This is the crisis for the republicans not the fake crisis of perpetual riots, BLM, or hordes of brown people crossing the border.

The best republican performance in history with with nonwhite voters was 39% in 1956 and its just not good enough.

> Hispanics and Black Vote for Republican Party

> 2020:32% 12%

> 2016:28% 8%

Am I the only person who sees these two lines as a tremendously stinging rebuke to the Democratic Party and the progressives in particular given what an utterly deplorable individual the incumbent and those who surrounded him were? Sounds like a growth opportunity for the Republicans more than a crisis, which speaks volumes about how the progressive message is being perceived among minorities they are claiming to be helping.

While you are hopefully grasping at 2 data points as if they were a trend their portion of the black vote has been almost exclusively exploring the territory between 8 and 14% for 40 while Hispanic vote has been mostly exploring the 25-35 territory with the exception of one glorious trip north of 40 in GW Bush's second term.

This isn't a stinging rebuke of the progressive agenda its just an example of a certain percentage either buying what Trump or Republicans are selling or prioritizing conservative values like sexual or reproductive issues over other concerns. It was and is inevitable.

The thought process that if an odious man like Trump can garner 32%/12% then a more reasonable person could do better isn't I think correct.

Half of the grand old party has gone off the deep end. A more reasonable person will never make it through the primary in the first place because the crazies wont let it happen and if they did then for every thinking mans vote they obtained they would lose 2 crazy. Take a look at Donald Trump you are looking at peak Republican. If you wanted to make a monument to Republican presidents you could start the tour with Lincoln and end with Trump because he is either the last Republican president or the father of the first dictatorship.

"Reasonable" doesn't have anything to do with it. The thought process is that a smarter but equally deplorable candidate would be able to able to tailor and segregate their messaging so that each subgroup hears what they want to hear, uniting both the center and the far right to secure the presidency. Trump was only good at telling the crazies what they wanted to hear because he wasn't that smart; a skilled politician is good at telling everybody what they want to hear.

Much as I would be happy about the end of the Republican party, thinking that they're finished or don't know what they need to do to win again is fantasy. The Democrats need to distance themselves from antagonistic progressiveism that is driving voters into the arms of the Republicans immediately or they stand a pretty good chance of losing future elections. That is what the minority voting numbers of 2020 show.

> When reason fails, use fear or violence eh?

I assume you mean to ask this rhetorically, as if the notion is absurd. But this is pretty much the gist of the paradox of tolerance. What would you suggest doing about intolerant people when reason fails?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Note: the Paradox of Tolerance only applies in a "naive" (first-order) consequentialist framework. In a virtue ethics framework, the answer to "what should be done about intolerant people" is "tolerance" because tolerance is an inherent good regardless of outcomes.

However, I also think to a first approximation, virtue ethics has better consequentialist outcomes than naive consequentialist ethics does.

So I don't have an answer to the PoT; I just don't think it's a slam-dunk argument against tolerance at all. I espouse tolerance first and foremost for the sake of its ideal, and I hold that ideal because I prefer its generalized outcomes.

In other words, I can't help but notice that the Paradox of Tolerance is largely used as a tool to justify plain intolerance.

Eh, I'm going to have to vehemently disagree with anyone suggesting that Germany banning Nazis wasn't a good idea.

Eh, I actually think Germany banning Nazis was a good idea in hindsight, but there's some special context there. :P Specifically, looking at Germany, I don't think it's a Paradox of Tolerance situation because we've seen over decades of experience that the Nazi ban is not being broadened or overapplied. And there's no need for it, because the actual Nazis remarkably seem to be unable to help themselves, even given the very specific and limited ban we're running. So I'm going to explicitly carve out an exception for the Nazi ban in my otherwise liberal ideology - on consequentialist grounds, since as far as free speech restrictions go this one seems to be operating productively even within its sharply curtailed limits. In other words, it selects Nazis and approximately nobody else. If more limitations of free speech had the character of §86, I'd be a lot more on board with the concept.

In other words, the Nazi ban is one case where the dialog went like this:

"Come on, this is pointless, they can just use other symbols and dogwhistles. You'll fall into an escalating spiral of swatting down new Nazi symbols, negatively affecting pretty much everyone but Nazis."

"Yeah but look, we won't fall into an escalating spiral of free speech restrictions. Because they won't change their symbols, ever."

And they were right. I don't entirely understand why, but clearly they were right. My standing theory is that Nazis are either really dumb or in some sort of symbiotic relation with the constitutional protection office where going to jail is actually their goal. Works for me.

Tl;dr: my rule-consequentialist ethics don't have a problem with "liberalism, except where Nazi paraphernalia and holocaust denial", since those modifications have clearly demonstrated their worth and limited character.

> it selects Nazis and approximately nobody else

You are seriously suggesting that "nobody else" is ever going to attempt what the Nazis did, ever? We've got billions of years until the sun makes Earth uninhabitable. History clearly shows us these things are cyclical. Also, your point about symbols is wrong, they are constantly looking for new dogwhistles and using them.

It seems like you're either lost in the weeds or have some obtuse agenda. This 'intellectual' sophistry is meaningless to 99% of your fellow humans. I don't see how anything you've said negates the paradox of tolerance-- there is a line to be drawn or fascists win, it's that simple to me and I cannot imagine an argument that would convince me otherwise.

Tolerance vs intolerance is a false dichotomy. Our actions can be viewed as points on a 2-dimensional axis between the two. Is showing discomfort with another's overly racist ideas tolerant or intolerant? What about asking questions about why someone made a casual offhand comment? Refusing to participate in a group blackface costume for Halloween? Are these tolerant or intolerant actions?

No one is claiming that it’s not a continuum. Even the Wikipedia summary of the paradox of intolerance refers to societies that are tolerant without limit.

This, to me, is a straw man

The PoI could equally apply to any conspiracy: Shadowy Jewish bank cartels, the gay agenda, prism and the deep state.

The issue at hand is that the evidence is picked at contextual extremes, and then extrapolated.

You need way more verification that the intolerant have the power you think they have; there is v often a silent majority that would step in if things escalated.

> When reason fails

And what "reason" might that be and how did it fail? :-)

You cannot reason with people who are taught since birth to be unreasonable and simply believe. Go to any sort of forum with people of these crazy positions, try to reason with them, it is impossible. You can't dispel it, it doesn't matter if you are the most patient and we'll explained person in the world - you cannot overcome belief. These groups are intentionally malicious, they fabricate information, group together to spread that disinformation, and use the democratic system against itself to advocate for the times of lord's and surfs.

Just this week the local school cancelled a vaccination clinic because people believe covid isn't real and that the vaccine is there to put chips in you. That "the lord Jesus" is their immune system. These people will change the law from underneath you if you let them. They don't care about the truth.

Outside of the covid chip comment, which is a specific example, everything you wrote applies to yourself and others who agree with you as well. When you're trying to convince someone to take the vaccine who says they don't want to because covid isn't a threat, they don't see you as an enlightened mind backed by science who wants to save lives like you see yourself, they see you as an arrogant sheep brainwashed by the media who doesn't understand statistics and relative risks. Since you clearly don't understand their perspective, it is no wonder that you can't convince them to listen to yours.

Try listening to people you want to convince before trying to convince them. This approach doesn't have a 100% success rate, but it has a higher chance of success than your current approach has. The catch is you have to be open for them to convince you that your closely held beliefs are wrong. If you're not, and you dismiss everything they say out-of-hand, how can you expect them to be open to your ideas?

If they were interested in the truth it's not hard to find. They don't want that, and believe "facts" are false because they believe it so. Not because they have any actual knowledge.

They cannot be convinced despite a plethora of opportunities given, not due to a lack of them. That's how I know quite well that they don't care about the truth. If you were to argue with these people you'd be eaten alive, as would anyone else.

This isn't chess, they make up the rules and knock over the pieces as they go. Again, no care for the truth. You cannot change that. The only thing we can do is outnumber them.

Something like 80%+ of Americans support LGBT rights and people who identify as religious (in general) is rapidly dropping.

Your religious right may have been a real national force in 1980, but not now. It’s just a boogie man.

Repeated - and, sadly, successful - attempts to deny the right to abortion shows the religious wackos are at least a state-level force that can’t be ignored.

Abortion is not an LGBT issue and anti-abortion types are not exclusively religious. The split between anti-abortion and pro-abortion is almost 50/50 in the US and 50% of America are not fundamentalist Christians.

There are no arguments against early abortion that wouldn’t be either religiously motivated, or based on non- religious logical fallacy. From what I’ve seen on American media, almost all of it is religiously motivated. It doesn’t matter that fundamentalists don’t identify themselves as fundamentalist.

Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s a logical fallacy or religiously motivated. Get out of your bubble and talk to people and you’ll learn things!

I did. That’s how I know the reasoning behind this is false. “Life from conception” is no different from flat earthism.

> There are no arguments against early abortion that wouldn’t be either religiously motivated, or based on non- religious logical fallacy.

This is only true if you expand “religious” to mean “based on moral axioms regardless of source”, but then, any argument for or against doing (or allowing, or prohibiting) anything would be religious.

> From what I’ve seen on American media, almost all of it is religiously motivated.

OTOH, yes, the American anti-abortion movement is almost entirely a product of politically weaponized Christian conservatism.

> It doesn’t matter that fundamentalists don’t identify themselves as fundamentalist.

While the religious groups involve overlap with Fundamentalism (which is a particular subset of Protestantism), they aren’t all Fundamentalist.

Based on moral axioms, abortion is human right. Unless your moral axioms are fundamentally flawed, which is what I’ve described above.

> Based on moral axioms, abortion is human right

Based on the moral axioms you’ve chosen. Axioms are, by definition, unsupported and unsupportable.

> Unless your moral axioms are fundamentally flawed, which is what I’ve described above.

No, what you described above was belief that was “religiously motivated, or based on non- religious logical fallacy.” Axioms are the roots from which logic works, they aren't based on logic, fallacious or otherwise. And there's no reason moral axioms that conflict with abortion need to be religiously motivated, either.

Sure, you might view any moral axioms thst disagree with yours as “fundamentally flawed”, but that doesn’t salvage your earlier description.

I think the fundamental argument against early abortion is itself not religiously based. That argument goes like:

1. There is a secondary organism (life) within the womb upon conception.

2. That life will become a human being. Therefore:

3. That life must be given the same rights to not be killed that other (fully grown) human beings have.

Where is the religion or logical fallacy in that line of thought?

We even see aspects of this logic applied within common law, in that a pregnant woman (regardless of the length of pregnancy) that is murdered is considered a double-homicide.

I think it's unhelpful to approach a highly-contentious subject with the thought that the people on one side have absolutely no logical reason for believing what they do. I say logical, because the implication that something is religious is a way in modern rhetoric to defuse the opposing view by implying that the person holding it is not approaching from any sort of empirical worldview, but instead only deriving their argument from some ancient document of (whichever) religion.

This is all based on assumption you can force someone to “donate”, or partially sacrifice, their body for whatever reason. And this assumption comes from a fundamentally misogynistic interpretation of religion.

This is hyperbole. There is a First Amendment standing in the way of making Christianity an official religion. I am conservative and follow political forums. Conservatives may oppose gay marriage but do not seek to re-criminalize homosexual relations.

The fact that they were able to deny gay marriage proves the First Amandment pretty worthless.

What political force? There is no mainstream political interest in America targeted towards banning homosexuality.

> self-proclaimed far left extremists

As someone who is far-left (and not cis-white), virtually none of us proclaim ourselves extremists. Progressives, yes, perhaps even militant around organizing around a cause, but I fail to see how this part of your comment can be read as anything other than political straw-man flamebait.

> but obviously (to almost everyone) these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own

In this narrative, the CEO is playing the role of far-left extremist? I'm confused, please clarify.

no, the people that left the company over not being able to talk politics typically would be more sympathetic to far left extremist ideas, because politics at work is one.

Apologies, I still can't figure out which side you're on or why you're upset.

- obviously (to almost everyone) these are unfalsifiable standards that self-proclaimed far left extremists have created to invalidate everyone's thoughts but their own

The current state of social discourse is essentially landmines in the form of Kafkatraps[1]. Once there's any form of discussion on an unfalsifiable topic, it provides the leftist with a false sense of justification, simply because it was discussed...even if the leftist's reasoning made no sense and they lost the debate. Then they use the false justification to trick low-intelligence people into believing it's actually justified.

This has led us into a race towards the bottom within society, catering to the loudest complainer in the room. Crabs in a bucket.

Seems like the only real way to counter these unfalsifiable arguments is to call the person a fucking clown and tell them what a kafkatrap is.

[1] https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/editorials/wendy-m...

Thank you! I now know what this phenomenon is called. I went through "diversity training" when I worked at a university, and was appalled at the presentation. The Kafkatrap was _exactly_ the trick used throughout the entire "Q&A". It was so insidious, bit I didn't have a name for it -- now I do.

It kind of blew my mind when I first heard of the term last year. The comment thread of my source article is really interesting as well.

It's one of those concepts that everyone understands, but there wasn't really a word for. It still kind of hurts by brain how no one can come up with a solid rebuttal to the situation (this is what the article's comment thread touches on). Which leads me to believe this is somewhat of a forefront in human understanding/psychology.

I've been calling people who spread these kafkatrap things out for exactly what they are. People completely out of touch with how logic or reason works. Of course, they aren't interested in that, since logic is "the Master's Tools" of oppression.

Well, you know what no self respecting sjw should be interested in programming digital technology. /s Since it's all ones and zeros it's all binary, but they live in a non binary world, there are no men and women, a world of subtleties, everything is done in a shade of oppression and power. Only the level is different, you can be violent with words, express microaggressions or even nanoagression. You are the most privileged with the least amounts of pigmentation, albinos are at the height of it so it seems. Someone give these people a Nobel price ASAP.

> it provides the leftist

It's no different than the far-right unfalsifiable standards that were enforced for centuries, more often than not with religious overtones. Let's not pretend this is a left/right thing, so much as it's just an extremist thing. Only now, the leftist is using the outrage tactic just as effectively as the right, which has lost a lot of its moral high ground on most social issues.

Agreed and I dislike how these conversations just embolden people to invite us into their right wing filter bubble after they see our dissatisfaction with left wing filter bubbles

For now I’m satisfied with the reversion to the mean of not talking politics at work

I kind of agree with this—one of my main criticisms of left-wing ideology is that it so closely resembles right-wing ideology, and it certainly seems to push a lot of people toward the right wing. In particular the intense left-wing pressure to suppress any frank, unscripted conversations about race leaves a lot of “ideologically vulnerable” people with nowhere to turn with respect to their questions than the welcoming embrace of right wing folks, which unsurprisingly swells their ranks. All of this intense left-wing bad behavior similarly gives right wing folks a sense of moral license to behave badly as well (for just one example, think of how the media and other prominent voices profusely excused and justified BLM riots all summer long and the precedent that probably set for the 1/6 riot).

“Reversion to the mean” is probably a good thing insofar as it means “moderating ourselves”.

> It's no different than the far-right unfalsifiable standards that were enforced for centuries

Not sure what you mean. Examples?

I wouldn't say it's an extremist thing, considering the Kafkatrap setup tactic is being actively used by people with different degrees of leftness. It applies to any topic where one person/group claims/claimed to be a victim in any way/shape/form. My source article explains in detail.

A number of examples come to mind, but the most prominent is the Red Scare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

Not probably your point, but I’ve always found comparisons between the present moral panic and the Red Scare to be interesting. Notably, the extreme measures and intense paranoia of the Red Scare took place against the backdrop of a credible existential threat—global thermonuclear war. We now have the benefit of hindsight, but it wasn’t clear to people at the time that the situation would stabilize, which is to say their extreme measures make some amount of sense (I can sympathize with abandoning lofty liberal ideals in such a moment). On the other hand, the current moral panic has no similar justification—it’s a naked power grab by a group of ideological authoritarians who can’t even be bothered to pretend to act in accordance with their own stated beliefs. Neither the RS nor the present panic are rightful, but one is at least sorta understandable.

That really all depends on your definition of what constitutes a credible threat. I'm sure any activist would say that continued police brutality against minorities, widespread and increasing hate crimes, etc. represent a credible threat to affected populations.

We can argue about how genuine / common these threats really are, but at the end of the day I think it's fair to say at the absolute minimum that activists genuinely believe they are threats.

While those things are bad, I think we can agree that there is a difference between global thermonuclear warfare and police brutality and hate crimes. At the very least, GTNW is a literal existential threat for every person, while brutality and hate have been pretty normal in human history and liberalism is the antidote (indeed, the rich American liberal tradition is what makes hate and brutality seem so shocking)—giving up liberalism in the name of combatting hate is inappropriate, and IMO very likely the thing which drives up hate crimes in the first place (left wing behavior pushes many people to the right and sets up illiberal precedents for them to follow).

Of course - there was never a real danger of a global thermonuclear war. Police brutality, on the other hand, is real.

That’s hindsight.

>there was never a real danger of a global thermonuclear war

This seems like an odd thing to say. Is it meant as sarcasm?

Everyone has heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I won't say anything about that.

But have you heard of the Sino-Soviet crisis of 1969? Allegedly (I'm neither a historian nor any other kind of authority on it) the USSR was going to launch nuclear missiles at China during a border dispute, and asked the Nixon administration to remain neutral.

Instead, Kissinger replied that the US would nuke hundreds of Russian cities in response.

This story appears to be reflective of the official Chinese Communist Party historical account.

https://www.scmp.com/article/714064/nixon-intervention-saved...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict

What I’ve really meant is: there was never a real danger of a global thermonuclear war, unless started by US. The example above demonstrates this nicely.

The example above is a counterexample, where the USSR threatened to initiate.

Not from the description above - it says USSR wanted to use nukes in a local conflict; it's the US that threatened to make it global.

It doesn't say anything about the entire globe, just Russia.

You may be mistakenly equating nuking of hundreds of cities with planetary destruction.

There were hundreds of atmospheric nuclear weapon tests during the cold war. If that had been the end of the world, we wouldn't be talking about it.

The Red Scare began in the 1920s, long before nuclear weapons were invented, so the threat of nuclear war was not the primary determinant factor characterizing that situation

Quick question, without checking the numbers, about how many black people do you think were killed by police last year and how many of them were unarmed? I'm interested in knowing what you think the numbers are in reference to them possibly being a credible threat.

You mean the first red scare or the one we had for the last four years because it “hurt Trump” to make all manner of connections to Russia?

Eric Raymond and Wendy McElroy are not thought leaders I'd turn to, and naming something doesn't make it true or turn it into an effective rhetorical device.

There's a wide spectrum of human behavior and responses to these issues, and this takes a tiny sliver of that and tries to pain the rest with the same broad stroke.

> Examples?

In just the last few decades? We have immigration, women's propriety and reproductive rights, civil rights, and the LGBT movement to name a few. The outrage comes mostly from one side, which has their own arsenal of rhetorical devices to paint opposition as morally bankrupt reprobates. Support same-sex marriage? Closeted gay or un-Christian heathen, destroyer of families. Won't pledge allegiance to the flag? Must be a commie. Women deserve equal pay? What a beta simp.

Both sides do and say stupid shit in their own stupid ways.

> Both sides do and say stupid shit in their own stupid ways.

The sad and hilarious thing is that both sides are often wrong in what they advocate, but often right in their criticism of the other side. It's probably easier to recognise bullshit in others (than in oneself and) than to get stuff right oneself.

Since the "Kafka trap" thing isn't something he advocates but something he criticizes his opponents for using, I'd start from the assumption that it's among the (increasingly rare) things ESR is right on.

People are great at giving advice to others, while failing to do the same for themselves.

> things ESR is right on

Except he's not. The entire existence of "kafkatrap" is to paint an enemy and argument that doesn't exist, taking some random train of thought to it's logical extreme. Considering his bigoted comments on women, Islam, and African American's, I have very little confidence that he's coming from a good place.

Yeah. Tbh it reminds me very much of the classic LBJ quote "let's make him deny it".

Exactly. I identify as strict antifascist and leftist, but cannot understand why the extremist social justice warriors are identified as leftist. Eg there was this citation by them

> creates a “not safe work environment.”

On the contrary, calling for censorship and heated nonscientific, political discussion on the workplace, esp. against conservatives, creates a non safe work environment. It also cripples science.

Formerly they were called out as religious zealots, not leftists.

Exactly... wanted to say this... I don't subscribe to the left vs right dichotomy to begin with, but "kafkatrapping" is a tactic used by both sides. When I was reading the link, I was reminded of a ex-colleague, who thought my transition was wrong because it is pandering to the inherent evil in me. Ah...

> Seems like the only real way to counter these unfalsifiable arguments is to call the person a fucking clown and tell them what a kafkatrap is.

I think a better strategy is to avoid engaging them in the first place.

This may be would be effective, but this is also the same as "deplatforming" tactic that they use. If you're the kind of person who wants to defend the spirit of rational, open debate, isn't refusing to engage someone a tactic that on itself contradicts those views?

Do you engage all the BS at work, or do you let it burn itself? Whatever arguments you have need time to become more constructive, neutral and obvious. Arguments back and forth is fruitless and depleting.

> Then they use the false justification to trick low-intelligence people into believing it's actually justified.

I don't agree with this. Anyone who has been following politics has noticed the growth in the left's base, mainly from the college educated. A lot of these activists seem to be motivated by the (ironically) paternalistic notion that they know better than the groups they advocate for.

I see quite a few unsubstantiated claims like this being thrown around in this thread. Can you help by clarifying 1) which activists? 2) which groups to which they do not belong are they speaking on behalf of? 3) in what way do they think they know better? 4) who among these groups has spoken out against what activists say? and 5) what gives you the impression that the activists have not consulted with the groups they represent (if they are not themselves members of the group)?

1) the woke ones. 2) see the comment up thread about the disabled person expected to to fall in line because they’re part of a minority group. 3) see kafkatrap. 4) unsure what you’re asking. 5) see latinx conversation up thread.

What triggered my comment was episode 225 of Rationally Speaking[1]. In it, there was an interview with Veena Dubal[2] where she (according to the podcast) is a prominent advocate for AB5 [3]. In it, she concedes that taxi drivers themselves have been polled[4] and _do not_ want be classified as employees and want to maintain their independent contractor status.

So in answer to your bullet points:

1) Veena Dubal

2) Uber drivers (I mean, I could be mistaken. Perhaps this professor of law moonlights as an Uber driver. If so, I would continue to argue that this is not her main vocation.)

3) She wants Uber drivers to be classified as employees

4) The majority of Uber drivers

5) Nothing and I never said they hadn't consulted. In this case, quite clearly they have consulted with the groups but have not listened.

Now, in the podcast, Dubal goes on to dispute the polling methodology of the various polls. Well okay, re-poll with your questions and present the data. The point I'm trying to make is that you don't ram through legislation before convincing the people you're going to affect the most that it's good for them. Educate and convince them first.

[1]: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/255-are-uber-and-lyft-d...

[2]: https://www.uchastings.edu/people/veena-dubal/

[3]: https://www.investopedia.com/california-assembly-bill-5-ab5-...

[4]: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/513506-uber-poll-drive...

low-intelligence people

mainly from the college educated

What would you call going $200,000 into debt for a non-STEM degree?

College education is no sign of intelligence, it’s often the opposite.

Gotta agree here. Only Americans think University and brains are directly correlated.

Absolutely untrue, seen that all over Europe as well.

College education, including a fair amount of STEM, is an admission fee to be considered middle-class (or higher, depending on which school you went to). Nothing more. What you actually learn in college is 100% secondary to being able to say that you went to school X (and have the connections from that school).

You're assuming that intelligent and college-educated are near-synonyms. I've seen plenty of evidence that's not necessarily true.

Is this evidence you speak of your own personal and subjective experience or is it peer-reviewed studies? If it is of the latter kind, could you provide some citations for me to peruse?

Yes, it is the peer-reviewed studies, and in particular their quality, that I'm speaking of.

Are you certain that you are qualified to judge the quality of peer-reviewed studies? In either case, that isn't what I was asking about and you know it.

Why wouldn't they be qualified? Are they perhaps not college-educated... And therefore not intelligent enough?

why do people always link the worst possible site to cite the kafkatrap? it's literally a conspiracy theory site encouraging a prosecution of Fauci on the front page.

It confims existing beliefs so it doesn't really get scrutinized.

I thought the same thing. It's unfortunate because the linked article is fine but I can't share it because of all of the other wacky nonsense.

Nobody believes this; your comment is embarrassing.

embarrassing to who if nobody believes it

Basically no one is "cis", because people are just born the sex they are and don't "identify" with it, or agree with all the outdated stereotypes placed on their sex. Men and women aren't a subset of their sex.

so the reason I use that adjective is because it only has upside. It is effortless, harmless, actually briefly conveys a much longer abstract message which is the purpose of language, and helps otherwise marginalized people feel included and stay productive.

it doesn’t matter to me that 99% of people already match that adjective which wasn't previously known or necessary

I don't "identify" as "cis". I think of myself as normal, pretty much like everyone else. But when I need a word to describe myself as "not trans"... There isn't one, until "cis" came along.

So yes, I'm "cis". I don't like the word, and I probably would not have managed to come up with it on my own. But "straight" doesn't describe the situation and "not trans" is inherently negative, where no negativity is desired.

I'll fully agree that I don't follow a lot of the stereotypes for my gender, but there are a lot I do follow, too. Nobody is 100% stereotypical. And Cis- and trans-gender isn't even about that. It's about how you feel and who you feel you are, not about following stereotypes.

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