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Comment by vegetablepotpie | Hacker News Reader

Articles like this push a narrative of woke social justice warriors ruining society by ignoring customs and norms. Certainly there are exploitationists who gravitate to any movement to attain power. However, everyone who tries to affect change in bureaucratic organizations knows that the worst things are not the word ‘no’ but complete silence. Customs and norms allow institutions an excuse continue the status quo without thinking too hard about it.

The real story here is that institutions have gained so much power in society such that they have eclipsed every function in daily human life. The people who lead them have arbitrary and capricious control over prices, investment, transportation, and justice. The way people have responded to this is just part of the story. I want journalists to report on the whole story.

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> However, everyone who tries to affect change in bureaucratic organizations knows that the worst things are not the word ‘no’ but complete silence.

Sounds like the issue is the bureaucratic organizations, not the people who choose to be silent about certain issues/topics.

I explained that badly. The people who compose bureaucratic institutions are silent. Going neutral, not taking a stance, no comments, are the safe moves, and produce no change either good or bad. Depriving institutions of neutrality is a way to erode their power. This is a tool activists have.

>The real story here is that institutions have gained so much power in society such that they have eclipsed every function in daily human life. The people who lead them have arbitrary and capricious control over prices, investment, transportation, and justice. The way people have responded to this is just part of the story. I want journalists to report on the whole story.

Very true. The question is not why left-wing college grads can wield arbitrary personal power based on some job they got at a prestigious private institution. The question is why jobs at prestigious but still ultimately private, undemocratic, unaccountable institutions have so much arbitrary power in the first place.

And IMHO the answer to that involves a lot of talk about how stupid, untrustworthy, self-serving, racist, corrupt, etc the actual voting public supposedly is.

> And IMHO the answer to that involves a lot of talk about how stupid, untrustworthy, self-serving, racist, corrupt, etc the actual voting public supposedly is.

And said as though the left-wing college grads are completely immune to being stupid, untrustworthy, self-serving, racist, corrupt, etc. (OK, they may be less racist. It's a start. The rest still applies, though.)

No, left-wing college graduates are not less racist. I can assure you of that from direct, first-hand experience. They just think that, being college graduates (particularly from humanities fields, not like your smelly racist STEM worker-bee degree, you're just a servant while they're a master), they get to redefine what racism means. If you are a racial or ethnic minority, prepare for these motherfuckers to re-narrate your entire history and identity to you as a just-so story to explain the stance the Third World Liberation Front or whoever took on you in 1968, that then got institutionalized into the humanities courses these people took, which were then brought out into street militancy from 2014-2020.

> If you are a racial or ethnic minority, prepare for these motherfuckers to re-narrate your entire history and identity to you as a just-so story

That hit painfully close to home. I once said I liked the speech George Bush gave about Islam after 9/11–based on being a brown guy after 9/11–and was confronted by a white woman who told me I should “educate” myself on how “Islamophobia had damaged Black and brown people in America.” (She was, of course, “too tired” to educate me herself.)

But not too tired to confront you. And not to tired to be condescending or smugly superior.

I like to think I'm a good driver, but sometimes I am (let us say) rather relaxed about strictly following the stripes on the road. My wife sometimes says how tiring it is trying to keep the car on the road when you don't have a steering wheel. Well, people like this lady you ran into must find it exhausting trying to keep the culture on the path of righteousness when all they have is nagging.

For a job, the scope of responsibility should match the scope of authority, or it's very frustrating. The scope of their authority very much does not match the scope of their self-appointed responsibility. One would wish that the frustration would lead them to question whether they really should take on that self-appointed responsibility, but many won't...

The concept that there exist "brown people" (read: MENA or South Asians, I'm guessing?) who aren't Muslim and have serious concerns about political Islamism is gonna blow that lady's fucking mind.

Like, guess who really hates Daesh/ISIS? Middle Easterners. You haven't seen someone hate ISIS until you've seen Syrian refugees hate ISIS.

>Articles like this push a narrative of woke social justice warriors ruining society by ignoring customs and norms

I'm not sure this characterization is correct. Their argument is much more about the SJW groups pushing new erosive and pernicious norms instead.

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