Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

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Since Stanford has not said anything about why they're doing this that makes any sense, I am going to throw an idea out there:

I think this all dates back to the end of Halloween in the Castro[1]. This was back in 2006. S.F used to throw a huge awesome LGBTQ themed party and then some gang members decided to attend. Gang members being gang members, one threw a bottle at another and 9 people got shot. They shut the whole thing down that 10s of thousands enjoyed hugely because of that one incident.

I'm thinking that the extreme overreaction was because if this incident had started a rift between any group that was not a white supremacist or Christian group and LGBTQ+ this would have been catastrophic for intersectionalism. So they had to shut it all down. The suspects were never arrested or described any more in news articles than being associated with at least one gang.

Thus, I think the end of fun is to prevent any incident between the great mass of intersectionalist factions that don't like each other, or have irreconcilable differences in real life and must exist in carefully managed online spaces and social interactions in structured environments in order to present as part of a unified woke coalition. The contradictions are so great between all these groups that more and more rules must be added on top of rules to keep all the conflict from escaping out and piercing the image of a bland unified morally righteous whole.

[1]https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/halloween-castro-histor...

It would be much easier to communicate if we removed words like “intersectional” and “woke” from our vocabulary.

SF doesn’t want to enforce laws and fun things are less possible when violent idiots attend.

There’s a demographic skew when it comes to violent idiots and people with more virtue signaling than sense are trying to turn “violent idiot” into a protected class and strangely start celebrating many of them.

So we can’t have nice things that attract people who tend to hurt others.

The new problem is "hurt others" has been expanded to include microaggressions and other trivial differences of opinion between groups. In order to hold all these groups together in a unified whole, they have to eliminate all uncontrolled "fun" situations where differences could break out into the open in an uncontrolled fashion and cause a huge PR disaster, or worse a rift between groups that have very little in common with each other and are only held together by the thinnest of intersectionalist bonds.

BTW, for all you downvoters. How is closing down the Stanford outdoor hiking club not proof of this kind of thing? You have hikers and they are accused of violating some sort of diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice protocol. It's because there's some other group that has some sort of grievance with people hiking and in order to prevent conflict they have to layer on more rules and bureaucracy to keep all the grievance energy from crating a big dust up, scandal, someone suing the school, etc. They have created all these mobs of enraged activists marching around everywhere looking for someone to enrage them so they can feel validated. The school, to defend themselves creates more rules, more bureaucracy, less controversial fun, etc. Banning Halloween in the Castro was just the kickoff event to the long downhill slide since then.

It’s getting to the point where we need to intentionally design people’s young lives to include some actual strife to reset their suffering metric so that someone being slightly unkind stops being treated like battery.

In other words the whole “right of passage” where you’d dump a young teenager in the woods with a knife and a fishing pole and tell them “good luck” needs a modern equivalent.

Human beings seem to have a sort of suffering constant where it doesn’t matter how awful or easy your life is, you find about the same amount to suffer from regardless if you’re a billionaire or an orphan foraging in a garbage dump. People with really comfortable lives are finding troubling things to suffer from and it needs to be addressed and soon.

I’ve been saying that we need some sort of walkabout for while now. Turning 18 is a terrible proxy for adulthood, especially in a world where we continue to infantilize and arrest the development of young folks by further sheltering them.

We need a better proxy for maturity to do things like vote than just how many years you’ve existed.

I didn't realize that knives and fishing poles and access to the woods were things that were unavailable to the general public.

Its a bit tricky in Gronland for example. ;-)

Depends. Oslo or Agder? But even then I can't imagine you can't find at least a fishing pole and a knife in Oslo.

Might as well throw ((( ))) around "they" because it's clearly gone far beyond any actual group in society, but instead some sort of masterful controller of things and social movements... the administrators of stanford don't control "wokeness"

James Lindsay goes into the history and mechanics of woke starting with Herbert Markusa and the start of the new left in the 60s. It's a long long back story. If you want to get deep in the weeds as he goes line by line through all the founding works of the new left you can listen to his excellent "New Discourses" podcast. Thousands upon thousands of professional activists have been trained in these teachings, done PHD theses on these subjects and infiltrated vast networks of charitable foundations and higher education in their so-called "long march through the institutions" to spread the woke ideology and create generations of ready-made grievance entrepreneurs.

Lost me at "woke ideology" and "grievance entrepreneurs" the latter of which is a huge projection.

Huh? You're not making a coherent argument.

Oh, I'm saying that you aren't either, and are just bloviating around culture war nonsense. That's made clear by your use of key phrases.

You are just bloviating around culture war nonsense. That's made clear by your use of key phrases like saying the other person is using key phrases.

Well "key phrases" isn't a phrase in the culture war, so I can't take your response here seriously. It seems childish, trite, and a bit "I know you are but what am I?!?!?" To put it another way, I don't see a coherent argument. I also didn't say anything to bloviate, perhaps you would appreciate reviewing the definition for that word too? You are the one here writing about how "wokeism" started in 1960 and expect people to take you seriously? You sound like you might as well be a fox news host. Give me a break, I'm looking for people who don't have an axe to grind.

San Fransisco isn’t a person and therefore can’t have an opinion about whether to inforce laws. What you have are people fighting for control of San Franscisco (and other jurisdictions), some of which want control and don’t want to enforce laws and those that do want control and want to enforce laws.

In pretty much all jurisdictions, the latter group is more forceful, more aggressive and more determined to take control to impose their own flavor of authoritarianism, left, right or otherwise. The only group consistently failing to take control are those that would take control and actually make a point of leaving you alone.

Many in the gayborhood had grown weary of the size of the event and it was more of a last straw. Many locals were eager for it to end.

Now that it’s been largely gentrified, time is ripe to restart something, preferably towards Dolores.

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