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Comment by OfSanguineFire | Hacker News Reader

Your post reminds me of a music forum I’m on where a lot of regulars seem to have got bored discussing music, and now are more keen on discussing how a certain band or genre is either harmful to whatever minority, or progressive and liberatory for whatever minority. Room for endless sanctimonious tweets indeed. How did contemporary anglophone society end up like this?

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My experience is that the content of those arguments often doesn't matter. This sticks out to me particularly in music discussions because those discussions have always had room for endless sanctimonious opinions. One of the most valuable things I read when I was younger on the Internet was a SomethingAwful columnist explaining how to be a fake music snob and pointing out that "people involved in music discussions don’t actually care what other people think, they’re merely concerned about the politics of domination and submission." It's not just music discussions: human discussions in general are prone to this, and when the discussion is really about the politics of domination and submission (a topic that people, usually correctly, care a whole lot about), the "real" subject matter of the discussion will become the building blocks of the social dominance exercise and its connection to the underlying thing will quickly be severed. There is no political tendency or fandom or faith that is immune to this, it's an emergent feature of humans' monkey brain hardware.

Being a victim, or a righteous defender of victims, is a guaranteed source of prestige and lift in status in the anglosphere's college-educated middle class.

Being kind to other people will make you more likeable, truly takes a place like HN to frame compassion and solidarity as something bad:D

It’s actually about unkindness. Kind people would give others the benefit of the doubt. This is the type of kindness you see from politicians, where individuals are aggressively attacked due to some microaggression to a group.

Compassion and solidarity should not be imposed without compassion, though. You don’t fight hate and oppression with more hate and oppression. When most people are annoyed with in-your-face militant attitudes it’s not because they don’t want to be nice. It’s because they don’t want to be bullied into following the dogma of the day. Of course you also have plain old racists, but putting them in the same bag as the big chunk of the population who just wants to get on with their day is bound to alienate quite a few people. Hence the blowback.

When someone explains that I cannot not be racist because I have pale skin (which does happen), well it just makes me want to punch them in the face. If we are supposed to all belong and accept each other regardless of our external appearance, then people making assumption about me based on it is just prejudice.

> When someone explains that I cannot not be racist because I have pale skin (which does happen)

this does not happen, nobody says that. It's a strawman argument.

There are examples in this very discussion, FFS.

Being holy is good, being "holier than thou" is bad.

Doing things to support minorities is good, having a row based on who is the biggest friend/foe of various minorities… it's not literally "Munchausen by proxy" but it seems to have similar vibes.

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