I don't believe the clicking thing but then I guess various subcultures have their own idiosyncrasies, and I haven't been in the U.S for a long time - maybe they have some new habits.
It's not a subculture, it's regular corporate Human Resources behaviour in a few places. In my opinion it's often a symptom of something wrong rather than a mindful remedy.
On it's own clicking fingers can be good especially if some in the audience really do have trouble - for example a group meeting of certain sufferers. Most people would encounter it as part of a range of other idiosyncratic symbols and activities. It has become something that is done by default than something done specially.
Going further, it's different from a subculture. It becomes more than something that might be harmless but a kind of religious activity - something that both protects against evil people who are against them and something that promotes group unity within by participating.
Turns out being the victors of the culture war isn’t all sunshine and rainbows like one would think.
Your bizarre reaction, pattern-matching it to a bunch of ideological stuff, reveals a lot about your but nothing about them.
“Snapping is not new, but it is newly resurgent,” said Daniel Gallant, the executive director of Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side. The practice, he said, dates to the heyday of the beatnik poets, who would gather in coffeehouses and at hootenannies to perform poems laced with cultural rebellion and political activism. (It has also long been popular in bastions of counter-counterculture: sorority houses. Some historians say snapping was used in the days of the Roman Empire as well.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/fashion/snapping-new-clap...
Culture section of the ... New York Times ( YMMV )
The objective is to make you obey. That's it. That's the whole reason.
The folderol about "neuro-divergent people" is just a thin gloss of claimed virtue intended to disguise the actual goal.
Do they have any actual evidence that "neuro-divergent people" suffer a greater degree of trauma from clapping than finger-snapping? No, they don't. Sure, there might be a "neuro-divergent" person, or even more than one, who finds clapping disturbing, but that says nothing at all about the general case.
> if anyone doesn’t comply, that’s a great indicator that they oppose all of the above and are therefore fascists to be smoked out.
Or witches, perhaps. The terminology changes over the years, but the tactics remain the same. The people who get out the torches and pitchforks because someone clapped his hands are exactly the same type of people who used to lynch blacks, burn harmless old ladies as witches, and throw Jews down wells. Exactly.
They do it because they enjoy hurting people, and have found a cover story that allows them to do it under an illusion of virtue. You complain because we burned Mrs. Johnson? Well, then you must be pro-Satan!
Lovely, clapping is now “fascist”. As ridiculous as it sounds, I can’t even tell if this is satire because I’ve met people who seem to genuinely believe that making an okay sign means I’m KKK or something. I’d rather starve on the street than work with a group of people who can blurt out the parent comment with a straight face.
But clapping is noise-adjacent, which is distress-adjacent, which is oppression-adjacent, which is fascist-adjacent, so actually clapping is fascist.
The logic of American polarization.
It is not unique to the left either.
Hilarious hyperbole here but what is sad is there are some on HN that will not recognize it as such and will nod their heads in agreement as they read it, then in all seriousness convey the idea downstream to some group of like-minded friends who will then add it as one more moral turpitude into their weird nouveau religion.
Why is this even a matter of belief, what makes you uncomfortable about it?
With a modicum of effort you can indeed corroborate that this happened - I hope you do so - but I'm more curios about the knee jerk reaction.
You clearly don't want it to be real and simultanously you left open the possibility that it is a thing you aren't familiar with. But first and foremost you called him a liar. This is worthy of further rumination.
This is actually a common thing when you have lived in a place for a good amount of time and then leave, but keep awareness of the general cultural and political exports, you feel you know that society and what is it like but you perhaps do not know as well as you think you do.
>Why is this even a matter of belief, what makes you uncomfortable about it?
People often make statements about what societies are like in order to paint them in a particular way for rhetorical or propaganda purposes. I have a lot of experience seeing that about cultures I am familiar with, so when I see something that seems quite so absurd as this did to me about something that I feel I should know, it inspires me not to believe it.
Evidently you have never had a similar experience.
on edit: grammar fix, 2nd edit, changed as "well as you do" to "as well as you think you do"
Thank you for the candor. I agree that it is bananas. Definitely can see how it might be difficult to believe at first.
> People often make statements about what societies are like in order to paint them in a particular way for rhetorical or propaganda purposes.
Absolutely. What do you make of the folks in this thread echoing your sentiment that it must be made up and/or quickly changing tact and trying to pass it off as completely benign and normative by various explanations?
I would argue trying to pretend like it is fake is a form of gaslighting/propaganda. Doesn't seem like you were engaged in that, especially with your response.
You might be somewhat alarmed to know that initially one or two NYT staffers did in fact engage in exactly this behaviour until they were debunked ("I was there and it didn't happen" type posts on X). I am a tad alarmed.
Hence my call for rumination. All of this is quite bizarre, don't you agree? What on earth is going on?
> Evidently you have never had a similar experience.
Of course I have. I am not even calling you particularly gullible actually. I think clearly on display down thread from you is an exploitation of your, and others like you, reasonableness.
So after considering this and other things I would think huh, maybe some people snapped but not in the whole mesmerized puppets snapping along group-think that the anecdote seemed to paint it as. Like if there are 10 people and 4 people snap for a couple seconds and maybe someone says Amen a nervous person might just remember it as some big humiliating they all snapped against me! thing. This would allow other people who have knowledge of the thing or the culture of the company to say "come on, that never happened"
But as far as the rest of the combat you are having with the rest of the people in this thread who say it didn't happen - hey, you all seem to be more worked up about this thing than I am, I just thought that sounds too crazy, it sounds like something from "Curb your Enthusiasm" not real life.
But yeah if a group all snapped together because my favorite sandwich choice was too culturally insensitive or supportive of an authoritarian agenda I would probably start talking some shit and get fired, even though I don't agree with that corporation's viewpoints on things.
on edit: added some context.
on further edit: you could also argue that the article doesn't say it was some groupthink thing, I guess that is a matter of interpreting the style of the article.
I'm pretty sensitive to implications of literary style and so forth, in my opinion at least, and I think the implication was "oooh everybody ganged up on me" not just "some people snapped and others were like let's get through this dumb corporate orientation so we can go to lunch!" which is what I would have found totally believable.
No no, I am right there with you. It is straight out of Curb'd.
> I'm pretty sensitive to implications of literary style and so forth, in my opinion at least, and I think the implication was "oooh everybody ganged up on me"
Observe people doubling down in this thread about how the fingers snapping (which didn't even happen probably!) is totally normal because actually... :P
Again, can hardly fault you as a reader, you certainly aren't part of that.
Listen, someone posted in here that they themselves are a NYT reporter and not only did the finger snaps did not happen (but would be totally justified if they did!) this is just a former disgruntled employee who "probably got fired for watching porn".
I just think that's... amazing. Hilarious and weird. And something to watch out for.
> Why is this even a matter of belief, what makes you uncomfortable about it?
Nobody mentioned any kind of discomfort, merely bewilderment. You are tearing down a strawman you built based on a very uncharitable reading of a 1-sentence comment. That sentence even mentioned the author being a cultural outsider.
> but I'm more curios about the knee jerk reaction.
I am more curious about why you chose to escalate so quickly instead of taking this as an opportunity to discuss different viewpoints and experiences. Also, why you are so quick to attribute malice on such a flimsy basis.
> This is worthy of further rumination.
You present yourself as a model of cultural understanding (because clearly your attitude is better and one we should emulate), but you do sound a bit like a member of a cult. This is also worthy of some rumination.
P.S. - Dear dang, with regards to our previous discussion elsewhere. Observe the above.
> Which cult am I a member of?
I did not write that you were part of one, just that what you wrote sounded like it.
In this case, one for which such strange behaviour would be normal and failing to grasp how outlandish it seems to anyone else, chiding an outsider who does not believe it. Which is of course internally inconsistent because you also seem to support the story’s author, who himself wrote how bizarre it was. Therefore I would think that you’d understand how someone else could find it unbelievable (which you seem to come to in your other comment).
To be fair the main issue I have with your post, and why I replied at all, was how out of line its aggressiveness was compared to the OP, who merely expressed confusion. I don’t know who you are or what your perspective is on this, but there must be other ways of making your point.
The fact that several other people in the thread have a hard time believing it should tell you how utterly strange it is. And yet, you interpret them as attacks to the author, which they really don’t seem to be (apart from a comment from a throwaway account, which gets rightly called out).
> P.S. - Dear dang, with regards to our previous discussion elsewhere. Observe the above.
Ok. First, that’s rude to drop me in a private conversation about which I don’t know anything line that. If you want to use my comments to make a point, at least keep it private.
Second, he does not read every single comment. If you want to write something he’ll see, a good place would be your private discussion elsewhere.
> I don’t know who you are or what your perspective is on this, but there must be other ways of making your point.
I'm struggling a bit here. Help me out, saying I sound like I'm in a cult is good manners? And which cult does it sound like I'm in?
Nonsense. If I share something I read in the newspaper, and you find out that it's not true, that doesn't make me a "liar". Gullible, perhaps, but not a liar.