Comment by wonder_er | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wonder_er | Hacker News Reader

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supporting HOA's is supporting a key tool supremacists used in the USA for a long time to enact oppression and violence on people of the global majority.

You can keep supporting it. if we were hanging out IRL I would clock[0] you (unhappily, regretfully) as someone supporting supremacy.

a belief in authority can get real dangerous, real fast.

Update:

[0] I mean "clock" in the "to note the flaws of" sense. Urban dictionary gives one definition which sounds right-enough:

> used in gay vernacular especially among drag queens

> to call out someone's flaws, to uncover or reveal the truth in a situation or one's true gender

Here's a few quotes about HOAs, zoning, and policing from https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...

> If the targets, their family members or associates wouldn’t speak to deputies or answer questions, STAR team deputies were told to look for code enforcement violations like faded mailbox numbers, a forgotten bag of trash or overgrown grass, Rodgers said. “We would literally go out there and take a tape measure and measure the grass if somebody didn’t want to cooperate with us,” he said. Rodgers said people sometimes would fail to pay the fine, which would result in a warrant being issued for their arrest.

So, the gap between HOAs and police (deputized slave patrols) exists only for the people that want to imagine it as existing.

mountain out of a mole hill? perhaps.

>You can keep supporting it. if we were hanging out IRL I would clock you (unhappily, regretfully) as someone supporting supremacy.

Let me understand you - you would assume that the individual in question knows for certain how HOAs have been used against minority groups, and then you would physically attack them before asking them if they were even aware and trying to enlighten them to the issue?

Edit: And at the risk of pushing HN's guidelines, I'll point out that this is what you've put on your personal website:

>I value coherence, meaningfulness, compassion, and kindness.

One of these things is sure as hell not like the other. Yikes. Maybe go get some fresh air, bud...

Edit 2: And I say all this as someone who very much hates HOAs and will never own a home that is in one.

ooooh, not clock as 'hit' but clock as 'I would note this thing seems to be true about you, and it would lead to me thinking at least a little less of something about you."

That thing being "you operated inside of a HOA without noting the easy-to-encounter truth about how HOAs function/have functioned."

yeah, I'll update the wording in the original post.

Update: Wording updated. indeed, I value the things I said I value, I appreciate you pointing out the other common ways the word 'clock' is used. I normally don't use such loose language.

You're probably right about a walk - my co2 meter shows the current level in this room with an open window is 818 - pretty fine, but movement and sun is always nice. It's cloudy, but I was about to head away from my desk for the day anyway.

Ah, fair. My apologies for assuming the meaning.

no, i think it is the right move, especially if it landed as such a provocative statement to dig around on the profile, and then THAT RESEARCH revealed such a contradictory impulse.

There are people who live like that, and the quick social shaming response is not a bad one. "you said you care about people {here}, and you are now behaving in a dehumanizing way. how interesting"

I simply used a word that means one thing to me, and I use it in spoken language often enough, but it happens to have an equally prominent alternative usage that means directly 'to hit'.

No apologies needed or received. I think apologies are useful for some mistakes, but in some cases, if it seemed like you're witnessing online bullying... I say keep on keeping on.

Me saying "i'd hit you in person if you said this" is straight-down-the-middle bullying. Me saying "I'd sadly think less of you, if you said this in person" is not bullying, IMO, so I say we're both right. how nice.

now i wanna take my frisbee for a walk in the local park but it's as bit too windy for good throwing... hm.

There are a shocking number of properties with covenants that either disallow black people or something associated with slaves like cotton.

Which given how unpopular that is now, goes to show that it is so impossible to reverse covenants you can't even remove wildly unpopular stuff like the exclusion of blacks. Thankfully such covenants are not enforceable.

yes, exactly this. I believe it rises quickly to attention, upon researching at all the history of this "HOA thing" in the USA, is that they existed purely as a legal fiction to better accomplish oppression of 'the other' by european american english-speaking peoples in the greater united states.

Clauses like "by purchasing this property you promise to sell it only ever in the future to a white person" are sprinkled like salt across legal documents from certain eras.

Everyone was saying the whole thing out loud.

They are not enforceable, per se, today, but they still remain like landmines or unexploded ordinance in the landscape. Where there were clauses like that, that are currently unenforceable, something else might be close-enough to enforceable that it matters.

I simply ask people involved with these institutions something like "Do you know the racist/supremacist underpinnings of (HOA's|zoning|road design standards) in America?"

and usually the first half-second of their next facial expression correctly telegraphs how it'll go.

Every industry I've worked in, I read with fascination the lurid writings of those who hate the industry, either as insiders or outsiders. That an institution in the USA is _soaking wet_ in supremacy, and exists purely to propagate the concept of 'race' into the future is so banal to me, it's not really a hot take, though I remember when I thought something like this was improbable.

Anyway, HOA's are one of 'em. The hold up as ideal the concept of the suburb, which existed as "the alternative" to all things 'ethnic'.

That ideal uses threats of violence to expunge all things 'ethnic'. Sometimes under the guise of displaying class conformity/'not looking poor', but, lets be honest, that's an anti-ethnic sentiment.

It hurts to behold, all of this.

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