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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

> Why are so many really so angry? I promise it has nothing to do with this woman.

One guy (while looking at the presentation), turned his head to his buddy, and said - look at the size of that dongle, would you fork it?

Do you know what that is? It's Funny (and crude). And if you don't find it to be so, that's just too bad. You're not owed anything. You (nor anyone else) have been violated.

We are simply getting fed up that there are people so PC, so fragile, so venomous, so victimhood seeking, that they would attempt to drop a bomb on us over nothing.

> And guess what, her sentiment about racism, whether I agree with it or not, is shared by many scholars of American race relations who are decidedly more informed on the subject.

Redefining established words to fit your narrative (as someone said on here) is a crime against understanding and is not acceptable.

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> Redefining established words to fit your narrative (as someone said on here) is a crime against understanding and is not acceptable.

This is hardly a redefinition as much as a clarification of intent and context. Saying that it's a "crime against understanding" is a bit of an exaggeration.

I mean, saying that racism is "prejudice" is what Dictionary.com says, and saying racism is "prejudice with power" is what a sociologist says, then can't you figure it out with context? Dictionary.com says gravity is, "the force of attraction by which terrestrial bodies tend to fall toward the center of the earth." but a physicist would probably have a different definition they think is more accurate.

I definitely wouldn't say that Adria was right in this whole incident, but picking apart the rest of her Twitter history like it's some sort of way to establish how much you should dislike her is the wrong approach to making things better.

Nonsense. She wrote in all caps that a class of people "CANNOT" be racist in all caps like a loony bird. She wasn't making some deep intellectual point. Come on. It was stupidity. It's not the same as a layperson describing gravity in terms of some basic understanding of Newtonian physics and a physicist describing it in terms of general relativity. It was just dumb.

> It's not the same as a layperson describing gravity in terms of some basic understanding of Newtonian physics and a physicist describing it in terms of general relativity. It was just dumb.

You're mixing up what I said: a sociologist describing a social phenomenon is analogous to a physicist describing a physical phenomenon.

In the tweet, Adria colloquially used the word "racism" in a way that's different from colloquial usage (she used the sociologist's definition and not the Dictionary.com definition), but that doesn't make her stupid or a "loony bird."

Do a couple tweets, screwups, or overreactions deserve this kind of outrage?

> You're mixing up what I said: a sociologist describing a social phenomenon is analogous to a physicist describing a physical phenomenon.

Sorry, no. All academic disciplines are not analogous and equivalent. The sociological re-casting of "racism" that we are referring to here is an opinion, and not even a majority one at that (among sociologists).

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