DATACOMMANDER

The ideology is not especially deserving of anything but ridicule, but I went through the slides and excerpted some particularly goofy stuff.

"Marginalized person: Any woman who wants to work for pay for an employer"

"Oppression: The self-reinforcing system of stories, TV, news coverage, police, and legal system stereotyping Black people as criminals, that benefits non-Black people and harms Black people"

What TV shows has the author been watching? For my entire life, at least 95% of the depictions of black people that I've seen on television have been positive, sometimes to the point of being pandering. (For example, if a show has a black character and a white character, and one has to do something wrong to advance the plot, it will be the white character, because that won't cause outrage, while the reverse will.)

"You are eating lunch in the employee kitchen when a group sits down near you. One person comments loudly “If I ate that, I’d be as big as a house!” A higher-weight coworker is sitting nearby and can clearly overhear."

It's not clear who's talking to whom here. If it's someone commenting on the lunch of a coworker with whom they're not sitting, well, I've never seen behavior like that in any workplace, nor have I heard of anything like that happening. If it's someone commenting on one of their lunch-mates' lunches, then it's none of the "higher"-weight coworker's business.

"Higher weight people face workplace discrimination, particularly women, regardless of ability to do the job Body size is falsely equated with virtue: self-control, hard worker, in good health"

Body size is correctly associated with self-control, energy, and good health. The proportion of overweight people who couldn't reach a normal weight if they ate sensibly and exercised is tiny. The "healthy at any weight" meme is absurd.

"Black people face a much a higher bar than white people during hiring (and in general), and white people often get a pass or exceptions to the process"

Bullshit.

"A co-worker shares an article on your work Slack claiming that white men are biologically more suited to STEM careers, saying "I don't agree with all of it, but it has some good points." Another co-worker replies, saying that they disagree with the article but we have to be tolerant of co-workers with different political views because diversity of thought is important too."

Men are biologically more suited to STEM careers, on average. You have to be willfully blind not to see that this is true. Why does this make people so angry?

""Office housework" is necessary but unrewarded work (taking notes, organizing parties, tidying, etc.) People of color and women of all races are expected to do more of this work and punished for not doing it"

Bullshit.

"On a company mailing list, someone writes “How would you explain this [technical thing] to your grandmother?”"

Old women (and, to a lesser extent, old men) are much more likely to have trouble with technology than are young men (and, to a lesser extent, young women). Again, why does this make people so angry?

Intersectionalism is just borderline personality disorder in ideological form.

Uh, all of it?

I should have been more specific: I was referring to elections for head of state. Regardless, your post is high on rhetoric and low on content. You provide no citation for your strongest claim (that in many part of the US white supremacists carry more than 10% of the vote for some office or another). The white supremacist whom you claim is running for Congress “unopposed” will certainly be opposed by a Democrat, and will certainly lose. If only 12 white supremacists ran for office in 2018, that runs counter to the notion that white supremacists are a significant force in American politics. Almost anyone can run for office, and I highly doubt that any of them won anyway. Given the number of elected officials in the US, I think it’s fair to say that any group that doesn’t hold at least one office is not a significant political force. Can you name an elected official who is a white supremacist?

(Before you accuse me of shifting the goalposts: I wasn’t clear in my original post. If you can find a presidential election that occurred in the last 20 years in which a white supremacist received more than 0.01% of the popular vote, I’ll stand corrected. You’ll have to go back farther than 2016: I googled every candidate [1] who received more than 0.01% of the popular vote in 2016 and none of them is a white supremacist.)

1. https://transition.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2016/2016presgeresults.p...

What part of the world do you live in, where there’s a real risk of a white supremacist politician receiving even 1% of 1% of the popular vote?

Yes, but...actually try to put yourself in an employer’s shoes.

The slide set is a big can of crazy.

You didn’t find the slides so bad? Really?

Those slides present a rather extreme ideology, which is not based on (and is often flatly contradicted by) evidence.

Right, and what we’re seeing is that men and women enjoy different things.

That women have less interest in or capacity for STEM work is the most parsimonious explanation.

But again: why is it bad if white people are in power? What’s wrong with white people?

Anonymous accusations should be treated as worthless for obvious reasons.

Actually, his claim was that it shouldn’t be called assault if no force or coercion was used by the older man, and the older man couldn’t be expected to know that his partner was being coerced by someone else.

“Including workers in ownership and governance is necessary to lessen the hold on corporate wealth by affluent white families.”

Why should this be a goal? Is there something wrong with affluent people, or white people, or affluent white people?

If it’s not a binary, it’s still a very much bimodal distribution. Ironically, the notion that gender is either a binary or a spectrum is a false dichotomy. It’s obviously a bimodal distribution with most, but not all, people clustered around one of the two peaks.

I’m not a solo business owner, but if I had to guess, I’d say that the ones who are successful turn their weakness into a strength by using some obscure tech stack that they’re a wizard with but that no one else uses. It’s a trite thought here on HN, but if I were a one-man shop I really would try to use a Lisp dialect.

I disagree, but I want to be clear that I disagree on practical, not ideological, grounds. As others have pointed out, handing out prison sentences for security breaches would be counterproductive. If we make it financially ruinous, companies are more likely to change their behavior in the way we want then to.

If the other “incidents” are like this one, then the problem isn’t him, it’s the community’s puritanical streak.

I just read an interview with him in which he renounced his belief that adult-child sexual relationships aren’t necessarily harmful. As for the concept of coercive consent, his point was that if you have sex with someone who’s being coerced, but you aren’t aware of the coercion, you haven’t committed sexual assault. The blame rests entirely on the person doing the coercion. Of course, if you suspect that a potential sexual partner is being coerced into having sex with you, you should refuse (and, ideally, try to help them). But if they don’t seem to be in any distress, you can’t be blamed if it turns out that they were actually being coerced.

It wasn’t, and it’s absurd that people still insist on calling it a sexual assault. Stallman’s logic was spot-on.

This is the sort of thing that millennials should focus our energy on. We may be politically polarized, but I think we can all agree that this is bullshit and needs to be fought.

This is a travesty.

“The economists John Schmitt and Heather Boushey found that among 24-to-35-year-olds, almost 20 percent of college graduates “actually do no better than their counterparts who left school after high school,” even before taking college debt into account.”

Well, duh. It takes time for a degree to generate a return. (And besides, what’s with this crazy wording? Why not say that more than 80% do better?)

Try looking at 45-to-60-year-olds. I seriously doubt that those with no degree are doing just as well as college graduates in that age group.

Soderlund is going about this all wrong. First you just do it, then Charleton Heston blows the lid off your operation.

The position presented in the essay is mathematical nihilism. I make no comment on him or on his general philosophy, which I thought was obvious from context.

The irony is that it never occurs to our elites that perhaps they are incompetent. No, the narrative is always that the ignorant masses are going to burn the house down, despite the heroic efforts of the educated, level-headed elite. Newsflash: preventing the masses from burning the house down is the primary job of the elite. When a fire nevertheless starts, that means that it’s time for the elites to be replaced by those who can prevent fires.

Yes, and that’s precisely what makes the nihilist position so silly. (I’m sure the author wouldn’t describe himself as a nihilist, but if the position presented in his essay isn’t nihilism, then what—other than a waste of the reader’s time—can we call it?)

The conclusion of this essay is deeply stupid. The author uses formalism in the same way that he accuses Hilbert of doing, except that where Hilbert presumably remained a closet Platonist, the author is apparently some sort of nihilist. The comparison of mathematical propositions to sheet music is transparently inappropriate: for, if the latter truly denoted nothing, we would not continue to print endless volumes of it. Surely, even music that is absolutely nonrepresentational still has the virtue of being a pleasing or stimulating pattern of sound; so we should discard as just silly the notion that notion that, e.g., an existential quantifier is nothing more and nothing less than a backwards E printed on paper, and that the endless volumes of text containing the symbol are produced for no reason.

I am not a Platonist, nor a formalist, nor an intuitionist, but there is a completely coherent interpretation of mathematics, entirely fleshed out in my mind, which is none of these. I could summarize it here, but I’ve grown rather tired of broadcasting my ideas pseudonymously in random comment threads only to see them published a year or so later with no attribution (and why not; why cite a random commenter?). Whether you believe me or not when I say that there is another way, the nihilism in this essay can clearly be rejected as an abortive train of thought.

Where did you get the idea that the only purpose of a “well-regulated militia” is to completely replace a standing army? Just because some of the founders were against the idea of standing armies doesn’t mean that they saw it as an “either/or” proposition.

“If you want a second amendment, you need to also support defunding the military and a return to militias and mercenaries.”

That doesn’t follow from this:

“Both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists opposed a standing army and saw it as a tool of oppressors.”

False dichotomy. What about social disintegration?