News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Diversity in Technology and Open Source by KirinDave on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @04:50PM (#14501220)
> This is not a zero-sum game and you exemplify the very problem of demonizing people based on color

I'm pointing out that specific minorities are being unfairly treated and your response is to infer that, not being part of the minority, the folks inflicting this must be part of the majority and then say: "demonization!"

I'm not using the word demon here. I'm saying what's obviously happening. What 20 people just got fired at Uber for doing, and more have been told they can take training or leave over. I'm not sure why recognizing there is a problem for certain people is "demonization" but it seems very fair we cannot call abusers abusers because it will hurt their feelings, but care not at all for the rights of the victims to seek redress.

> Young white men deserve protected status in the same way that young black men deserve protected status.

... What?

> The commonality here is the social economical status

Then why are there more black men in jail then white men even normalizing for economic status and type of crime? You keep suggesting that if we just listened to the stats this would be clear, but observing the stats a picture totally discordant with your worldview emerges.

> The solution is not an eye for an eye (more prison, harsher punishment, deportation, blaming them for their own situation), but rather helping them out of the low social economical status they are in.

I'm happy to help, and I do. But also: folks need to admit they're part of a system perpetrating wrongdoing and work to end that wrongdoing. Everyone has a shared duty to do this as part of our society.

I'm not sure how your response here addressed my criticism about electing super rich white men as proxies if the real problems are caused by the rich unfairly treating the poor, as you imply...

Re:Diversity in Technology and Open Source by belorn on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @07:41AM (#14505399)
> we cannot call abusers abusers because it will hurt their feelings

Black people are overrepresented in crime statistics in the US. Calling all black people criminals will not only hurt them, it is racism. Immigrants are also highly overrepresented in crime statistics here in Sweden, and calling them all criminals would be nationalistic and racist.

> ... What?

And this is why both EU and US political landscape has changed in the last 20 years. The inability to empathize with people that need help is in my view the biggest cause of harm in politics and reason why it becomes polarized. A person i need is a person in need, regardless of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or what other demographic you can put them in.

> even normalizing for economic status

Normalizing for economic status removes the wast difference in crime demographic data. It is the single biggest factor, dwarfing any other attribute. If you provide data and only a single attribute then social economical status is a better predictor than anything else combined. This fact is so established that the Swedish government has taken rather extreme stance where they refuse to issue any new reports on the subject since any non-social economical attributes are just considered noise in the system. The second or third biggest attributes, regardless which ones they are, can only be political abused in order to not focus (and funding) solutions to the biggest one.

> folks need to admit they're part of a system perpetrating wrongdoing

The beauty with addressing social economical status is that you do not need to force black people (or in the case in my nation, immigrants) to admit that they belong to a group of criminals. Rather you create general moral rules which empathize with people in need. Black people are not part of some system perpetrating black people doing crime, and demanding that black people as a group need to take responsible for black people crime is just an other form of collective punishment.

> rich unfairly treating the poor, as you imply

Also called class society and is a core tenet of left politics.

> 'm not sure how your response here addressed my criticism about electing super rich white men

If we want diversity in experience and perspective then companies (and politics) should look at the rich part of your statement, not the white men part for which your comment exclusively talked about. To ignore the social economical aspect is to pretend it doesn't exist.