Your posts take what may sound like a benign or reasonable position (civil rights are good, right?) and uses that as a means to assert that supporting BLM is the same thing. For some it is, for some it isn’t. And for some it’s green grocerism or a Kafkatrap.

How in any possible reality is BLM not a civil rights issue? Did you read about the murder of George Floyd?

You're totally wrong.

Police brutality against Black people is a civil rights issue. BLM is a group of affiliated political organizations, and a slogan coined and popularized by those same organizations. Those organizations view the policing issue as just one symptom of a larger societal problem and advocates particular solutions not only to that problem, but to other problems that are, within their intellectual framework, related.

It’s the difference between “child malnutrition” and activist organizations that have particular explanations for and proposed solutions to that problem.

> Police brutality against Black people is a civil rights issue. BLM is a group of affiliated political organizations, and a slogan coined and popularized by those same organizations.

That's historically false. The slogan was popularized before the key organizations existed; the organizations were, in part, a response to the criticism that the movement united by the slogan lacked a clear and coherent agenda.

My understanding is that Alicia Garza and the other founders of the BLM organization coined the phrase itself: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/blacklivesmatter...

> Outraged and saddened after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Florida man who killed a Black teenager in 2012, Oakland, California resident Alicia Garza posts a message on Facebook on July 13, 2013. Her post contains the phrase "Black lives matter," which soon becomes a rallying cry and a movement throughout the United States and around the world.

https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/BLM

> In 2013, three female Black organizers — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — created a Black-centered political will and movement building project called Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter began with a social media hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin back in 2012.

> According to the Black Lives Matter website they were "founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

> My understanding is that Alicia Garza and the other founders of the BLM organization coined the phrase itself

Yes, they created the slogan and hashtag in 2012 and the Foundation in 2013, and the Movement for Black Lives was founded in 2014. (Much of this is express in the excerpts you cite.) The organizations did not exist until well after the slogan was popularized, and the various organizations within the movement (even the big two) mentioned are not without disputes over both policy recommendations and priority between them; the slogan isn’t a sales technique for the programs of one organization or the other, the organizations are working to try to establish how to make the slogan concrete.

How is that responsive to my point? The folks who created the slogan built a political organization around it, and that organization has a specific political platform. Put differently, it’s not like the slogan was some pre-existing neutral concept that happens to be used by these organizations. There is a direct relation between the slogan and these organizations.

Demanding that people repeat and affirm the slogan, therefore, seems risks demanding they endorse the organizations.

Do you actually believe this is a real risk? Can you articulate how the dangerous outcome you're referring to actually plays out?

At Northwestern, there were demands for former Dean Yuracko to recite the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. She released messages condemning the “horrific racial injustices faced by African-Americans on a regular basis” and developing an action plan for the school. But she was condemned for “not explicitly stating, ‘Black Lives Matter.’” (https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2020/7/9/21310596/nor...). And she was ultimately removed from her job.

I don’t know Dean Yuracko’s inner thoughts. But I suspect she has fairly progressive views given the nature of her research (gender equity) and that she believes “black lives matter” as a literal factual statement. But being pressured to repeat that statement, as the slogan, and the name of an organization with some fairly radical ideas, is a differently thing entirely. In America, we don’t go around forcing people to express solidarity with a political movement, no matter how meritorious the movement.

I think we're likely talking past each other. I agree that there is immense social pressure for individuals to endorse the slogan "Black Lives Matter".

What I dispute is the proposition that any reasonable person assumes such an endorsement also constitutes an endorsement of the Marxist beliefs of "BLM, Inc.", a name I'm introducing to capture the organization you're referring to.

I agree that BLM, Inc. is so hospitable to radical socialism that we might as well refer to it as a radical socialist organization.

I strongly disagree that such tendencies also apply to the slogan "Black Lives Matter"; BLM, Inc. has lost its hold on the slogan, and no longer owns it. That's what happens when a slogan succeeds so wildly it's on every bumper sticker and lawn in Oak Park.

(I think this is more or less what the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education has to say about BLM as well).

This is precisely what I’m talking about. You’re continuing to assert that if you support civil rights you must support BLM. Others have pointed out why this comes from a faulty assumption.

People make these claims about HN based on their own political passions, which lead to false feelings of generality. If you had the opposite politics, you'd notice opposite things and derive opposite conclusions [1]. Plenty of people do:

"leftist totalitarianism prevalent on HN" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20202305

"any opinion that's not 100% politically correct && strictly SJW standard compliant is suppressed" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197581

"anti-western and extremely anti-capitalist" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384662

"biased to the left" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325122

"quickly turning into a leftist SJW and socialist haven" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351311

"always politically left" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632

"Obviously this website is rigged for the liberal agenda" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23429442

"skews quite left" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23661802

"a liberal echo chamber" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23658461

"They purge anything that doesn't trend left leaning" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808107

"Marxism and thought police are rampant here" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23986096

"HN is ran by radical leftists, so no surprise" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24037475

"if you say anything that doesn't align with the mainstream liberal consensus you'll be flagged and a mod will reprimand you for flaimbait" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353254

"You aren't allowed to go against the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party here" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24782327

"anything critical of the Democratic party is instantly flagged [...] And the moderators don't give a fuck either because they're also in the main HN demographic of SV white liberal trash" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24990311

"They purge anything that doesn't trend left leaning" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808107

[1] I think it's simply because we're more likely to remember those: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Sure, not everyone agrees on where HN leans politically. There is no all-encompassing autoritative data, and plenty of room for interpretation and debate. Everyone is entitled to their opinion on the topic and I have mine.

> Hacker News leans right-wing politically

News to me. I guess I haven’t been paying attention, because HN always seemed fairly left.

Tells you of the strength of the bubble if op thinks that a hub this enriched for Californian techies swings right.

See my user name. I was being polite, what I was thinking was, imagine how fucking far left you have to be to think hackernews is right wing. ;) You’re right, it’s a matter of perspective and bubble.

> Their rethorical device for holding the moral high ground is to frame their political views as neutral and apolitical, while framing views they disagree with as divisive and “political”.

This I wish more people called out. There is a lot of going on this post. There is a lot of, whats called on reddit "enlightened centrism", they definitely come out in full force here to attempt to be clever. This fake argument needs a name and a better description.

similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning