We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922953.

Please don't use HN for ideological battle or post generic ideological comments or flamewar comments to HN. All that leads to internet hell, which we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We ban accounts that do those things:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

especially if they're using HN primarily for those things:

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Looking at your recent commenting history, it looks like you either are, or are perilously close to the line. Please stop.

There is a clear difference between racism and acknowledging white privilege. White privilege simple describes one way in which racism manifests itself. If you can't tell the difference between a KKK member and someone says that people with white names getting called back for job interviews more than people with black names is white privilege then you are willfully ignorant. It is not racist to say that someone benefits from white privilege.

Also the person you are replying to didn't say they destroy peoples lives based on racial hatred. They haven't destroyed anyone's lives because they're white.

I'm fairly educated on these things, and I'm a racial minority married to a white woman with mixed kids, and I'm still not sure I understand what people mean when they refer to "white privilege."

I get that there is a distinct cultural bias against Black people (what people call "anti-Blackness"). Living in the south this was quite apparent to me. This is structural in nature, and quite distinct from normal majority/minority dynamics.

But I don't perceive any similar "white privilege." To go to your resume example, I've got a last name that's definitely Muslim, but I've never perceived any sort of difference in response on that basis. (And in myriad areas, from income policing to health, statistically I'm likely to enjoy advantages compared to white people.) I think the concept of "white privilege" is actually a conceptual error that comes from generalizing Black-white racial dynamics to a multi-ethnic society.

Also, to address your point about the KKK member, the left uses "racism" to mean a lot more than just that. Based on that expansive definition of "racism" I'd qualify use of phrases like "unbearable whiteness" as "racism": https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/01/the-unbearable-white...

I can describe it. I'm Brazilian, very white, green eyes, brown hair that was lighter when I was younger.

About 30 years ago (wow!), in my late teens I organized a party on a house my aunt recently bought to become her medical practice. We had lots of drinks, some drugs, a DJ, live music and some guests walking over the roof of neighboring houses. Police got called.

When they saw me, young and privileged, they wanted to arrest me. I offered them a beer, they entered the house, one of them played the drum set with his service gun. They drank some fancy cocktails.

They enjoyed themselves for about 15 minutes until they were called on the radio. Then they told me, laughing, I should try to control my guests a little better. Then they went away.

If we weren't a bunch or privileged white kids in an upper middle class neighborhood, they'd most likely arrive shooting, as they do when there are parties in slums.

Is that "white privilege?" From personal experience, I don't think police treat upper middle class asian kids any differently than that. (But I bet it would be different for upper middle class Black people.)

Statistically, and adjusted for age (which is really important because there is quite a big difference in median age between racial groups in the U.S.) asians are actually less likely to get shot by the police than whites. Latinos are about the same/a little bit more likely. Black people are twice as likely to get shot by the police.

I think "racial privilege" and/or "class privilege" are the general terms that have more straightforward meanings, and "white privilege" is both a) a special case of race/class privilege, and b) sometimes used as a poor synonym for race/class privilege.

In Brazil, it is my impression Asians are treated as white by the police.

The rule of thumb is that they will be more violent with poorer people, which has a high correlation with having darker skin, at least in southern Brazil. Asians are more often than not, middle and upper-class.

> they'd most likely arrive shooting, as they do when there are parties in slums.

Can you please link to the news articles about these slum parties that are broken up by officers who start shooting the moment they arrive? Seems like something that would definitely get reported on.

In all my time living in low-income housing, I never witnessed something like this. And I had plenty of sleepless nights when neighbors would throw ragers. Some got broken up (mostly when a fight would break out among attendees), and I'm sure some of the cops weren't pleasant. But I never witnessed cops jumping out of their cars with their guns blazing.

Although I'm one piece of anecdotal evidence, so I'd like to see the evidence you have of this event.

You can read about one such case, one that created enough social repercussion that the cops involved had legal trouble, here:

https://recordtv.r7.com/fala-brasil/videos/mpsp-ira-indiciar...

Most often nothing happens.

I see this link happened in Brazil. Definitely a horribly incident.

My comment, and my personal experiences, relate to America. At least here, I don't know of any events where police have opened fire on a pack of teenagers partying without reason. But they could exist, which was why I was asking for evidence.

I agree with your third paragraph about the conceptual error. I think there are subtleties to the concept and racism is manifested differently. I've heard Muslim and Arab people talk about their experiences with racism and I believe them but they don't complain of the same things that happen to black people.

And yes I chose the kkk member as an obviously racist person but my point was that pointing out white privilege is just not racist.

Oddly, it always seems to be the people throwing around terms like “white privilege” who are willfully ignorant. There is no such thing as white privilege.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted.

Communists and Fascists share a lot of the same authoritarian tactics.

The word we need to use is "Totalitarian Liberalism". We're not heading into communism (there's no unity, there's no focus on workers) nor fascism (there's no aesthetic, there's no glory of the nation). Instead, we get as much Product as we want, as long as we all toe the line and profess to believe as we're told - no matter how far that strays from observable reality.

It’s because they’re positing that it’s only people on the left that do this.

I’ve heard it said that the enemy of extremists isn't the extremist on the other side, it’s the moderates. Extremists are itching for a fight, and they’ll continue fighting forever. Moderates and pragmatists stand in the way of that goal. If an extremist group were to win and completely eliminate the other side, they’d draw some other battle lines within their own group. “Othering” is important to extremists, and the’ll find a way to do it.

I’m another proud lefty. I marched with Black Lives Matter last summer, voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primaries, I’m vegan for all the reasons people think are stupid. All of that is true, and it infuriates me to see leftist extremists getting dressed up in black and setting buildings on fire. It infuriates me to see leftists gatekeeping on Twitter, and taking such joy from tweeting people’s employers to try to get them fired for the crime of making a joke that didn’t pass a purity test, or for having a counterintuitive take on something complex. Internet pile ons are the worst.

All that said, it confounds me that people on the right seem to be unable to see these traits within their own party, and aren’t working harder to rid their ranks of QAnon, Proud Boys, and Trumpism. It seems like anyone on the right who has the temerity to point out these problems gets branded as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and expelled from the party. Jeff Sessions – JEFF SESSIONS – was cancelled by the right for not being right enough.

So, yeah, there’s a lot of projection going on all around.

No they are not positing they _only_ prior on the left are doing it.

Militant left is as dangerous as militant right. The problem is not the side of the political spectrum but the approach to dealing with opponents.

> Militant left is as dangerous as militant right.

Yeah... The terrible dangers of universal healthcare and proportional taxes...

Promoting universal healthcare and proportional taxes isn't dangerous at all. Neither is promoting freedom of speech and healthy laws for small businesses.

It get dangerous when either side decides that anything standing in the way (in their opinion) of these ideals are "other", and that the "others" are so evil they are simply inhuman, and must be quashed by all means necessary.

This pattern repeats in history many, many times. And lots of people are nervous that the beginning of that pattern is starting to play out in the modern West.

> It get dangerous

True. Remember all the lynchings of white people in the South by the BBB, for offenses sometimes as minor as drinking from the wrong water fountain?

Or when BLM marched, with torches in hand, chanting "Blood and soil" and "You will not replace us"? There was even a Neonazi woman who was ran over by a BLM activist driving a car.

And what about the day when BLM terrorists invaded the Capitol threatening to kill everyone who wouldn't break the law and vote Obama back into the presidency? That day was wild.

Both far left and far right regimes have resulted in chaos, murder, and repression.

If you're skeptical that leftism can cause violence, the wikipedia list of recent far-left terrorism groups may convince you otherwise: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_terrorism

And of course, there's the more classical examples: Maoist struggle sessions, the Red Terror, the Cambodian Killing Fields.

Extremism is dangerous. And it's concerning to me that this has become a debatable point.

It's noteworthy that these groups were mostly active in the 20th century as opposition to governments while right-wing extremists have been the government of many countries, including the US until recently.

Yes, I agree that it's very noteworthy. These groups generally appear in response to right governments. Which means I suspect we'll see more of them in coming years.

I am all for fighting far-right extremists. I am very against innocent civilians being killed, oppressed, or censored in the process.

Those are good points.

I think however, cancel culture in particular, is a phenom of the Left right now.

Weaponizing conspiracy (QAnon, Elections, COVID) is a culture of the Right, no doubt.

Both sides are fully aware of what they are doing and leveraging it on purpose (not all, but many).

The thing is - if we have good institutions then we can hold out against QAnon. But cancel culture I think is actually a corrosion of our institutions.

QAnon and COVID conspiracies are not a problem at Harvard, whereas Cancel Culture is, in fact, it's being driven little bit from places like that.

Cancel Culture is all over the right. They just don't call it that.

Mention the name AOC favorably, and you will be shut down. Parler censored people for supporting BLM. Many took pride in tanking Captain Marvel because of its lead's support for feminist causes. Any progressive action you take will cause you to be dubbed "virtue signalling".

It's all just cancel culture. They simply won't call it that.

There's a saying that for the right wing, every accusation is a confession. They're calling it out on the left (much of it nut-picking[1]) because it's a pervasive part of their own culture.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking

"Mention the name AOC favorably, and you will be shut down."

No, this is not remotely true. They'll downvote you into obvlivion on 'Fox News' comments - but this is not cancel culture.

Nobody is 'losing their job' and being 'publicly shamed' because they said the 'like AOC'.

Sure - you might get a few Trumpers in your face for supporting one of the more perceptibly radical faces of the Demcorcatic party - but that's just 'angry culture' - not cancel culture.

" Parler censored people for supporting BLM."

I strongly doubt this is true - even if it is - again, this is not 'cancel culture' - this is just bad groupthink on a site.

If executives and staff were being fired and losing their jobs for showing up at a BLM rally, or donating money to BLM - that would be 'cancel culture' - but I don't believe that is happening.