This specific instance seems like an overreaction of some in both corporate and social media culture. One poster already pointed out that this is likely more about corporate fear of getting targetted by a vocal but ultimately small 'woke' crowd (there, another label, but at least a bit more specific than just generally someone who wishes to achieve basic goals like welfare, equality, and regulation of private industry). It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
In debates like this sometimes a small number of loud, well-meaning but naive people get much more influence than they should for fear of the other being painted the bad guy, while a significant number of people who are actually affected by the underlying issues don't get heard at all.
I don't have the experience of any other group doing this. I agree that it is not inherently a political ideology.
The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal. I think it is important to say that because I know people in other parts of the country that see these as insults and would be surprised to know that people commonly self-identify as these terms.
I find that this group thinks their behavior is better and more helpful than apathy, "silence", and the idea of rampant exclusionary hate from the right. When its really not better, its different, but its not more helpful. There is absolutely a constant threat from people afraid of bird watchers in a park, people that blend into their ranks and are willing to weaponize their understanding of race, two seconds after donating to the Democratic Party.
I don't think Microsoft do claim that, nor is that really why they did this.
Microsoft is a profit seeking entity that is trying to maximize its profit and goodwill (an intangible asset) at the same time.
Thus for them the best moves are those which:
* Have minimal cost.
* Distract people away from profitable dirty laundry which doesn't attract goodwill (e.g. concentration camp contracts).
* Buy them some goodwill among some people - especially through the mechanism of "outrage marketing" (people who by dint of attacking "the right" when they attack this will naturally defend Microsoft - a bit like how Nike used colin Kaepernick).
They did this because "change master to main" appeared in a local maxima that maximized these three conditions.
This is being reflected all around the corporate sphere because what applies to Microsoft applies to a lot of other companies.
Just abut the only company to handle one of these situations in a way that seems rational to me is Trader Joe’s. Some people on Twitter decided that having a burrito labeled “Trader Jose” was a horrendous form of cultural appropriation and demanded the company change all products with this kind of word play in branding. TJ’s considered it and just basically said “no, move along” and the whole woke twitterverse moved on to some other target.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/...
The marketing/PR people in any organisation care passionately about what other people think of the organisation - naturally, because it's their job to care about this.
Journalists are insanely influenced by what other people are saying and love nothing better than a nice piece of juicy controversy to get those ads clicked.
Stock markets are notoriously twitchy about rumours and "public perception".
Most corporate CEO's got to that position by climbing a greasy pole where what other people think of you is literally the most important factor in your climb.
So almost everybody involved in making these kinds of decision are exactly the people most vulnerable to being bullied like this.
But if you can resist - there's only a few thousand Twitterati who will bother even trying to enforce any kind of boycott, and they're probably not your customers in the first place. It's completely ineffectual if you can just ignore it.
Telling the geeks in the IT basement to change the name of the "master branch" on that "git" thing that the organisation apparently uses, so that thousands of angry people (some of them journalists at large media organisations) aren't shouting at you on Twitter seems like such an easy choice to make ;)
But that's an obervation we make in hindsight, and without knowing it was like for the targets. At the time, their phone is probably ringing off the hook, media are calling, etc., and they have no idea when the attack will end or if people are getting fired, advertisers withdrawing or any of that.
I'll applaud anyone, left, right or other-vectored, who stands up to mobs, though. I'm not a fan of the phrase "cancel culture," but it gets one thing right: it is a cultural development, both the culture of outrage and the culture of appeasing the mob. The injustice of a, outraged mob declaring itself judge, jury and executioner only works if targets try to appease them. So while the culture of outrage is a hard problem because it's diffuse, anyone who refuses to accept that injustice is has an outsized effect in pushing back against the appeasement side of it.
a) modern corporate culture trying to make employees take on the company they work for as part of their personal identity
b) young, liberal people working in PR departments who would be horrified if anyone personally called them racist / sexist / homophobic etc
These people go to work, see some random account on twitter saying "<your company> is racist" and a) and b) combined makes this feel like a personal attack on them that they have to defend and social signal against.
This is the most likely explanation I have come up with, because as you said, none of this really makes sense from a logical business perspective.
You are saying 'this group thinks' as if all people who would identify as adhering to leftist ideologies (from the extremes to common social democracy) act like this. You are trying to stuff people into boxes: you are either team A or team B. That is polarization; something we can sorely do without.
I'm also convinced that the screamers aren't really interested in stopping black people from being offended (let alone actually harassed/murdered). I think they're much more interested in getting recognition for fighting the fight.
Its just the 99% correlation with my life experience, observations of real impactful polarization, which leave me without another way to describe it.
Be my guest in rewriting it more accurately.
There needs to be push-back if they [those left/liberals not in this camp] want to disassociate. But where is it? I don't think there is appetite for this argument.
I know many of left/liberal-types (in the Bay Area) all who either believe, or accept this as silly but somehow think it is meaningful to some people and so should be gone along with...
> It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
If you combine both the statements, you are committing a no true Scotsman fallacy.
The idiots are just very loud on social media.
Why? For what purpose are you burdening 90% of True Scotsmen with an obligation of your choosing?
As an example, as a leftist I can say: “A socialist revolution without social justice is not socialist”. Yes, this is a no true Scotsman fallacy, but here I am merely disavowing a subgroup of people that might share my economic believes that workers ought to take over the means of production, but fail to see that the racial injustice in our economic system is part of the problem. In my view, if you don’t see that, you are not a real leftist.
That's missing polsci 101, left/right exist, that's why they have names, not the opposite.
Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left? I don't.
Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd? I know very few. Almost all of them who speak on the topic, speak in unequivocal support of "woke" ideas and talking points.
If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it. You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd to not be counted as racists.
It's in everyone's power to start extinguishing the extremes. Until then, I'll take silence on your nearest extreme as your tacit approval of it.
Certainly. The majority really. That's in the Netherlands, but compared to the vocal internet crowd most people I know who vote on parties left of the political compass worry about climate, animal and human welfare, and inequality. Rarely will someone go all 'woke' and demand changes like this.
Haha, GP specifically assumed US in the first line of his comment and then got responses from the Netherlands and twice from UK. Yeah, it's largely an American phenomenon so far but I wouldn't be too happy about it because American culture exports these things all over the world and Hollywood is among the most woke.
While you're protesting this notion on HN, plenty of your countrymen are learning English from some of the wokest trash on Netflix.
Not your fault, though. Our internal borders are meaningful. We lie to ourselves that they aren’t, and the rest of the world goes with that. Minnesota, Michigan, and Mississippi may as well be different countries for all they have in common.
Whereas US' opinions on foreigners are always balanced, well-nuanced and fair?
I don't see how your sweeping generalisation in the last paragraph adds to the considered discussion here either.
I'm in the UK so maybe it is different, but lately "woke" is anyone that is seen as an enemy of the far right. Including those who are on the right of the spectrum, but just not as far as those throwing the "woke" label around.
I am also in the UK and there is lots of hand-wringing about "the extreme far right" but if you gently probe what people mean by "extreme far right" they mean "Brexit" or "not electing Jeremy Corbyn".
I expect in a few months the term "ultra extreme far right" will enter the lexicon, and we'll keep adding superlatives as the term "right-wing" becomes more and more diluted and gradually encloses the entire population except for a few Momentum die-hards.
Bollocks. For starters, Brexit had support on the far-end of the left, who see the EU too liberal, e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/692f2578-fcbd-11e5-b5f5-070dca6d0... (RMT comes to mind since I work in that sector)
I've certainly seen many outside the Momentum bubble being labelled 'Tory' (e.g. Lib Dems as 'yellow Tories', Blair/Starmer as 'red Tories', etc.), but you're speaking pure hyperbole.
"Extreme far right" is reserved for the likes of NationalFront/BNP/UKIP/BritainFirst/BrexitParty/Reform/whatever they're calling themselves these days (plus their goons like EDL, DFLA, People's Front of Judea, Judean People's Front, etc.)
It saddens me to see this sort of word-muddying (especially on HN), since it makes it easier to deflect this sort of crap:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_UK_Conservative_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia_in_the_UK_Conserv...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Conserv...
(Not forgetting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Labour_... to avoid the knee-jerks; although that's probably not dismissed as 'people call everything "extreme far right" these days')
By putting BNP and UKIP in the same list you have just proved my point.
Is Rustie Lee "ultra extreme far right" in your opinion? https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/documentaries/who-is-rustie-le...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/03/new-ukip-membe...
The previous I'mNotRacistBut Party was UKIP (featuring Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as advisor for racially-charged issues, and denounced as racist 24 years ago by its own founder)
Before that the BNP was scoring a few percent in general elections.
And around and around it goes, all the way back to Mosley's blackshirts.
Of course, Farage himself may denounce such things:
> I set the party up, she was the administrator that got it set up.
( https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/12/former-ukip... )
Which is an interesting contrast to his remarks when the party was being formed:
> This was Catherine's idea entirely - but she has done this with my full knowledge and my full support.
( https://www.independent.ie/business/brexit/the-new-ukip-nige... )
Friendly reminder that it's very easy, and very common, for racists to disavow their racism when it's expedient to do so (e.g. an extreme example https://youtu.be/zcoYKuoiUrY?t=1568 )
Yeah, the funny thing about the UK is hearing from a country where the center-left party bombed an election precisely because it couldn't throw away its woke wing on two big "woke" issues (Brexit and antisemitism), and hearing that "anyone who's not far-right is woke". Well no. Keir Starmer won his place as head of Labour precisely by his willingness to reject further coalition with the "wokes", when Corbyn had been unwilling to really oppose them at all.
Aside from that, the 2019 election was really a Brexit election. Labour failed to pick a side, and the Conservatives were promising to get Brexit done and were early enough in the negotiations that they could promise it would be a soft brexit or maximum brexit depending on which crowd they thought would hear their comments.
But I was talking about a more agreeable definition of "woke". Many people on the left are very comfortable with this subculture, just like many people on the right are very comfortable with Trump. I very rarely hear people on the left saying anything against the woke culture, so in my mind it's very reasonable to equate or at least strongly affiliate the two.
Yes. The "healthcare pls" meme springs to mind as a trivial, but very widespread, example https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=healthcare%20pls%20...
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
Of course, the woke left views somehow views this as infighting, and somehow trying to primary away more conservative Democrats somehow is not.
This article we are commenting on is an example of this.
Yes, some big names here: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
(cue the no-true-scotsman argument how e.g. Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker or Margaret Atwood aren't really "left").
Many of them have gotten flak for signing it, too.
>" Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?"
Bill Maher is a fairly prominent liberal who has been vehemently anti-woke. This is regular fodder on his Friday night HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher as well in his regular standup comedy.
I know of quite a few prominient anti-woke left-leaning people in the UK: Helen Pluckrose, Andrew Doyle, Nick Cohen, Kathleen Stock, and so on.
(but neither side seems to know the other has even that little bit in common)
There's a lot of them. But do you really expect them to do it all the time? Disavow every single misinformed but loud person? (Why don't you actively speak against Ted Bundy - are you supporting serial killers?)
For example I can argue with my mom who says she's a feminist because women are better than men. Or I can spend that time preparing a lesson for the local programming club for kids. Why would I choose the first option? Who would benefit?
Disavowing Trump is massively different - a single, elected person with power. Taking that position and bringing it to their local representatives would be worth the effort.
Amongst the more left leaning people I know there was a hugely negative attitude towards the CNN/MSNBC style coverage of the past 4 years that fixated on Trump and conspiracy theories and gotcha stories.
Every side is gonna be smeared, it's much more important to look at what they're actually trying to offer people. And offering nothing but vague platitudes tends to be worse than offering lies, as Hillary's pretty vapid 2016 campaign showed. This move by github seemed to bring more attention to them working with ICE and the like than anything else that I could see.
$15 min wage was super popular in Florida, Trump won Florida by a significant margin. Had the dems actually offered this obviously popular thing and stood by it that state could've turned out very differently as it'd force Trump to take a side on something that mattered to people.
The best I've seen is sentiments along the lines of "yeah that's overkill" which is about equivalent to what fiscal conservatives and libertarians were saying about the moralizing christian right back when those clowns ran the show.
People don't generally speak out against people who make their positions look like a reasonable middle ground. Woke crap makes basically every mainstream left position look reasonable by comparison so of course they don't want it to die. It makes them look good.
Of course we shouldn’t. That’s not how any of us should think about other people.
The way to improve things is to speak "truth to power", and the moral way to do it is to always "punch upwards".
I've been riling against Trump, Bannon & Co for the past 4 years. Before that I've been vocal about Obama's reign of terror, his broken promises of closing gitmo, and his drone wars. No doubt in my next 4 years I'll be hurling insults against Biden.
There is no need to add disclaimers or enumerating all things that a comment doesn't stand for. Doing so not only makes for "boring reading" but also looks like the person feels very insecure.
Yes. The majority of them are performative liberals.
>Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?
Yes. There is infighting to an extent but it's really not hard to find leftist critiques of what you call woke culture.
>If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it.
I highly doubt bad faith actors would care about what people on the left are doing. Sure hasn't stopped you from mischaracterizing them all this while.
>You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding as to who "the left" are. The majority of actual (not what passes for American left) leftists will agree that disowning "Trump and his crowd" is the same kind of performative wokeness that you accuse liberals of. Disowning and denouncing for appearances does nothing because it doesn't tackle the root cause that allowed a movement like Trump's or the larger right to come to power.
The general population publicly expressing their honest moderate views and opposing the extremes is not "for appearances". It's the core of what's missing in today's public debate, dominated by far left/right activists, bot farms, and personalities/celebs.
My point is, the (American) left is justly associated with wokeness because they are its primary visible supporters. Maybe it's because those on the left who don't support it just don't speak up, in which case, my message is: please do. I'm not just going to assume your existence.
It's an easy way to discredit your political opponent.
Also, i am sightly offended when people call the Democrats "left". I've talked to a real "leftist" (and by that i mean, sightly left on european political board), he felt forced to join the democrat to have a shot at a representative position, and some support for his flyers, but he agreed with my broth: the democrat would be barely center in europe.
And honestly, the far right and the conventionnal right have only themselves to blame for the right of the woke/cancel culture. They are the one who started to open up the overton window, they can't start crying when their politicals opponent do the same.
Also, what does "left" in Europe look like? Because I'm surprised to see you say that Democrats in the US "would be barely center in Europe".
The Democrats push for what can at best be termed social democracy, even though real social democracies in Europe would still be to their left after they fulfilled most of their campaign promises. Left right and centre are kind of reductive categorizations but social democracy is left of centre.
As I mentioned, I've seen plenty of this, but with filter bubbles being what they are, it's hard to fault someone for not coming across them enough.
What I'm saying is that it's not that they (we?) don't exist, more like you don't come across us because of xyz reasons that are getting harder and harder to pinpoint as discourse is manipulated each passing day.
I also broadly agree that nuance is missing in the "modern debate", which causes bad faith interpretations like everyone on the left being either "woke police out to cancel everything you love" or "stalinists looking to establish USSRv2" and everyone in the right being "uneducated white people who don't know what's best for them" or outright Nazis. I wanted to push back against this kind of monolithic interpretation, hence my previous comment.
Isn't that really dangerous though?
eg if you're unlucky enough to become targeted by some of the more "out there" people, they can do career-and-effectively-life ending things by blowing it out of proportion, getting it in the media, etc.
There's also the part where conservatives are Masters of Canceling since forever, including things like Hays code.
It's easy to make people who are angry at outgroup not notice they are fleeced.
* Colin Kaepernick and kneelgate
* calls to boycott Starbucks for celebrating an inclusive holiday season, rather than Christmas in particular
* republican voters "cancelling" Mitt Romney and other republicans for being vocally anti-Trump, even though their political principles have not changed
I can think of at least one more serious example that goes beyond just a vocal minority: The long, ongoing fight to teach children about LGBTQ issues in public schools. Teachers can be fired for simply revealing to their students that they have a same-sex partner.
Not long ago, too, was it career-ending for a Hollywood actor to come out publicly as LGBTQ. Ellen comes to mind as an example.
>Colin Kaepernick and kneelgate
Kaepernick wasn't canceled by the right. He just wasn't the best player out there and didn't get onto another team. He now is making millions from Nike and other deals all without playing the game. If this is what be canceled is like I would gladly sign up.
>calls to boycott Starbucks for celebrating an inclusive holiday season, rather than Christmas in particular
There was an attempt but nothing happened. As far as I know Starbucks' revenue didn't even drop (but I haven't really looked into it). Again a complete failure of a cancellation.
>republican voters "cancelling" Mitt Romney and other republicans for being vocally anti-Trump, even though their political principles have not changed
Romney still has his senate seat and is still on all of the committees he was original on. There is no cancelling here, unless you mean voting out a politician is canceling.
>The long, ongoing fight to teach children about LGBTQ issues in public schools.
This is a bit more complicated. Some people believe it is more than just an objective teaching that LGBTQ people exist and you should treat them as any other person but more of encouraging people to engaging in such behavior. Some people also accuse the schools of focusing on random LGBTQ people or assuming people's sexuality when they weren't married in history class instead of focusing on more important people or just the facts. I don't think I was in school when this was going on so I can't really comment on what it is like.
> Teachers can be fired for simply revealing to their students that they have a same-sex partner.
I have only seen this in private religious schools. In theses cases the teacher agreed to publicly follow the church's teachings and they failed to follow their employment contract. You shouldn't work for a church if you disagree with the church's teachings.
>Ellen comes to mind as an example.
Are you saying Ellen was canceled for being LGBTQ? I am pretty sure she is being attack for being abusive to people who work / worked for her.
Liz Cheney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy have successfully been censured by the GOP, and motions are in progress against the rest that defected from the Trump cult.
The NFL would have almost certainly done it themself since the NFL was losing viewers massively. Just not watching a show is not canceling in my view. If that is the case then almost everybody is canceling almost everything else.
>you might remember someone saying "Get that son of a bitch off the field".
Last I checked Trump can't cancel any NFL player.
>Liz Cheney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy have successfully been censured by the GOP
I agree these are [partial] cancellations, but members of the GOP being censured by the GOP is not really the same as organization you did not choose to be a part of cancelling you.
Can you say anything to demonstrate to me that it really is more than just a vocal minority of people?
Perhaps we have different definitions of "cancel culture"? I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it. I do think the master vs main issue is silly, though. I'm not sure where you draw draw the line between "cancel culture" and "social consequences for toxic / abusive behavior in public".
[0] Religious-right, anyway
You've not met me, but I'm a left-leaning individual who thinks the drama about "cancel culture" is mostly invented.
There's lots of people doing crappy thing on the internet generally and on twitter in particular.
In a world where you can get anonymous death threats for pretty much any reason, I've not seen any evidence that "the left" or "cancel culture" is an actual problem in this regard beyond the baseline of people being nasty when anonymous.
I have seen people, often on both sides of the same issue, point to unpleasant people on the other side and make some kind of argument that "those people" are all crazy. Some of the individual stories are horrifying but I've never found any of them convincing at the level of settling the argument (whichever argument it is invoke in). It's just used as a way to circle the wagons against the other side.
Your position is the same as the ones he's met. That was his point.
For instance the vast majority of working professionals I know don't get themselves regularly involved in political arguments on Twitter, since they see it as unproductive.
So it is simultaneously true that:
* cancel culture is "a thing" on Twitter, in the sense that it's easy to find examples
* cancel culture "doesn't exist", in the sense that no one you are likely to encounter in real life is ok with cancelling people for tweets they made as a teenager
Since I have you here, would you mind elaborating a bit more about your stance on "cancel culture"? I'll also elaborate a bit more on my stance.
I think most people would agree that mobs by definition have no united agenda. It's a bunch of disorganized people with their own goals and motivations who all briefly get fired up about the same topic. Twitter mobs are a tornado of confirmation bias, where people in echo chambers spin up hot takes of current events to confirm their own worldview. The amount of meaningful debate that can be had in 280-character chunks is negligible.
When people talk about "cancel culture", my impression is not that they think there is any sort of coordinated attack on right-leaning figures by prominent left-leaning figures -- only fringe conspiracy theorists believe that George Soros is sending out weekly lists of names that should be "cancelled" this week.
It's that they believe Twitter is a place which has developed a culture of criticizing and ridiculing other users, public figures especially. I think it's undeniable that any time a public figure missteps, a vocal minority of people (e.g. angsty teenagers) on Twitter calls for the person to be fired or otherwise deplatformed, even before they have a chance to respond. Some people also receive death threats.
So, I don't think it's unreasonable to label that sort of behavior as "cancel culture". To me, it clearly exists, but there is room for debate about how prevalent it is, as well as how good vs bad it is.
I think we agree that "cancel culture" is not as prevalent as Fox / MSNBC would have their viewers believe. Twitter magnifies the opinions of their angry users to drive engagement, and then news organizations pick it up to serve one political narrative or the other.
Personally, I have seen many positive examples of public figures being called out for toxic or abusive behavior, and I'm all in favor. Louis CK was "cancelled" for extremely-scummy-but-not-necessarily-illegal behavior. Heck, #metoo is all about cancelling rapists, and that's a good thing! I also think that the JK Rowling controversy was for good cause, and led to both productive [1,2] and unproductive public discussion.
However, to me, the whole master vs main debate is silly. I don't see it as a driver of positive change.
[1] Contrapoints, "JK Rowling" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us) [2] Contrapoints, "Cancelling" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8)
It is interesting you call it the "master vs main" debate. The problem is the combination of the words master and slave. You - maybe unconsciously - left the word slave out.
And there is not really a debate. I do not believe anybody was bullied to change that. It was a decision that was made independently. And now in the aftermath people shout about it as if it is utterly impossible that this could have happened without some mobbing or a big "culture" that made this a unjust decision. Because: "I know not a single adult that like that change." Well, maybe the majority likes it. The majority just does not participate in online discussions, so it's invisible. Hard to tell.
> I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it.
That is cancel culture.. its just not an example of cancel culture run amuck which is what the problem has always been, not cancel culture itself which is widely accepted by most people for the most egregious behaviors.
Mitt Romney was not attacked for not representing conservative/republican values, but for going against a mob/cult (of personality). That is as "cancelling" as it gets, regardless if it leads to him being voted out in Utah or not.
He is not ostracized in the way I would consider it. As far as I know Republicans still work with him, are willing to let him sponsor bills, etc. My understanding is he is still invited to Republican lunches as well.
I think we are working with two different understandings of cancellation. He will almost certainly lose his next election though.
>he was good enough to be president
Well not good enough since he lost to Obama. Just because you win a primary doesn't mean the majority actually supports you.
>so something else must have changed.
I think people forgot what his views were. People have nostalgia and remembered they thought he was better than Obama which turned him into a more mainstream conservative in their mind. I think there are other things at play like Romney being a Morman and also having name recognition.
My point was specifically that this wasn't the case here. Maybe you misread a negative in my comment.
If you say it's not cancel culture when a majority of people change their mind about someone, then you're saying that almost by definition cancelling is when a small minority of people have the power to deplatform someone who missteps. So, it's not accurate to say that "the left is ok with cancel culture" (for instance) since only a small group of people are going it who are not representative of the larger population.
Which right are you talking about?
Seeding wrong ideas in what seems to be a neutral context is not nice™.
To switch things around for perspective:
"There's nothing wrong with being white and you should be proud of your race."
Yep, if a black person told me this it would be patronizing, and if a white person told me this I'd assume they're racist. Swap white for black in my quote, and it's what the white community in the US is effectively telling the black community, if not in such obvious terms.
It's precisely because of systematic racism that we white people get to share our "sage advice" on how to combat racism, while being almost totally ignorant on the subject. It's proof of privilege and hideously condescending.
For context, I am neither black nor American, I have little time for woke virtue-signalling and fake outrage, but I do want to be properly respectful of others whose background and sensitivities aren't necessarily like my own. With that in mind, I often find socially acceptable terminology around race confusing.
For example, take the word "color". I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable, nor why one of the most prominent advocacy groups still uses the former term in its name. There is so much unconstructive commentary about this particular example that it's hard to figure out what the relevant history and genuine sensitivities are here. Can you enlighten me?
Black people in America are from many different cultures and are simply people that noticed that they had a shared experience of being excluded from institutions and even entire states.
The terminology simply comes from individuals taking initiative in the moment and saying "they treat everyone that looks like us all the same and we need umbrella terms to acknowledge our shared circumstance so that its easy to refer to ourselves". Other non-black people already had terms for us and these terms were typically also used in the pejorative. Many people consider "black" to be an affliction even today. So what you have is that some black people reject those older terms, some people try to repurpose and "take back" those older terms, some people create new terms, most terms are still in use.
These aren't scientific terms, but they do permeate into academia to convey a shared concept. So there isn't much to read into it except learning what the consensus is, and the history of why it is. But trying to merge it into the lexicon based on pattern recognition with other words will only confuse you.
but lets look at your example source of cognitive dissonance, NAACP:
The NAACP has done historically monumental things on behalf of a group of very different people that were being excluded as if they were the same. It comes from a different era and different motivated individuals taking initiative. It predates a different individual pushing “African American” much later on. That predates such rampant subsequent immigration and population growth in the US where enough people find African American to be so ambiguous to the point of ridiculous, while there are many slave descendants that take pride in the term and make it their whole identity (or have it forced on them like many black people in other English speaking countries with no American parents, this is particularly comical to me), whereas others who may also be slave descendants adopt black American or other adjectives and identifiers. With the NAACP there is no utility in changing that acronym and no need to or drive to, like a landmark. It wouldn’t surprise me if they arbitrarily did change the name on their own, but there is no talk or consensus amongst its beneficiaries to do so (unlike other landmarks).
Well, yes, this is how the group forms in the first place. It's made up of people who don't have an identity in common other than the one that's forced upon them of "non-white" by the white people discriminating against them.
Note that in countries which aren't white-majority you don't generally get a group of people holistically identifying as "people of colour", even if the same ethnicities would do so in the US. Instead you get different forms of racial discrimination.
Similarly LGBT+ merges a group of people with very different identities and practices, the primary thing they have in common is receiving the same kind of abuse from the same people.
Scott Alexander explains this as a way for upper-class people to maintain their privileges: "The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying "colored people" is horrendously offensive but saying "people of color" is the only way to dismantle white supremacy."[0]
[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-...
“Indeed, what is acceptable for white people to call African Americans and for black people to call themselves has evolved over the last century. The standard term has shifted from “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “African American” as people sought to redefine themselves and their place in America.
Now, in 2020, “people of color” often is used to refer to the collective group of non-white Americans. It is offensive to single blacks out as “colored.” That, in part, is because of the painful segregationist history associated with the term prior to the mid-1960s. “Colored-only” restrooms and water fountains are examples of harmful relics of the Jim Crow South that black people had to fight, and die, to remove from American culture.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/dahleen-glanton/ct-da...
Scott Alexander's hypothesis explains all of that. Constant change is what makes fashion fashion, and fashion is a very effective way to discriminate between the in-group and the out-group.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/30/295931070...
Oh this is a good short summary of the era
but really the web amplified the tendency to look and speak in shallow settings
it's like morals on the map versus the territory
Take a minute to reflect back on what happened.
People that werent going to do anything meaningful, but still wont. Except now they wear black and blue versions of the American flag in a specific counter protest.
While the actual person of color has to listen to your ilk proclaim rewriting the language is so progressive and for that person no matter what their life experience has been, and also wonder about how much the “silent” people resent them because they think it’s we’re going to cancel them.
Hope that people can further refine how the energy and sentiment is directed. I feel like we’re close, but people are still so out of touch.
Malcolm X was a communist---pretty sure that's about as far leftist as you can get.
Of course, our media is run by billionaires so they capitalize on the identity politics to divide everyone and avoid having any real debate about economic policy, which is the only thing that really matters.
I would so much rather be debating about the best way to roll out UBI than whether to call something "main" or "master".
Economic incentives don't change people's minds, they motivate them to double-down on their biases.
What I'm saying is that if Fox and CNN (for instance) devoted the same air time to good-faith debate about the causes for, impact of, and solutions to wealth inequality and our changing socioeconomic landscape as they do reading Twitter comments live on air, we might be in a better position than we are today.
See: Rodger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Bill and David Koch
They want you constantly thinking about race instead of thinking about wealth inequality.
They want you constantly fighting with your fellow workers instead of forming unions.
Basically all large, multinational corporations now make their company logo rainbow for pride month, and all release the same sounding official statements about racial inequality on a regular basis, etc. etc.
It's almost impossible to find a large corporation that doesn't do this now. And their statements are so bland and generic that they are almost all identical, and completely interchangeable.
I like that you quote it there.
I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US. It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
In the US, if you are generally more aligned with the democratic party but see some changes you disagree fundamentally with, you either suck it up or give up your ideals and switch to the complete opposite (republican party).
Just look at COINTELPRO for example, that's what happens.
Although there’s still the CPUSA, PSL and even the DSA.
However the confinement of the current democratic system in the USA today simply doesn’t allow for third parties to gain national traction. There are mathematical models that proves this fact. For the real left to get socialist parties to the national assembly some democratic reforms needs to happen first.
There are. The Democratic Socialists of America has grown a lot over the past few years. They even managed to get four member elected Congress this last election cycle.
It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
I have no evidence, but I suspect McCarthyism and the following hard crackdown on leftists that followed during the cold war greatly slowed down this "natural" growth. It took a generation removed from the cold war for this growth to start up again.
Edit: equality+equity.
With the rise of Bernie Sanders and a new generation of people getting into socialist and left wing politics, it became quite a bit broader and larger and vibrant. And my impression is it became of a centre of gravity for other left tendencies in the US to coalesce.
There's quite a few different groupings in there these days. I don't think you can make a broad generalization like you did here.
They're more concerned about trigger words and identity politics than dismantling capitalism.
Democratic Socialists, Social Liberals, NeoLibs, and NeoCons(because of the Republican party's shift to the right) are all stuck under one party, so the biggest group controls the entire thing.
Do you think that there's a difference with using "master" for the main branch vs using "blacklist" for stuff you don't want in your system? Or are they equally non-offensive to you?
"allowlist", "blocklist", "denylist", whatever. They all mean something. I know that "blacklist" is used in a number of areas (blacklisted authors etc.), and I don't have much trouble understanding it there, but those uses also come with a whole set of connotations that don't necessarily apply to lists of URLs or whatever. It's a stretch too far for my brain to be able to hop over without thinking it through.
(For the record, I'm also all in for "false alarm" in place of false positive, and "missed bug"/"undetected flaw" for false negative in the context of static analysis where it makes sense.)
it is part of an effort of acknowledging that things white are seen as good or less bad, and things black are seen as bad and worse, and this is consistent across the language
this particular approach of extrapolating that towards skin color and ethnicity is just as misguided
but I could have seen it coming: when I’ve used the words in context before, it becomes clear people have had race on their mind the entire conversation that they try to make a poor joke about the irony of me using those words. Seemingly for their own comfort.
Not exactly what I would call privilege, in America.
You equate the few radicals that see some issue there with all 'on the left' which is presumably 50% of any population.
Similar to veganism: the joke is that vegans are all very vocal about being vegan. But reality is that you simply don't notice all the ones that aren't vocal about it and silently love their lives or focus on other issues. Its just an issue of availability bias [2].
> Traditionally, Zwarte Piet is black because he is a Moor from Spain. However, since the late twentieth century the common explanation of Zwarte Piet's blackness has been that it is due to the soot on his body acquired during his many trips down the chimneys of the homes he visits. Those portraying Zwarte Piet usually put on blackface and colourful Renaissance attire in addition to curly wigs and bright red lipstick. In recent years, the character has become the subject of controversy.
As in, it isn’t an inaccurate criticism. It would be nice if the various camps just acknowledged their criticisms based on accuracy.
Yes, a few predictably present radicals does make it an accurate criticism. It would be more difficult to predict this kind of behavior from people identifying as “the right”. They do other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the latter, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the former that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform.
> It's not pervasive corruption that's to blame, it's the evil culture of people not like you and their corrupt representatives!
We have this where I live, but thankfully we also enjoy a fair amount of mobility; it's less common to be entirely surrounded by those who vote the same as you, and most ridings have flipped between two or three parties over the coarse of most constituent's lifetimes. While the ethnic diversity of the ridings has generally increased over the same time.
Americans could use more political diversity; you're choosing between neocons and neoliberals, and fighting visciously against each other to do so.
The best thing a company can do the way I see it is to _dedicate_ a cut of regular profit to a black charity. Like, on a regular basis.
Money can affect serious change in the right “hands”.
JUST MOVE MONEY TO BLACK CHARITIES OR ASSOCIATIONS. ITS CALLED DIVISION OF LABOR. Then, do your best to be inclusive intentionally. That’s the answer IMO.
The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.
I read about the GitHub name change, then completely forgot about it until I saw this HN thread. At the time I think I asked our internal Git guru if this was going to change anything, and he said don't worry about it.
My concern is that a few gaffes from here and there are combined into some unifying characteristic of my "wing," when most people simply take little or no notice of them.
Oftentimes simply being talking in public gains otherwise obscure or even unhelpful views traction simply by being available.
Seems another good reason to “walk away from the left” if even their apparently sincere projects keep backfiring like that.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...
The most important word in the term "African Americans", to me, is, "AMERICANS". You're in this with us. You're our friends, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. We're in this TOGETHER. And this woke-ism bullshit is just that: bullshit.
Changing a primary branch name from "master" to "main" isn't solving the damn problem. Execs want to do this to earn PR points and wash their hands of the issue of a lack of representation and equality in the industry as a result. It's cheaper than actually giving a shit. But the reality is that socioeconomic barriers to entry into high paying STEM roles amongst our African AMERICAN friends/colleagues is a very real problem that needs to be addressed on both a cultural and economic level.
Ya'll are every damn bit as capable as the rest of us and I'm fucking tired of seeing you thrown under the bus in this industry, especially under the guise of "woke"-ism. It's time we start tearing down these PR stunts as the falsehoods that they are and insist on real, monetary, quantifiable and results-driven investments in black communities that are damn well deserved.
And to my colleagues in the industry that are non-black (especially white): it's time we stand up and "get their back" for our black friends, colleagues and family members. We're in this together, and it's well past time we stand up for our fellow Americans. This bullshit charade needs to stop and WE have the power to move things forward into an era of REAL representation and fairness, and as such we have a RESPONSIBILITY to do it. Enough talk - it's time to act.
Unfortunately this export from America is starting to take root in Europe.
Anyone born in New York is American, not everyone born in London is British.
The empire caused all sorts of citizenships to appear; citizens of the Empire were "British" right up until the point where they actually started moving to Britain, causing that right to be taken away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Ugand...
The faction of people that don't believe you are British if you aren't white has to be minority of people. Most of the people that may have brought up the subject are in their Winter years now. Pretending that Enoch Powell is still popular is a nonsense and tbh is nothing more than virtue signalling IME.
While I do see your point (not British myself, but in Switzerland we had a few ISIS cases as well), I'd like to offer a different viewpoint as well: Our countries messed up at some point in their life - education, mental healthcare support, whatever; something went wrong when one of our citizens feels obliged to join something as heinous as ISIS. After all, we also feel like that with every other terrible criminal - murderers, rapists, etc.; our societies believe in their right to find the right path again, why not someone who joins ISIS?
She's the perfect example. If a full on British person like Nigel Farage does a heinous crime (or make it apples to apples, he joins ISIS) would they take his citizenship away?
If she was born in the US, it would be unthinkable.
The case went through all the legal proceeding and she is not allowed back in the UK. Good!
> If she was born in the US, it would be unthinkable.
If they were born in the US, they would have just been assassinated by drone strike instead like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki.
A lot of ISIS members came back, they faced persecution, some even death sentence but none had their citizenship stripped.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-k-strips-citizenship-is...
> If they were born in the US, they would have just been assassinated by drone strike instead like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki.
Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.
Well they shouldn't have been let back in anyway. I also have no sympathy for a woman that said she felt nothing when she saw severed heads (of people executed by ISIS). Also there are claims that she enforced some of the Sharia laws and wasn't a passive member of the Caliphate.
She revoked her citizenship when she left.
> Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.
No there is a different legal treatment for people that join a rogue state which literally wants to destroy yours. I don't care about these people. Her supporters can cry racism all they want, It isn't racism. We don't want terrorists back in the country.
The citizenship concept is a requirement for modern life. If a person has their citizenship revoked, what are they to do?
They are illegal where they are, and they are illegal where they go. To my knowledge, there's no processes in any country for becoming a citizen without a preexisting citizenship from another country.
Back to this specific example, if she had wanted to come back and denounce ISIS; what should the UK offer her?
What about if she wanted to come back and face trial; what should the UK offer her?
In the end, just to point out the obvious, revoking citizenship is completely unneeded. If she comes back, charge her with her crimes. If she travels, extradite her. If she stays, let the leopards eat her face.
It is an American import and it is absurd. It also causes division. e.g Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross. I've seen a lot of guys in working man's pubs get quite angry and this sort of resentment is always hand waived away as "racism" when that isn't the problem at all.
Many developers don't spend time with the lower classes / those that aren't university educated which have to deal with the worse parts of immigration. They only see the positive aspects of it.
BTW the same happens with the British in the South of Spain btw. The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.
I'm actually sympathetic to your views, and feel strongly that immigrants should respect and participate in the host culture as much as possible. That requires effort on both sides, of course, and the blame doesn't always lie with the host Western culture as is often unfairly characterised.
My only point was that I don't see that maintaining a link to your heritage and cultural/ethnic distinctiveness as _necessarily_ incompatible with assimilating and participating fully into the host nation and enriching it in the process. This isn't an argument for neoliberal multiculturalism by the way, which I view as mostly a policy disaster, that hurts the working classes and immigrants the most.
No that's absolutely racism.
> The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.
This is also their racism.
A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.
> No that's absolutely racism.
Why? Care to explain? I never mentioned the race many weren't white btw that were making a similar complaint.
> This is also their racism.
So Spanish people who are basically white are being racist against other white people? Is that what you mean? That isn't racism.
Or British (not all British people are white) are people being racist against Spanish people? Or are you using Hitler's definition of what "white" is which means Northern European.
Either way this is non-sensical.
> A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.
What are you on about? Nobody said anything about that. I said there are people in Spain that are English that don't assimilate with the local population which is Spanish.
This old nonsense. This is the problem people like you will constantly bring up the past and won't let anyone forget about it. None of the people that were involved with that are alive today. Also BTW every country and people have invaded and colonised one another if you go far back enough in time. Are we going to start blaming the Italians for Caesar massacring the Celts and the Gauls? When do you want to stop? 50, 100, 500, 1000 years?
> I suspect your xenophobia is a personal foible, not a British sensibility
When did I claim I had a problem with people having another flag up? I didn't say that. I said the labourers in the pub tend to and it has nothing to do with xenophobia (which is you basically euphemism calling them/me racist btw).
If you re-read my comment I actually said that someone would just claim it was racism and not actually try to understand what the real issue is. You did exactly that and you didn't even direct it at the right person. You can never have a sensible discussion about these issues because mid-wits will scream racism almost as it were some Pavlovian reaction.
BTW I am actually a xeno-phile. I actually have lived all over the globe and have only recently come back to the UK.
> Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross.
That's not anti-foreign culture, but it is insulting to be born in the UK and not see it as your homeland. Or would you be okay with me raising a British flag in India and claiming I was British, if my parents happened to move there before I was born?
> Your insistence that foreigners can't continue to identify with their own culture while also embracing a new one is aptly described as xenophobia.
Nope. I never insisted that at all. I never even mentioned foreigners. You keep on twisting what I am trying to explain and trying to pervert it into something you wish it to be.
I said that this sub dividing people in the *same nationality* by *race* is an American import to the UK (and from what some of my Belgian and French friends have told me) a import into some parts of Europe as well. It isn't typically done in the UK, France, Belgium and I suspect it is the same in many of the other European countries.
Then I said that working class labourers (not all of them white btw) don't like it when 2nd/3rd or 4th generation immigrants aren't patriotic or don't try to assimilate (like their parents did). I then said these concerns / complaints will always get hand-waived away by people as "racism" when the real problem is a feeling of disrespect. Just like you have.
It got nothing to do with xenophobia as the people I am talking about are British.
> If you want to have a sensible discussion, lets start by engaging with what is actually said instead of what we wish was said.
I do. So if you could actually respond to what I said and refrain from this behaviour (which you are now accusing me of) that would be great. Pointing the finger at me, when it is actually you is disingenuous.
How HN works is that commenters need to resist provocation and focus on substantive, thoughtful discussion no matter how divisive the topic is. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. This is something we're working on learning to do as a community. Most commenters in this thread are demonstrating that it is possible. Accounts that fuck with that process by casually setting fires or stoking them are particularly harmful, so please don't do that here.
In terms of whether an article is on topic, the criterion is not "might someone take it as flamebait", but "is it intellectually interesting and substantive enough to support thoughtful discussion". More explanation about that if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
Some of it is imported, but the UK is quite capable of its own characteristically British racism, most recently directed against Poles and Romanians.
Tell that to the Balkans.
Europe has the same problems the US does just spread across fewer skin tones.
In our secular societies you are what your nationality is and your race is irrelevant (or should be considered to be) in the eyes of the state and in the UK it is considered rude to bring up someone's race (other than identifying them).
I will accept that we aren't perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good. Bringing up areas of Europe which I obviously wasn't referring to and have been politically unstable for decades now is disingenuous and simply missing the overall point to be a smartass.
Yes, but
> You are your nationality.
Only if you're a nationalist. Many believe in cross-national or non-national collective identities, e.g. the identity of being a wage worker.
In other cases - it's groups oppressed by the state. The Catalan and Basque come to mind; and there are the Roma ("gypsies"), who are not territorially-defined.
etc.
Nope. That is how the law and the state sees it.
Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.
I never claimed there were Romanians Europeans living in France. I claimed that if you were happened to be Black and British you were still seen as simply British (until relatively recently). The same is generally true in other parts of Northern Europe as well, I have discussed this with Belgians, Germans and Frenchmen online and they all tell me similar things.
I am complaining that this nonsense of saying you are a White <Nationality> or a Chinese <Nationality> or Black <Nationality> idea has been imported from America. It doesn't make sense here.
> "African American" isn't solely about skin color, but also about a shared history, migration path, acculturation, and regional population concentration. It's as much a valid "sub-nationality" of American as "Midwestern" or "Californian".
I don't care what they do in the USA. That is their business. It isn't a thing here and it shouldn't be. Just because we speak English in the UK, doesn't mean we are like Americans.
> Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.
I understand this and never claimed the opposite.
Why is race necessary or useful in the same way?
Thanks to EU freedom of movement, that is absolutely what you do have.
Are we at the point where we need to announce our skin colour so that can be the basis of judgment of our comments now?
And you chose to only call out the white person? Do I even need to point out the irony of this?
If you define "left" as anything "not far right" then, yeah, ok, of course it's going to include a bunch of liberals who are not interested in any real structural change in the political-economic system and so are obsessed instead with changing how people speak.
So I just don't use the word anymore if I can. I'm not "left wing", I'm a socialist... Unfortunately "socialist" also seems to mean something weird to many Americans, too. (That anybody could with a straight face call Obama or Biden socialist just boggles my mind...)
I don't agree with their philosophy as I believe it to be unrealistic but their criticisms and descriptions of what the state is and isn't is valid and why some call it socialist may make more sense to you. Hans Herman Hoppe (I am sure someone will quote mine him to smear him after I've mentioned him and haven't read any of this books) even called Democracy a soft form of communism.
I don't know how anyone can make this statement with a straight face. What about ObamaCare?
If it is redistributing wealth, it's socialist. Taking taxpayer money from person A and paying it out as a subsidy (even if laundered through a private company) to benefit person B is socialism.
Anytime you are redistributing wealth under the threat of the government's right to licit first use of force, you're engaging in socialism.
What you're describing is socialism as defined by its libertarian intellectual opponents, and that's a pretty broad definition (any taxation followed by spending is socialism? That's pretty odd... so all military and police forces are socialist?)
So, fine, if that's what you choose to believe, but it's certainly not a policy proposal that is advocated by actual socialists. Even the soft left wing of the Democratic party found/finds the ACA objectionable.
In fact it's explicitly the kind of policy that liberals advocate in order to avoid socialist policy measures and to avoid being called socialists.
That's communism, a specific flavor of socialism.
There are many variations discussed in the article. What you should look for are the market varieties of socialism, especially the ones where the objective is to achieve socialism by following peaceful mechanisms of achieving socialistic goals instead of achieving socialism via revolution.
The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your own snarky comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.
Just a thought.
this person is referring to a dichotomy in the black American slave caste, where people that worked in the fields were considered different than people that worked inside the house. the adjectives being "house negro/n**r".
It is used to invalidate the opinions of someone proclaimed as "black" that doesn't have consensus with a community that is pretending to be amorphous.
There have always been black Americans privileged enough to choose causes like any other American, while being lumped into the identity politics from all factions of the country. Even Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail (1953) references this.
I don't speak for anyone, and I am aware of black American people in my life that did bring up the "master/slave" terminology in computing as problematic and offputting and insensitive. The people in my life are of an older generation than me. The github issue, as this article points out, does not have a "slave" context only a master. To some that doesn't make a difference.
I am speaking for myself and like I said I agree with what the person in London wrote.
"Microsoft stops selling software to American police departments" is a good response to BLM. "Microsoft changes 'master branch' to 'main branch'" is pointless deckchair-reshuffling that signifies nothing.
By applauding the change of a noun that has the most tangential possible relationship with slavery, aren't you letting them off the hook of doing anything substantive?
?!?
It basically means a "house slave" that was well-treated and is therefore sympathetic to or on the side of the white man. The anytonym is "field n-word", a slave that worked in the fields, which I probably heard more often as people sometimes identify as that term. E.g., if a guy is talking to his buddy who has a nice ("cadillac") job situation, he might say "I'm just a field n-word."
What do you mean? It looks like Trump got a higher percentage of black votes in 2020 than 2016. The change is larger than Hispanic votes even:
Displays of misplaced white guilt like this - while bizarre psychologically - don't really harm or help anything.
Oh wait no I don't, because feeling shame or accomplishment for something your ancestors did hundreds of years ago that you had zero control over is a completely ridiculous concept.
It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate.
For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, watching people be vicariously offended without asking if context in question is offensive, and the obsession with signaling instead of meaningful action.