First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior. I think their attempt to cast this as “political” is deeply cynical; discussing how people behave at work will always be in bounds, even if it touches up against issues that are politicized. The initial trigger here was a discussion about the list of “funny names”; there’s no easy way to sweep that under the rug as off topic, since it’s explicitly at-work behavior.
Second, they did an end run around the employees. Announcing the policy to the world, and implying that the Basecamp workforce was having a problem focusing on their jobs was an asshole move destined to blow up in their face. Nobody likes feeling crapped on by their boss, especially not in public like that.
Honestly, it didn’t have to be about politics. Treating employees like that, especially ones with options, is typically not going to go well.
Fourth, they retaliated against employees by taking away benefits in the most humiliating way possible, via the aforementioned disastrous public blog post.
And yet, people are still going to bat for them because...I don't know. It seems like a lot of people have a religious faith in the decision-making capabilities of men like DHH and JF. Seems like it might be related to some of the issues employees tried to raise internally.
I can think of a reason. To protect employees who are not part of the woke mob from being “canceled” by the woke mob.
This goes well beyond 'consequences'. its being used as a weapon against people you disagree with or are just political enemies and the end result is thugs and bullies gaining power that didnt earn it and dont deserve it.
The current state of politics bled into this. There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture. It wasn't about what was appropriate or not and then handling it. The discussion went far beyond that.
> Second, they did an end run around the employees.
This was really surprising to me. I thought they would have posted publicly after all the employees had learned about this. This is poor change management within the company and a lesson I hope they learn.
Classic and indisputable example might be Germany in WW2. It wasn’t like citizens woke up and immediately decided that genocide was okay; they slowly were worked into finding it acceptable and palatable as a measure to endorse.
It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.
A name like, say, "Fuk Yo" is accidentally similar to the English "Fuck you". It's kinda funny in a childish way, but I don't think that making fun of it automatically implies that they think these people are of lesser value. i.e. I don't think it's automatically racism in the first place.
It's inappropriate because making fun of your customers is never a good idea, and it's also inconsiderate and impolite. But that's not the same thing as racism, or evidence of white supremacy.
And maybe some employees who worked on that list were racist; there is no way for us to know. I like to opt for a more good-faith interpretation, which seems very uncommon these days.
The idea that this would "escalate" from a simple list to actual racism seems unlikely. Everyone knows the difference.
Also, the holocaust was a lot more complicated than this "pyramid" lets on. The Nazis took power by force, in some exceptional circumstances, and the Holocaust wasn't widely known among the German people. It's overly simplistic at best.
> It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.
I have never seen a single "slippery slope" argument that I found convincing, including this one. In every single case I've seen everyone is acutely aware of the difference between A and B. I don't consider it an argument, I consider it a fallacy.
Racism is the air we breathe. I grew up around mostly white kids, and there is undeniably more fear amongst those kids (myself included) when interacting with black people than with white people. It seems similarly undeniable that affluent white people are more afraid of african american people when its dark out than they are of other white people. When a black person applies to a job, their blackness is not neutral. It seems to me that most people have underlying feeling about blackness, and that people of color have to contend with that when they're going through their lives.
I'm not saying there aren't problems; I just don't see the connection between something like this list and the actual problems, and I certainly don't see a good reason for some of the strong and bold claims that are made about it.
I've read a fair number of books on helping things through change. The pyramid being put where it was seemed like a bad idea the moment I read it. The way it was responded to is something I would have expected.
There is a lesson here. If you want to bring about change in others it's about leading them rather than saying what you want to say.
I don't find it challenging to make that argument at all.
"Laughing at names leads to genocide" to me implies that laughing at names is a necessary and sufficient condition to a genocide.
The pyramid of hate, to me, implies that laughing at names is a necessary but not sufficient condition of genocide.
Therefore showing the pyramid of hate does not imply that laughing at names leads to genocide, as it lacks the sufficiency condition.
Not so hard to argue.
Please don't create accounts to do that.
I can point to numerous people being killed by calls to action around abortion.
I think that's a misinterpretation of what that graphic is trying to convey. The point isn't that people and groups that exhibit behavior at the bottom of the pyramid are on the march to genocide. It's that there's a spectrum of bigotry and discrimination, and each level of it that is tolerated enables worse behavior. It doesn't mean every situation is going to get to the level of mass-killings.
Normalizing bigoted behavior encourages more bigoted behavior. The same way that normalizing managers who scream and yell at people often leads to others becoming more openly belligerent or otherwise creates a toxic workplace.
You might feel the illustration is incendiary, sure, but I think coming down as hard as they did on it to a pretty valid concern of "hey maybe no funny names list" did no favors to those concerned, and subsequently doubling and tripling down on it has really really not helped.
No, it's a class thing. Among unionised labour work has always been a political battlefield. What's new is that you know have a politically activist group of people within upper middle class white collar jobs who, traditionally were conservative in temperament because they were materially well off.
Professionals whose values do not align with their management have figured out that they actually have influence, and the top 1-10% have noticed that they can actually press the top 0.1% if they want to.
When in the history of the US has racial inequality not been an inherently political topic? At its founding, the statement "all men are created equal" was highly contentious.
When it was turned into one by politicians and activists, just like masks were.
I'm a firm believer that if you actually sit a few people down and try to have a sane conversation where people actually talk and don't spout slogans, you find that their views aren't all that different, then just put emphasis and importance on slightly different things, and have been presented with subsets of the facts that emphasize those preferences.
The problem is, we're going on a few decades of a concerted effort to confuse and separate us based on language, and specifically meaning of words. What used to be camps choosing words that placed their views in a beneficial light (pro-life vs pro-choice, for example), has moved to very purposefully continuing to use the same words on both sides but to re-frame them to mean something entirely different than intended by that side. For example, Black Lives Matter and how it literally means different things to different people, regardless of the originators intentions and protestations.
Information silos allow this to happen. If you can exert control over the information environment, you can change the definition of words, and then people can't even communicate correctly any more. That's a real goal of those that wield political power. Moderate is just another name for someone dangerously close to being a swing voter to them, so promoting enough animosity that even things overtly against your own interest are seen as the lesser of two evils is a winning strategy.
Lest you think I'm talking about the left or the right, they both do it. And lest you think "sure, but one side does it more", no, they both do it so egregiously that the difference does not matter, and all you're seeing is the effect of Knoll's law in action. Make no mistake about it, you're getting screwed from both sides. That you tell yourself that your side is the more sane one is just the fiction that lets you sleep at night (and hopefully that's all it's doing, and not empowering you to be a complete asshole to people just as screwed over as you are).
"Politicians and activists" obviously didn't politicize masks. No coherent reading of the last 2 years supports that conclusion.
It was the screeching Republican base, who decided on day one that the masks were a symbol of government overreach and I guess got Covid to own the libs.
The base is multiple tens of millions of people spread across the entire United States and in many socioeconomic strata. The only time anything gets as widespread acceptance by even a portion of the base like the mask thing is because a narrative was being pushed that most of the base was exposed to. That used to be a hard thing to do (easier if you could rely on a large religious bloc to see it one way), and now it's a frighteningly easy thing to do. That's the point.
Yes, more or less? I can't think of a single right-wing activist or politician who was truly rabble-rousing for the cause.
I've worked for several companies headquartered out of different regions of the world. The amount of politics at work I've seen has related to where leadership is from.
What other category would you put it in?
Since literally forever.
Like when wasn't it?
This is not about Trump or Obama, that's easily avoided, it's about Identity Politics, which cannot be avoided:
They are arguing over Identity Politics and definitions of privilege.
"“The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”"
The Executive basically stated he doesn't believe the organization or it's culture is rooted in 'White Supremacy' - echoing the aggressive language used nowadays in Critical Race Theory.
The Employee, I believe mischaracterized that statement as 'the denial that racism exists' - which is an unfair, but also pointed out the denial of 'White Priviledge' - which is a valid point to make if one actually believes that.
The argument is existentially problematic - some people believe that groups are not inherently racist, others believe that if there are White executives then the system is inherently racist, going so far as to use terms like 'White Supremacy'.
This 'debate' is raging everywhere right now - schools, public sector, private companies, NGOs etc.
It's hard to rectify because those who don't see systems as overtly or fundamentally racist are challenge by those who do, and those who do, are inclined to believe those that disagree with them are basically evil.
It's a low-grade cultural race war unfortunately, pitting regular people against other regular people, often over some very abstract things, like naming things 'blacklist/whitelist' instead of 'blocklist/playlist' etc..
Second, since you've been using HN primarily for that, we've banned the account. We ban accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology they're battling for, because there's nothing more destructive of the intended use of the site. Not to mention its intended spirit, which is gratifying curiosity, not smiting enemies.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Equality vs hierarchy is literally the core of the difference between right and left, that is the definition of inherently political.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
All: HN's guidelines apply irrespective of whether other people are following them or not. When commenting here, please consider your own behavior first, and make sure it's in the intended spirit.
On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace.
This also doesn't mean that the Basecamp founders are responsible for systemic racism because they had a list of "funny" names and [gasp] employ at least one conservative.
What has happened to everyone? It's like we have taken the social media rage machine and applied it to real life interactions.