"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

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

Edit: it's clear from your comment history that you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for. (Actually a lot of the time we don't know, or care, what they're battling for. We care about HN not becoming a flamewar hell site.) If you would please stop doing that and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044182.

I think the point the OP is making is that an overt statement such as "White power!!1 Jews will not replace us!!!sixonetikitorches" directly exposes a white supremacist opinion, whereas there are less overt actions that, if analysed thoughtfully, also expose white supremacy.

It is very similar to people who say "I'm not racist, I don't think I'm superior to anyone and the dictionary definition of racism is to assume superiority based on race" (this is more or less a direct quote from Pauline Hanson, an Australian Senator who is wildly racist).

What I have found in discussions with people who I think are racist, but who deny it, is that they have an emphasis on personal agency and personal responsibility. So while they might be able to happily have black friends, they see, for example, disparaties in incarceration rates not as a social problem but as an aggregation of personal failures. If one believes that a particular race is, on average, more likely to commit the types of crime for which one should be incarcerated, and one sees incarceration as an "inferior" way of life, then the logical conclusion is that they are racist.

An interesting thing to note about analysing racism this way is that it can also uncover racist attitudes in the very minority populations who are being discriminated against.

Also "defund the police" is a shorthand that typically means "reduce direct law enforcement funding and instead fund other community engagement programs". Of course we need cops, but we don't necessarily need them all armed to the teeth in riot gear showing up for a drug bust (sub-question: do we really need drug busts at all?), and maybe they're not the best first responders in domestic disputes, and so on. Most people for whom "defund the police" is a catchcry recognise this, because there are very few true anarchists in society (and anarchy is kind of where "left meets right" in the political spectrum anyway, which is why libertarianism is such a dangerous and insidious ideology).

Oddly, several members of the defund movement have said they literally want to defund and abolish the police. It's almost like words mean things?

> If one believes that a particular race is, on average, more likely to commit the types of crime for which one should be incarcerated, and one sees incarceration as an "inferior" way of life, then the logical conclusion is that they are racist.

You can try to argue that crime rates show disproportional racial representation for a bunch of reasons. Claiming anyone who states the facts is racist is wrong.

> Oddly, several members of the defund movement have said they literally want to defund and abolish the police. It's almost like words mean things?

Yes those are the "few anarchists" I was referring to. From what I have seen of people discussing the "defund the police" movement it's about a dramatic reform of law enforcement, including much less emphasis on armed police storming about the place.

> You can try to argue that crime rates show disproportional racial representation for a bunch of reasons. Claiming anyone who states the facts is racist is wrong.

I didn't claim anyone stating the facts is wrong, I made the claim that when people attribute a statistical anomaly like disparity in incarceration rates to an aggregation of personal failures rather than a systemic problem, they are logically being racist (even if they don't see it as such).

One of the BLM co-founders and current directory of the BLM non-profit is one of those "few anarchists" who proposed to outright abolish the police.[1] That article also proposes to abolish prisons, the military, borders, capitalism, and includes phrases such as "U.S. [and its] fabricated borders" and calls to "fight the U.S. state".

If you had told me this was written by some troll to make BLM look bad then I'd believe you. To be fair, there are some good things in that article too, it's not all bad; it contains some anecdotes worth hearing, but that doesn't follow that the conclusions are also good.

This is also the same person who cited Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong as inspirations, by the way.[2] Yes, really, that Mao. I genuinely thought this was inserted by a vandal on the Wikipedia article when I encountered it last week, but the source pans out.

I mean, people don't just get these "abolish the police" and "BLM is a Marxist organisation" out of thin air. Granted, there is a lot of bad-faith trollism from Tucker Carlson and similar people, but if your message is so confused, easily misunderstood, and your leadership says things in support of the most extreme interpretations then quite frankly, you have no one else to blame but yourself.

[1]: https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/04/abolition-and-reparatio...

[2]: https://time.com/5171270/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors...

The BLM organization and the movement are two different things. You’d be lucky to randomly be able to find a single black person who knows any of the founders of the org or any of their principles except to reduce police brutality.

Yes, and people keep saying this, and people keep being confused by this.

I don't understand why people are so resistant, or even outright hostile, in making the social justice movement (including the sentiments BLM expresses) more effective. If you truly care about social justice then being as effective as possible should be the #1 priority, no?

I don't care much for BLM not because I don't care about their goals, but because I don't think it's very effective for a number of reasons. Yet every time I raise this it's either dismissed like your comment does, or met with a surprising amount of hostility. Aren't conversations on how to best affect these kind of changes super-duper important? It appears not, and it seems BLM has become the goal, rather than the vehicle to get at the goal.

Popular movements almost never are the ones to actually institute policy, only influence it, so there's not really much advantage to finding compromise at the level of activism. It's not BLM or the Defund movements job to write legislation that actually achieves their goals, and there's almost no chance what they argue for won't be watered down anyway.

It's best to think of any popular movement as directional - for sure there are individual people in the Defund movement calling for 100% abolition, and others calling for demilitarization, or redirecting of some funding - as of right now, they want the same thing as far as first steps go. If they're successful in redirecting some funding away from police, the non-abolish crowd will move away from the movement and they'll become increasingly irrelevant when it's 10 anarchists arguing for no police instead of massive protests.

> I don't understand why people are so resistant, or even outright hostile, in making the social justice movement (including the sentiments BLM expresses) more effective. If you truly care about social justice then being as effective as possible should be the #1 priority, no?

Again, you're confusing an organization with the movement. The organization has only minor impact on the actual movement. It's like saying that a group named "Democracy for America" reflected what people in the US believed about Democracy.

> Aren't conversations on how to best affect these kind of changes super-duper important? It appears not, and it seems BLM has become the goal, rather than the vehicle to get at the goal.

I support BLM, but I'm not sure I support the goals of the BLM org. Mostly because I barely know them (I realize I could just go to their webpage and read them). I do know what most people I associate believe BLM means though.

Now this does mean there is a problem in that different people have different interpretations of it. But honestly this is always the case for any type of social movement. There's a base for the support, and then a bunch of splinter ideologies.

> Also "defund the police" is a shorthand that typically means "reduce direct law enforcement funding and instead fund other community engagement programs".

"Reform the police" is much more universalist term that people across multiple political spectrums would have gotten behind (and it's still memorable).

I'm not sure why it wasn't used instead.

Reform the Police had been the modus oparandi for fixinf policing for >50 years. It hasn’t worked. That is why more absolute language has been used.

Policing organizations/unions/departments have refused to change, evolve, or improve their behavior.

Perhaps then the slogan should be closer to "Replace the Police". Something that represents both the dismantling and rebuilding of police forces.

Personally I'm a big fan of requiring a much, much higher standard of training than police have now. Especially when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. The best way to minimise the consequences is to ensure that we have maximised their skill potential with the forms of intervention which have the least risk of permanent consequences.

There's probably a larger group of people that want to see portions of the police budget reallocated than the police disbanded and reformed. There's really not a great term that perfectly captures what everyone wants, but at least some common ground is "less funding", which "defund" is at least close to if you squint.

> What I have found in discussions with people who I think are racist, but who deny it,

Define "racist"

Those who think that a group of people are inferior based on racial characteristics (and/or ethnicity ... ie. for some definition of "race" even though the very distinction is pretty tenuous if you get into the biology/genetics of it all).

Your comment strikes me as disingenuous and willfully obstinate.

disingenuous (adj) giving a false appearance of simple frankness

obstinate (adj) pertinaciously adhering to an opinion

pertinacious (adj) marked by an unyieldingly persistent fixedness (as of opinion, purpose, action) that is often annoyingly perverse in fact or in appearance

It looks like you simply googled those words and copy-pasted the definitions. I can do that, too (using a more credible dictionary vis-a-vis American usage, to boot. Mine’s MW, yours is Oxford, which is very British; we’re discussing an American company):

white supremacy (n) the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races

defund (v) to withdraw funding from (as a government-funded program)

This isn’t a helpful approach. Prescriptivist appeals to the dictionary and dismissal of others’ viewpoints are not ways of listening to the perspectives of others or empathizing with different experiences, and seem to be actively preventing constructive discussion in this case.

> This isn’t a helpful approach. Prescriptivist appeals to the dictionary and dismissal of others’ viewpoints are not ways of listening to the perspectives of others or empathizing with different experiences, and seem to be actively preventing constructive discussion in this case.

Agreed. On the flip side, I think it’s just as unhelpful an approach to co-opt a generally understood word (or phrase) and then (unbeknownst to the majority of peers) expand its definition to capture even mainstream behavior that might be construed as undesirable even if not obviously unacceptable, and then beat the same peers in the head with it when they express confusion at the changed meaning of words (or phrases). It’s a cheap rhetorical trick, and gets us further away from collaboratively solving very real and important problems in a pluralistic society.

I hear you. It can be counterproductive to use a totally unfamiliar jargon, especially if it trips the audience up and limits mutual engagement in favor of linguistic squabbling.

That said, I respectfully disagree that it’s “just as unhelpful.” Pedantry over definitions distracts from the underlying issues, while new and inventive and nonstandard usage of language can spur critical analysis and jolt us out of our familiar understanding.

Telling someone “defund isn’t used that way” shuts down the conversation. Demanding we “defund the police” makes me want to start / pursue / expand the conversation: what the heck do you mean by that?

Edit to add: my response sounds overly academic. Another way to put it could be: language is confusing, and it can be problematic if we make it more confusing. But, sometimes I need to get a bit more confused before I can see things in a new / different light, and language can be an effective tool to achieve that “good confusion”

> Pedantry over definitions distracts from the underlying issues, while new and inventive and nonstandard usage of language can spur critical analysis and jolt us out of our familiar understanding.

I understand that that’s the intention behind this strategy, but in practice it actually comes off as a shock-and-awe guerrilla tactic to argumentation that alienates rather than invite collaboration. Again, if the goal is actually to get people to buy into new ideas, attacking them (which is implicitly what happens when you expansively redefine “white supremacy”) is just not a good strategy.

> Telling someone “defund isn’t used that way” shuts down the conversation.

Right, and it sounds like the goal is to maintain open conversation! Constantly demanding that people use your definitions and argue with you on the terms that you unilaterally set is an awful way to maintain open dialogue/conversation with people that might otherwise be open to changing their minds. Insisting that people simply must accept whatever new rules of engagement is en vogue just exacerbates polarization and mistrust.

So yes, it’s just as, if not more unhelpful.

> shock-and-awe guerrilla tactic…that alienates rather than invite collaboration

That’s a good point, and I’m not sure I have a good answer to it! I believe rhetorical guerrilla warfare is an intentional and important tactic. My gut tells me part of the goal is precisely to make me and others like me feel uncomfortable: I generally have the freedom to not feel alienated, but that’s not a privilege afforded to vast swaths of our society who are historically disadvantaged. I can only imagine the alienation I would feel as a Black engineer—but as a White engineer, I feel right at home on my team of other White engineers, and alienation is something I can just choose to walk away from. Not so for others…

Still, I know that’s not a satisfying answer / response to your comment. You’re right that feeling alienated doesn’t make me more inclined to have open minded / collaborative discussions, in general. But given the structural imbalances at play, I emotionally feel that the graceful and “right” way for me to engage is by listening despite my discomfort, as a tool for learning the perspectives of others not just theoretically, but experientially.

:shrug: None of this is easy…but it’s important to me to pursue mutual care and understanding with as much good faith as I can muster, even when it’s uncomfortable for me.

The point that I’m trying to make is that the biggest beneficiaries of collaborative problem solving here are the very Black engineers you’re talking about.

Playing rhetorical tricks in an attempt to “make people uncomfortable” just muddies the water since everyone sees what’s going on. At best, nothing changes, and at worst this strategy just sets us back.

As long as we continue down the path of polarization and resentment, the further we stray from solving our problems as we remain in the status quo. In the status quo the biggest loser is the very person that stands to benefit the least from the status quo. From what you’ve told me, you’re probably not going to be the loser there.

Dictionaries don't define the meaning of words; they record the usage.

And if enough people use a different definition then the dictionary changes.

That doesn’t mean that I can define words however I like. Since defund has a well and consistently used definition I think it’s going be hard for the connotation to change so that “defund police” means something other than defund police.

with the term literally being able to mean figuratively, I'm hesitant to agree.

While this is true, we still go back to them to agree on what the words mean.

You don't get to assert what other people mean when they say things (shrug)

And conversely, you don’t get to assume that others understand you when you use language in ways that aren’t colloquial.

Shared definitions is the bedrock of human communication, and absent that, we’re no better than chimps just grunting past each other.

> And conversely, you don’t get to assume that others understand you when you use language in ways that aren’t colloquial.

Yep! It was a failure of all parties involved that the two competing definitions of racism weren't laid out on the table, when people started getting huffy.

> Shared definitions is the bedrock of human communication, and absent that, we’re no better than chimps just grunting past each other.

(laughs) Lay it on thick, why don't you?

It sounds like we agree!

I will say that from the transcripts (and from the way conversations have been going in this thread), the way this usually starts is that one party unilaterally sets the rules of engagement and more or less demands that others accept those terms, and when the others push back on those rules, we all take a step back and admit “failure of all parties”.

It would be a lot easier for us to collaborate on these problems if we can be honest with ourselves about who the aggressor is, and who’s caught on the defense in these kinds of heated exchanges in workplace debates.

> Stop entertaining people who redefine words.

I take it you still stick to the original definitions of "fun", "garbled", and "terrible", then? Good on you.

Merriam-Webster is not the ultimate authority on the English language. If people start using the word to mean something else, then, ipso facto, that's what it means.

If it's you vs Merriam-Webster, I'll take Merriam-Webster

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/defund

> : to withdraw funding from

and "withdraw" does not mean "remove completely"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white%20supremacy

> 1 : the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races

> 2: the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races

Interesting. They added that 2nd definition just last October. Here it was prior to October 2020;

https://web.archive.org/web/20200901223507/https://www.merri...

>> : to withdraw funding from

> and "withdraw" does not mean "remove completely"

It certainly _can_ and usually _does_ mean remove completely. Examples:

- "I'm withdrawing my student from this school"

- "The peer review committee has decided to withdraw this erroneous paper from publication"

- "I would like to withdraw $100 from my checking account" (It means the _whole_ $100)

- "He is experiencing heroine withdrawal symptoms" (after not having _any_)

Go to the bank and say, "I would like to withdraw money from my account." Do they hand you your balance in cash, or ask you how much?

Obviously one can withdraw all of something, but I'm skeptical of it meaning "all" by default.

It seems to me that "withdraw money" has a missing parameter.

If you used "withdraw the money from my account", that would imply all of the money. Of course, any customer service person would still want to confirm that by asking for more information before handing your balance over...

You are right! It can mean these things! But it can also mean other things, and (in my opinion) carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and impactful work of understanding what others mean, not just the official definition of the words they used.

"Defund the police" can sound extreme, or counterintuitive, or downright confusing. But it seems urgently important (to me) to understand why so many Americans feel so strongly that they use such intense language, propose such radical changes, and demand something that doesn't make sense to me.

Clearly, there's something I don't "get". It's infinitely more compelling to me to try to "get it" and understand others' viewpoints, and uninteresting to understand why the words they used don't match a conventional definition.

> carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and impactful work of understanding what others mean, not just the official definition of the words they used.

The onus is on both parties to communicate effectively and find language that removes ambiguity. Unfortunately, I think some degree of sophistry is occurring to use ambiguity as a motte and bailey.

Respectfully, I disagree. There's no onus here at all, on either side—this isn't some intellectual debate with formal rules, this is a struggle to make marginalized voices heard.

Effective communication is nowhere near the same as using transparent / effortless language. "The medium is the message"—phrases like "defund the police" and "Black Lives Matter" arrest the attention in ways that "we should reconsider the financial resources allocated to law enforcement" and "I value the lives of Black Americans as equal to those of White Americans and, moreover, those Black lives have historically been undervalued and oppressed" simply do not (and I can't even make a claim that that's what those phrases mean—you'd have to ask someone, and try to understand what they meant).

The effectiveness of communication is nontrivial. There's a reason for the long history of poetry as a way to communicate emotions, a way that tends to transcend the effectiveness of plain language to convey intense emotion in an intuitive form; and that reason is decidedly not that artful use of language removes ambiguity.

Ambiguity highlights precisely the points at which we fail to understand one another, and point to the most critical opportunities to clarify what we mean to each other.

We're talking about withdrawing funding, not a specific amount (like in your $100 example)

If I withdraw money from my bank account, I still usually have money in my bank account also. If we withdraw funding from a authoritative service that serves a public function but has also been leveraged oppressively, it doesn't mean there is no funding

Check it again next year when the political winds have shifted and you'll find that Merriam-Webster has changed the definition again, like they did last year.