I had a very wealthy 73 year-old client once -- one of the most interesting of all. He had built up a collection of businesses around the world, and at 73 was (and is still) flying around the world to make deals. He is like a savant in that if he is awake, then he's busy working. It was very common to send him an e-mail at 10 or 11pm, to which he would immediately reply, and then wake up the next morning at 7am to find he'd already sent a new e-mail a few minutes earlier.
I noticed that nothing stressed him -- he would push people and get angry and annoyed, but it was all externalized and not internalized. He's worth billions, but never does _anything_ that normal people would consider fun. For him, the work is his fun. I have great respect for the work and the success, but it's hollow in context of it all.
Maybe it's the result of telling 2+ generations of boys that "males", especially "white males" (predominant in Canada) are the root of all problems in society and the world, coupled with ever-present emphasis and promotion of girls (most recently manifested in Trudeau's absurd references to "she-cession" and "she-covery").
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, such as race and gender flamewar. I realize it's not always easy to post about this topics without being inflammatory, but the subthread we got here is an example of exactly what we don't want on HN, and this was pretty predictable from the way your comment ratcheted up the inflammation.
I think this is an instructive case - if you look at the parent subthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28539299) without this flamewar, it's clear that it's much better. Not that every comment is good or flamebait-free, but the discussion is more substantive and (not coincidentally) on topic.
Have you considered banning accounts that post racist trash like this instead of banning and censoring people who rightly call it out? You’re currently stewarding a white supremacist community and I have no idea how you sleep at night.
This thread needs a lot more attention on it. Not only does it demonstrate how racist and sexist this community is, it shows nicely how complicit you personally are in allowing this to happen.
Compare your response to this racist comment to this:
People with strong ideological commitments always think the mods are stewarding their enemies, especially when they happen to run across a case of us banning someone who they agree with ideologically. The assumption is that we must have banned that account for secret ideological reasons. Actually I banned it because it broke the site guidelines egregiously, has a pattern of doing so, and has ignored previous requests to stop. I also offered to unban it if the account holder wants to commit to following the rules in the future.
If you think this is evidence of ideological bias, that's a misinterpretation—you're drawing a signal from the data (or rather, from one random observation) that doesn't exist. This is a classic cognitive bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor..., https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Since mods get this sort of attack nearly every day for years, you can understand that after a while we get a little desensitized to it—especially because the attacks are so contradictory. The other side thinks that we're secretly stewarding HN in your favor. Lots of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 and I could give you hundreds more.
I think your characterization of this community is wildly inaccurate, for similar reasons. Yes, HN gets comments of all sorts—to expect anything else from an open internet community with millions of members is unrealistic. To act like the worst of the comments, or the ones that you happen to disagree with the most, characterize the community as a whole is a big non sequitur, driven by the same cognitive biases (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
I strongly disagree. It’s well known that this is one of the only technology sites that will allow racist and sexist comments. I’m not alone in seeing this. Remember ShitHackerNewsSays and #hnwatch? You need to clean up your house before lecturing anyone who’s rightfully upset that you and the site owners allow this site to be a haven for hate speech.
If anyone doubts this, take a scroll through here:
> It’s we’ll known that this is one of the only technology sites that will allow racist and sexist comments.
Even, for the sake of argument, assuming that that is true it doesn't prove the ideological moderation bias you are claiming, it is consistent with HN being one of the few sites which does not actively suppress such content and those who post it for ideological reasons.
Tangentially, this reminds me that HN needs a dedicated meta-forum and a policy of moving meta-commentary that is off-topic out of other threads and into the meta-forum.
If HN allows racist content, they are responsible for it. It's absolutely within their power to ban people for regularly complaining about BLM or "critical race theory". They just don't. Whether that's because HN mods are racist themselves or for some other reason, it doesn't matter because the outcome is the same. It even flies in the face of their so called reasoning because no intelligent conversation will arise from such a comment, yet they're left up anyway.
People can even predict the racist reactions this "community" will have:
Not sure why the downvotes here. This is an objectively true fact. And worse is that it’s not limited to white males. Nobody cares about our young black men either. 1/5 die of homicide while we reduce our police presence as if they are the most pressing problem.
At least a white male stands a good chance of not being born into a high crime area they have virtually no chance of escaping.
We suck at diagnosing and solving the real problems.
And the college gap is most pronounced amongst Black men and Black women, by an absurd ratio, so its fascinating to read a bunch of, presumably, majority CS degree holders who likely aren't Black or Latino talk about how white men have it worst for college enrollment
I think the issue isn't so much declaring exactly one group as the ones who have it worst, but to be driven by empirical data about how various groups perform. I believe college enrollment per capita goes something like:
white women > black women > white men > black men
(not sure where all the other racial groups fall).
So a simplistic calculation like "women are less privileged and black people are less privileged therefor we should help black women the most when it comes to college admissions" does not address the real world disparities that exist.
Is this actually happening though? I thought it was mostly just Twitter and subsequently the media feeling the need to write shocking stories. I have never had or heard someone tell me that it's bad to be white.
> The Guardian columnist Jason Wilson argued that the slogan It's okay to be white was devised by white supremacists in order to stoke overreaction from the left, sow confusion, embed a racist agenda in the mainstream media, and ultimately invite a backlash against anti-racist activism."
When any phrase is used exclusively by alt-right groups as a way to dogwhistle and provoke, it makes sense to label it as something that alt-righters use.
No one is seriously arguing that devoid on the context and who pushes that specific phrasing, that it's "not ok to be white"
You have to intentionally disingenuous to seriously believe that.
Your sentiment is the root problem of the issue. Any issue that touches on problems facing white people will of course be reflexively supported by the alt right, white supremacist, etc., as well. This makes it impossible to talk about these issues without being associated with those groups or accused of "dog whistling". Similarly, if you speak up about men's issues you are considered part of the manosphere, a misogonyst and probably alt right.
Basically any opinion that doesn't sing to the choir is labeled a "dog whistle" and dismissed.
Basically we have allowed a small group of anxious people to silence all discussion and it's frankly destructive and untenable in the long run.
I think you've clearly gone off the deep end when you are obsessing about what innocuous phrase has secret meaning to white supremacists. Like the freaking out over the "OK" sign, and the Hispanic guy who got fired because he used it without knowing the super secret meaning.
Seriously, these white supremacists are twisting you into hysterics and make you look like a fool with your obsession with decoding their secret symbols.
The OK symbol is completely ok. There's nothing wrong with it. There's a certain sect of internet cretins who use it to dogwhistle to each other.
When someone uses the OK symbol, it literally means nothing. If that person also belongs to or is adjacent to that certain sect.. then you can start to ask questions but still mainly assume innocent intent.
If that person is using the OK symbol while wearing a MAGA hat, posting pictures with Pepe the frog doing the OK symbol, etc.. You can see clearly the throughline here and it's not illogical or wrong to see what that person is clearly trying to do and call them out on it.
I'm not 'decoding secret symbols', and if a hispanic person truly was fired for just doing an "OK" sign and nothing else, then no one who is serious on the left should support that as that is beyond absurd. For some reason, my bet is that there was a bit more going on than that though, but I could be wrong!
You can look up the story, it was in the fevered summer of 2020 when lots of people were trying to get other people fired for innocent boring stuff in the name of Justice.
After the points I made, do you still think I'm being illogical and off the deep end? I really think what I'm saying about recognizing dogwhistles is important and common sense, but maybe I'm wrong.
Our current hyper-partisan always-on tribalism is a fertile ground for witch hunts and rumors that go off the rails.
The Hispanic OK sign dude is one particularly egregious example of this. I think in most of these cases, the company thinks it's easier to fire the person than bother to investigate what actually happened.
So it's very important to verify that a so called "dog whistle" isn't a hoax or overblown, and sometimes even if some Internet trolls are trying to launch a dog whistle bringing attention to what they're doing is helpful marketing for their cause with all the attention it brings.
I'm orthogonal to your points. I'm not as attached to the symbolic online battle, and I appreciate good trolling.
> It's more important exactly who is using the phrase and why, than what the phrase is.
This is thought-terminating tribal idiocy.
Let's put it in tribal terms for you. If your tribe self-owns by jumping into an obvious bear trap, that's an L for you and yours. Take some responsibility, and maybe slow down to consider the words next time.
Since I don't normally follow "white supremacists", and I would have a hard time finding them even if I wanted, how am I supposed to know what's a dogwhistle and what is not?
It's totally okay to use the OK symbol and pepe the frog, etc. I should have made that more clear; there's no problem in any way whatsoever with them until you start to see a pattern of the person using them being alt-right or adjacent, flirting with it, etc
What were their points, and how do my points not address them? I very much responded, and I should be more clear than until a person is clearly alt-right, them using the OK symbol or pepe the frog is 100% fine and I wouldn't even think about it.
If you are provoked by something as innocuous as "It's OK to be white" you really need to re-examine your commitment to tribalism and dedication to going out of your way to find things to be offended by on the Internet. (Or attached to telephone poles.)
Which was clearly the goal of this experiment, to show how quickly and vehemently people over react to anything that seems to deviate slightly from their personal ideology, no matter how slight.
I think you're dodging my main message. Of course it's ok to be white, I said that very very clearly in my comment I think, right?
The thing is, you have to see who is using and spreading that message. When it's alt-right people, you can assume malicious intent when they use it.
If someone who is not clearly alt-right says it, I wouldn't even think twice as that's literally meaningless, but you have to acknowledge how they are trying to use it as a dogwhistle
There is only one reason someone from one of those subreddits would say that line, and it's to get HN arguing about whether or not it should be taken literally, or as in indication that someone from one of those subreddits is in the room.
I was around on the internet when this was happening, so I can tell you the real story. Some people went around posting those signs, printed at home on A4 paper, around college campuses during a time when social justice issues were at a fever pitch in popular culture. Some very sensitive-to-social-justice-issues and sensitive-to-potential-indicators-of-people-being-insensitive-to-social-issues people saw them and became upset on Twitter. I think the signs usually got taken down, but that's what usually happens to signs.
Some people took this as a sign that an evil fifth column was going around trying to win an invisible cultural battle by putting up signs that had no racist content but that implied that someone around town would be willing to put up a racist sign if they had had the chance and the chutzpah.
Other people took this as a sign that the evil first through fourth columns were in such active pursuit of dissenters that they would get mad on Twitter and take down meticulously inkjetted pieces of A4 paper if they so much as implied that dissent was an option.
Few reasonable people took this as a sign that it was, literally, not "OK" to be a white person (what does that even mean? if it's not okay how are they supposed to stop?), but because taking down a sign can be taken to mean that the janitor disagrees with what those cultural mercenaries at Kinko's printed on it, that take got passed around a lot.
I believe the popularity of the sign lies in its ambiguity. You see, the mainstream discourse never went as far as to say "it is not OK to be white." It was hinted at, in a more or less subtle way, through the "white privilege" (some corporations actually have obligatory trainings on this) and in thousands of indirect ways making white people guilty of the skin they were born in.
So for some people the message of that poster was infuriating. You can't openly disagree with the literal meaning, but on the other hand, many people do it internally. They believe that white people as the descendants of slave owners should inherit the collective guilt of their great forefathers (even if it was a family of a third wave of immigrants from Europe that never owned any slaves). The very fact we are even discussing that is telling in itself.
It is okay to be who you are. It doesn't matter your race or nationality, your sex or gender or creed. It's okay to be white. It's okay to be black. It's okay to be Asian. It's okay to be First Nations, Native, Indigenous. It's okay to be male or female or intersexed or trans. It's okay to be Catholic or Protestant or Sunni or Shia or Jewish or Orthodox or Baha'i or Zoroastrian or Buddhist or Hindu or Taoist or Shinto or any other creed.
For all people everywhere, it is emphatically okay to exist.
If you disagree with that, then I think you need to re-examine who is engaging in supremacist politics.
Every educational system that's worth it's salt here where I live in Canada is going full-bore on the whole "critical race theory" and how "white people have oppressed every other culture for centuries"
My comment got flagged - and that's fine, but I'd like to hear an explanation.
Mine is as follows. Historically, the colonization was the domain of countries with access to sea, especially a long coast line - starting with Vikings. Among European countries, the colonization was done mainly by the Brits, Spain, Portugal, France, the predecessors of the modern Netherlands and Belgium.
Other European countries either didn't have access to sea, or had it but for various reasons weren't interested in colonization - for example because they were focused on land wars with their neighbors. You won't find many German or Austrian colonies. And you can talk to the Swiss how white people are guilty of colonialism, but you won't find any understanding there. Some with the whole Eastern Europe.
I understand this simplistic point of view ("white people invaded the whole world") seems attractive to some, but it's false, unjust and racist. If you say, "Several European countries colonized a significant portion of the world" - this is accurate, true, and definitely not racist. But it seems people don't care about facts or being precise anymore: it's all about emotion and fitting one's limited set of views.
===
EDIT: To people who flag and downvote: I'm a very open-minded person. I don't want to live in my bubble. So please, talk to me. Explain why I'm wrong - or at least why you disagree. HN is a discussion forum, let's use this opportunity to actually transmit some useful information. To me, downvoting and flagging says, "I disagree but I can't find any counter-arguments".
You added that last paragraph after your original comment, which was just the first two sentences. That was a highly misleading edit, because it changes the meaning of the reply you got. That was not a nice thing to do to the other user, even if they weren't being particularly nice to you in the first place.
It's great to share your personal experience and fine to edit your comments, but if you're making substantial edits, please say that they're edits.
I've thought about it over the years but there are also a lot of cases where it's better not to point a spotlight on things; if people post something they regret and later edit it out, and the effect isn't misleading, it's usually better to just let it sink into obscurity.
There are variations of such a feature that might strike a balance - for example only tracking edits once a comment has replies; or simply marking them 'edited' without saying what the edits were.
I just saw this dang and I apologize for my edit. It was not intended to mess up the next person’s as it was to add more context - but I recognize how it messed up their response. Sorry.
English has a lot of strange phrases that mean something other than what you'd guess from parsing the words by what they mean. For example, critical race theory is a phrase in the imperative sense that means "start arguing right now."
From WP: "Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of US civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to critically examine the intersection of race and U.S. law and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice." It's legal theory, dumbass.
Whoa, you can't attack others like that here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Since you've been doing it repeatedly, and ignored our requests to stop, I've banned this account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It is well past the point of meaning what it's defined to mean. I have been hearing about it somehow showing up as a guiding principle in the design of middle school curricula, which does not involve teaching those kids any legal theories. It is what all words turn into when they are used too often: it is a buzzword.
Not sure if you are aware but this was a coordinated and planned tactic by right wing media. Specifically they targeted the term crt and decided to make it out to be the devil.
It’s a common tactic of Fox News and adjacent online outlets. Senators will join in as well. Anything to start a culture war. It’s coordinated and planned. I’m on mobile but I’d send you some evidence about it. I remember Hasan Piker showing some interesting information about it.
Even though the issues you mention are real, you failed to provide a casual link between the two phenomena in question. "They are telling me I'm responsible for inequality in today's society so I won't go to college"? I'm not buying it.
They may perceive the "you're the problem" message as originating from colleges, or being especially strong there. They may not want to spend four years in an environment like that.
Why would you go to a place that is increasingly expensive, people are increasingly open about how there are alternatives to college, and your professors and other students look down on you for being white and successful?
Here we seem to have identified some factors beyond the boring old "CRT has destroyed education" bullshit. Students who are already "successful" have no need of college whatever their race or gender. College is ridiculously expensive, especially when compared to what was available in e.g. 1970.
First, I don't think it's been going on for 2+ generations.
Second, who is saying "white males" are the root of all problems? I mean, it's objectively true since we've predominately been in positions of power (European & new world) for the greater part of history. That said, I'm sure women can mess things up equally as bad if they were in the same positions of power.
Third, there's still an under-representation of women in STEM. Whether that's because a chicken-and-egg problem with visibility (or that women, on average, just don't want those jobs) is yet to be seen.
>it's objectively true since we've predominately been in positions of power (European & new world) for the greater part of history
Excuse me? That's ridiculously eurocentric and only contributes to "visibility problems" you seem to care about. It may have been somewhat true for a few hundred years, but there are many cultures that stood millenia without any european influence whatsoever. And in the very near future, asian countries will surpass the west in terms of influence, as it has been for a long time.
Under representation of women in STEM very much depends on what field we're taking about. CS? Sure. But what about, say, dentistry or medicine? At about the beginning of the millennium, the sex ratios equaled out at medical and dental schools, and every year since then, fewer and fewer men study in these fields compared to women.
Men, yes. White, no. Looking at the most extreme form of 'problems' a society can have, 4 of the 10 most deadly genocides were in Asia, 3 were in Africa, 2 in Europe/Russia, 1 in the Middle East.
All of humanity has the capacity to both oppress and murder en masse.
> Second, who is saying "white males" are the root of all problems? I mean, it's objectively true since we've predominately been in positions of power....
So... you then. You are an example of who is saying what you are saying.
Privilege is primarily about money, not race. If you want to help poor people, then tax the rich more regardless of race and underprivileged minorities will benefit naturally more.
All this obsession with race is just a way for the elites to urn attention away from actual solutions which would hurt their profits.
In the United State our history makes it absolutely about race too. The legacy of slavery and racial segregation didn't magically disappear in 1965. The limited amount I know about Canadian history is that something similar could be said about the treatment of First Nations.
Of course discrimination has greatly affected wealth distribution in the past. Still, I believe wealth re-distribution through Scandinavian style welfare state is the answer, not lectures about white-privilege and minority quotas. These days simply being white doesn't make you privileged if you were born into poor family, and being black doesn't automatically make you underprivileged if your parents happen to be wealthy.
There are privileges that come from race completely independent of wealth. Henry Gates Jr. getting arrested for "breaking in" to his own home while black is an anecdotal example of the kind of thing I'm talking about but it is shown in the data on policing and race too.
If you agree the US has a history of slavery and racial segregation, of course it will still offer privileges to white people because that's historically how the system was setup. When do you think that stopped affecting black people?
It’s not “shaming”. It’s teaching history. Should they not teach kids about slavery, colonialism…?
This is especially relevant in Canada where they have been uncovering mass graves of indigenous children at Catholic schools designed to convert Natives:
I still haven't seen proposals actually banning the discussion of specific historical events in schools. Even all of the anti-CRT legislation being proposed in the US, puts restrictions on what kinds of judgements you can state about people of specific races living today, not on historical events.
Granted, a lot of the wording of those proposed laws is way too vague, like not causing white kids to feel guilt or anguish or whatever. Maybe certain historical facts will make white kids feel bad, regardless or any editorializing.
But if you have specific proposals or legislation that explicitly bans teaching certain historical facts, I'd like to see it.
It’s not really “leftist”. It’s just “american leftist” if anything.
As far as some traditional leftists go, this whole discussion is a distraction from looking at class problems: “poor white men” can’t be oppressed by being white or men, but can be oppressed by being poor. This seems a strange concept for some on the American side of the pond.
You hit the nail on the head. It is so frustrating that every single social movement has to be exclusively focused around some innate quality that cannot be changed. Sex, race, sexuality, everything except class. We spend all this time arguing amongst ourselves instead of collectively asking the ultra-rich why socialized healthcare is too expensive but spending 20 years destroying a country for no reason isn't.
I just don't get how an american leftist can see every single fortune 500 company paying lip service to every single american leftist cause and not wonder if maybe something else is going on. And sure, I'm well aware that it's all meaningless PR maneuvers to curry favor among the public. But I firmly believe that these companies avoid any sort of class-based issue like the plague because that might lead to questions about why corporations can make so much money and pay so little in tax while the rest of us make peanuts and are forced to give the government 1/3 of it.
You didn’t answer my questions. Are you suggesting we don’t teach those very real historical facts I mentioned because some sensitive racists may take it personally? Since when is that a reason to distort the truth?
Edit: HackerNews has decided to throttle me because I’m not a hivemind reactionary. I’m really close to highlighting what’s really going on in this “community” in a more public forum dang.
Why do you have to make random threats towards website moderators when trying to explain your point of view? Seems like you're being disingenuous and you're not coming to this discussion with the ability to stop yourself and see things from other points of view.
The “other point of view” is white supremacy (aka the only people in the world concerned with “critical race theory”). The mods not only allow white supremacy on this site, they censor those who complain about it!
I literally got downvoted and throttled for saying slavery was real and talking about the very real genocide of Native children in Canada. What’s next, Holocaust denial?
You're no doubt getting downvoted because you're posting tons of flamewar comments, which is not what this site is for, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and regardless of your views.
Your account is getting throttled because it's rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. I haven't checked the logs to see when your account got rate-limited but it certainly wasn't today, and it has zero to do with your ideology or your views.
You're likely being throttled because of the number of posts you're making, as well as some sort of auto-moderator system where if someone gets downvoted a lot in a short time, the system thinks you're a spammer and throttles you.
As to why you're being downvoted I can only hazard a guess - You're likely being downvoted because you're making accusations using words that have very strong meaning and implication behind their use, and don't fit well with this discussion.
Saying the mods only allow white supremacy on this website is laughable. There's no way for you to prove this - I'd like to see you try. If there was actually white supremacy in this group, we wouldn't have such a diverse group of people (intellectually, physically, culturally, geographically, etc) to come here to discuss (in most cases) tech news related to readers' fields - it's part of why the internet is as popular as it is.
People who are regular contributors and commenters to the Hacker News forum usually bring more to the table than simple name-calling and insult-hurling. There's also wonderful ideas you can try yourself like critical thinking, opening your mind to other opinions, stopping yourself before making baseless accusations, etc.! It's fun.
There’s nothing “fun” about this site. It’s the embodiment of the worst of our industry. It’s literally spewing AM radio quality right wing propaganda. I don’t think the people here are as intellectually curious as you claim.
No personal attacks, please, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. You crossed that line not only with this comment, but also upthread ("you can try yourself like critical thinking").
Edit: it looks like your account has been using this site primarily for ideological battle. That's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and when an account is using HN primarily for that, that's the line at which we ban them (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). I'm not going to ban you for this right now because we haven't warned you before, but please review the guidelines and use HN in the intended spirit going forward.
We're trying to avoid having this site be engulfed by the hell of ideological flames and burning itself to a crisp. Scorched earth is not interesting, and it's the default outcome on the internet. We're trying to stave it off here.
All parent talked about was teaching facts and you're the one equating that with some form of shaming and oppression, for which you have demonstrated no evidence other than that said facts are indeed taught.
It looks like your account has been using this site primarily for ideological battle. That's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and when an account is using HN primarily for that, that's the line at which we ban them (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). I'm not going to ban you for this right now because we haven't warned you before, but please review the guidelines and use HN in the intended spirit going forward.
I legitimately am not sure how my posts in this have been "flamewar comments", so I guess out of an abundance of caution I will just refrain from ever discussing this topic here.
I wasn't just talking about your posts to this thread, but to HN in general. That's why I wrote "
you've done it a lot and we've asked you many times not to".
That kind of pattern is clearly a problem, especially since we only see a sample of the things any regular user posts. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd be grateful. I know it's not easy, but if we're to have the sort of forum we're trying for here, all of us need to work on our habits of how we engage with other commenters.
As for this thread, your comment that I replied to was obviously a snarky battle comment, not genuinely interested in what the other person had to say or why they might hold the view they do. That's not curious conversation.
One sign of curious conversation as opposed to internet battle is that people remain able to relate to each other across their differences. If the only way you're able to relate to the other commenter is as an enemy to be defeated, you're not really engaging out of curiosity. We're looking for curiosity-driven conversation here. There are other places to do battle.
These points hardly apply to just you, of course - the problems are all over the place, especially in threads like this. But as the guidelines say: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Ok, fair enough. I don't contend I didn't deserve admonishment in any other instances. It would seem I should just stay out of any thread that appears to be descending into flamewar territory. I will try to be more cognizant of that.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamewar comments and unsubstantive comments to HN. It's not what this site is for. Using the site primarily for ideological battle is also not allowed, regardless of which ideology you're battling for or against.
I agree with you on that note. We do need to know which people perpetrated the horrific acts and for what justifications they had at the time - if only to ensure it doesn't happen again, no matter what race.
That is absolutely not what it is saying. It is saying due to history and socio-economical factors you have "access to, or enjoying rights or advantages, simply by membership of a
particular group or identity".
"Eat your dinner, there are starving kids in Africa" is the same sentiment, and is meant to guilt you into finishing the meal. The same sense of guilt is implied here
I don't see it that way at all. It's meant to examine the current system we have. Eating your dinner doesn't affect African kids at all but the system that originally privileged white people still has effects today and examining that isn't about guilt or shame.
I’m curious - who is saying this? Have an example? Seems like an exaggeration. I’m sure it’s happened in some isolated cases, but I’m skeptical that this is a prevailing attitude
We have days for LGBTQ, women, and minorities because they are historically disenfranchised groups still dealing with societally systemic problems oriented against them. That is not true of white heterosexual men.
It'd be like trying to organize a day for people from multimillionaire families. It doesn't make any sense.
I see where you’re coming from but I’m not sure comparing to millionaire families is apt - but I’ve seen plenty of things organized for low-income, rural, and 1st gen students which all include white heterosexual men, and if the census is to be believed, are the majority in some areas. I’ve also seen things for specific nationalities at my university like German, Italian, etc - groups traditionally considered “white.”
I haven’t seen anything specifically for the broad encompassing group of white heterosexual men. Personally I think such a group would be meaningless as white heterosexual men encompass too many things. What would such a group even use as the mode of maintaining solidarity that wouldn’t be better served by a more specific group?
> We have days for LGBTQ, women, and minorities because they are historically disenfranchised groups still dealing with societally systemic problems oriented against them. That is not true of white heterosexual men.
No one even tries to defend these claims any more, they just try to get anyone who disagrees fired, expelled, or removed from social media platforms.
For example, the entire context for this discussion is the sever under representation of men on college campuses. So how can you say systemic issues never negatively impact men?
Also, it is very rare that those days ever identify specific systemic issues, with empirical evidence demonstrating them, with specific policy proposals to address them, with opportunity for debating whether those policies will actually work or have unintended negative consequences. It's pretty much exclusively moral posturing.
I have walked around many college campus's. Having days for minorities doesn't mean white men are the root of all evil, just like black lives matter doesn't mean that white lives don't.
I do. I respect the guy, but this seems like a "me too" (the traditional meaning, as in someone trying to assert "Hey, I'm a player, too"). It's a worthy cause, but I think his major contribution may be his celebrity cache.
Musk has a name re: Space based on accomplishments, hands down. Branson's move extends the Virgin enterprises, and Bezos has a similar business plan and track record as Branson. But now comes Woz, older and much later to the game, and with no background of experience.
His name, face, and personality will bring in investors, though, I'm sure.
Race is distinct from Nationality. "Latino" is not a synonym for citizens of Latin American countries, but the name of a racial group which originated from that region of the world.
It gets confusing with countries like China, Japan, and India, which are more racially homogeneous, and where the country name is the same as the (common) name of the predominate racial groups.
The parent is talking about ethnicity (culture), not nationality. "Latino" isn't a race, it's an ethnicity. In particular, there are many "races" of people who are Latino (white Cubans, indigenous Mexicans, black Brazilians, etc can all be "Latino" despite different races and nationalities). Indeed the "latin" in "Latin America" and "Latino" was originally a language category--these peoples all spoke romance languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc).
Much of what you say about hormones has been considered scientific fact for a long time -- but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the facts have been banished by political correctness.
Plus, Facebook is indeed a harmful product for society at large (like cigarettes), and often has bigger negative impacts on younger users (again like cigarettes).
The combination of these is obviously bad...but Facebook knowing it and hiding the fact is very much (again) like what tobacco companies did.
No, you're spot on. That's been my conclusion of the past few years, that Facebook, Twitter et al. are the tobacco companies of our time. They act very much the same as the tobacco companies did: misleading their 'customers', and corrupting the politicians who would otherwise regulate them.
Well put. My only social media connection was via Twitter, which I quit a month ago. This states the motivation, and the resulting benefit, succinctly.
The whole appeal for the drivers was "employment-like" opportunities with more freedom for themselves. This takes that away. If they wanted regular jobs they would have sought that.
You make it sound like the job situation in the Netherlands is desperate. From what I can tell by searching, unemployment is only about 3%. Where's the desperation in that?
Uber drivers I've talked to didn't join because they were desperate -- they joined to have more freedom and control.
To suggest that overpopulation is controversial is itself absurd, as it is fundamental to the science of biology[1]. That a species can reach numbers where their environment and habitat is depleted or otherwise unlivable is fact, not controversy.
"Population Control" is certainly controversial, though, as it should be. And, though controversial, it should be considered seriously. Many environmentalists lose their credibility by speaking of "sustainability" on the one hand, but then disputing overpopulation on the other. We need to impact the earth much less, and keeping our numbers down is a very effective way of doing so. That, plus using energy and resources more cleanly and efficiently.
The question about human overpopulation is not whether there can be overpopulation, but whether the often popular claim that the earth can not sustain the current or the projected future human population is true. The latter absolutely is debatable - there's no clear evidence that it's impossible (i.e. there's no technically feasible way) to sustain the current or the projected future human population. It absolutely is true that if we maintain the current level of CO2 emissions, it won't be sustainable. But that's not an evidence for overpopulation. If we sustain the current level of pollution, it likely will not be sustainable. But that's once again not an evidence for overpopulation - as we know for most of our resources that there are technical alternatives that can drastically reduce / eliminate them. We know there's more than enough energy. We know how to make our economy carbon-neutral. Most pollution can be controlled. The urban land takes up much less than 1% of the earth land - and we expect the world population to peak around 10B by 2100 (vs 7.7B today). No reason to believe we'll run out of land. There's more than enough headroom to improve the crop yields in poor countries.
In the grand scheme of things, we - humanity - know mostly how to create a sustainable technological system that can support 10B population. Whether our politics will allow us to get to such a system is a entirely different problem, and THAT might be our undoing, but I'd argue that's not really an overpopulation problem.
Also, the population growth is largely a side-effect of demographic transition - https://populationeducation.org/what-demographic-transition-.... i.e. it's a transitional side-effect of reducing the human suffering. The only humane and equitable way to move forward is to accelerate the demographic transition (i.e. improve the economic, health, education, etc, systems of all countries in the world to get them to stage4 at least). And, thus, "keep our numbers down" is not only inhumane or inequitable, that's ineffective - the developed countries already mostly stopped growing - e.g. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251591/population-growt... - and it's mostly the poor countries that are growing - i.e. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264687/countries-with-th... . There's no other humane way to stop poor countries' population growth - the most effective way is to improve their economy, improve their health and healthcare systems, and improve education.
"The question about human overpopulation is not whether there can be overpopulation, but whether the often popular claim that the earth can not sustain the current or the projected future human population is true"
So only human overpopulation is impossible, you're saying. I think you're wrong on that. We're special relative to other species -- but not that special, and not immune to it.
"In the grand scheme of things, we - humanity - know mostly how to create a sustainable technological system that can support 10B population. Whether our politics will allow us to get to such a system is a entirely different problem, and THAT might be our undoing, but I'd argue that's not really an overpopulation problem."
Is the goal to pack as many humans onto this planet as is possible?? That certainly isn't my goal, at all. With our technology, we don't need vast numbers with which to build pyramids or plant fields.
> So only human overpopulation is impossible, you're saying.
No. That is not what I said. I'm saying whether human overpopulation is theoretically possible/impossible is not the question - as the answer is very clearly yes, if the number is too large it will qualify as overpopulation.
I'm saying the relevant question is whether the current population and the projected future population would qualify as overpopulation, and I'm saying that absolutely is debatable.
> Is the goal to pack as many humans onto this planet as is possible?
No. The goal is to find the humane and equitable way to reach sustainability. I'm claiming sustainability (with current or projected peak human population of ~10B) is entirely technologically possible, and "overpopulation" talk is mostly ungrounded, not backed by any real evidence. At the same time, it's also clear the current state of things is NOT sustainable, and that we'd need to change our technological systems in order to reach sustainability, and I do admit that it's entirely possible and somewhat plausible that our politics will keep us from reaching the sustainability.
I noticed that nothing stressed him -- he would push people and get angry and annoyed, but it was all externalized and not internalized. He's worth billions, but never does _anything_ that normal people would consider fun. For him, the work is his fun. I have great respect for the work and the success, but it's hollow in context of it all.