d9h549f34w6's comments

I can think of several, but stating them publicly would lead to social shaming and loss of employment in the current dominant ideology of the tech world.

Protest, sure. Block? That's a very dangerous road to go down and I disagree with it. If some controversial talk is happening, and an opponent attempts to get the event shut down, then that represents an attack on the rights of the speaker to speak and the rights of the speaker's audience to listen to the event.

I'm particularly interested in the events surrounding Richard Spencer's speech last night at Auburn University. This was a case where, after having set up an event, Spencer had been disinvited by the university due to concerns about "safety."

A federal judge found that this was not a legitimate reason to shut down the event and demanded that Auburn dedicate police resources to protecting the speaker and attendees:

- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/opinion/richard-spencers-...

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/1...

Regardless of the content of Spencer's speech, this was absolutely the right course of action. It was found that the threats to physical safety were not coming from the white-nationalist side, but from black-bloc anti-fa types protesting and disrupting the event.

This is the concept of the "heckler's veto": Group A has a speech/rally at Location X, but Group B disrupts using threats/violence. When Group A attempts to have a speech at Location Y, Group B uses threats of violence to shut down the event because Location Y doesn't want to deal with the possibility of violence. In effect, one group is able to be shut down due to the threats of an opposing group.

In such a case, it's important for the health of free speech in general that such precedents are not allowed to continue. Here, a public university was (rightfully, IMHO) compelled to host an event despite threats coming from the event's opponents because to give in would be to legitimize those threatening shut-down tactics to the detriment of everyone's free speech.

Now I'm sure the specifics of this case also rested on the fact that Auburn is a public university and thus has more responsibilities to serve as a platform for speech than a private institution would. But it's good to see the delegitimization of street-brawl tactics that the court decision represents. I'm worried about a future in which leftists and rightists physically fighting or threatening to do so becomes the new normal.

If humans are hardwired to be averse to "millions of immigrants pouring into your home country," why is that? Presumably you're referring to that aversion being chosen by natural selection. That suggests that we're less likely to have been descended from those who were more open to displacement by outside populations, and more likely to come from those who guarded their borders. Societies that don't keep barriers are less likely to pass on their genes or memes to the future.

I'm assuming that the main difference between then and now is that an increase in resources means we can share freely with more "outsiders." Presumably resources aren't infinite, so what's the upper bound? How would we know?

How many destitute people do you house in your own home? Why only that number and not more? If zero, why is that? What percentage of your income are you donating to support refugees? Why is that percentage not higher?

Exactly. I think this is the aspect that's "rubbed me the wrong way" about this CoC thing. I don't come from a culture where workplace physical contact would be seen as acceptable, but I'm not about to claim that that's some sort of human universal without a lot more research.

The sense I get from GitHub's CoC effort is that it's attempting to codify supposedly universal modes of proper human interaction without recognizing that it's sourced in a specific, local culture.

What Person A sees as a good sort of social justice may not like up with Person B's interpretation. It is possible for movements to sully the name of a stated positive goal.

Beware of reading books by their covers. That's the sort of thinking that got the US stuck with the Patriot Act or other sorts of legislation. Especially after a terrorist attack, people don't want to be opponents of "patriotism" (which gets defined by one side to mean a very specific thing).

Phrases like "there's no such thing as reverse racism" seem inherently ambiguous and prone to causing argument, mainly because two very opposed sides can both say the same statement:

- "There's no such thing as reverse racism (because any kind of discrimination based on race is racism and we shouldn't be diminishing some kinds of discrimination)"

- "There's no such thing as reverse racism (because it's impossible to be racist against people who are in the Oppressive Group category)"

It's a namespace collision that can inadvertently give "support to the other side."

Though, it's the same thing with words like "racist." There's a generally universal desire in our society to not want to be "racist" in the sense of "common-usage-racism," discriminating against others based on group identities. Thrown into this mix is a new "academic-racism" definition of "racist," which requires "privilege+power" and demotes anything that doesn't fit into mere "discrimination" (which apparently isn't a bad thing anymore by itself?).

The reason why this new concept (which, let's be honest, is different than the common-usage meaning of racism) has the same name is because there is an ideological/political strength in namespace collisions or identifier overloading. By using the same taboo word for two different concepts, the new meaning can insert itself as the dominant meaning.

My guess is that they would be happy that they've created that climate of fear. I've noticed a trend among at least some in the "social justice" community that sees progress happening in terms of suppressing bad actions/speech until those who remember it die off. A lot of believing that the way forward is to akin to waiting for the "old racist generation" to die.

I for one support Curtis on this issue, but tend not to post here on the subject except under an alternate username. I do this because I do in fact fear the "social justice" crowd and their ability to mess with people and their careers when they don't follow the party line.

If I were to hazard a guess, I think I'm not alone in this and I think you're not in a minority (or at least a small one). The recent HN stories seem to get a good number of "silent upvotes" before anyone steps into the fray to add a comment.

Can you provide some support for your assertion that this is false -- that there are no cultural differences between Chinese cultures and Western cultures in terms of attitudes of what is "right" in terms of cheating, plagiarism, or copycat/shanzhai goods? Note that this is not just a matter of whether a culture has cheaters or not, but to what degree it is tolerated in either practice or in the stated beliefs of a culture.

Culture is not just cuisine and costumes -- it is also how one interacts with the world and others in one's society. There's a certain arrogance in assuming that all people in the world must obviously approach things in the same way that you do.

I think the issue is not so much that they'll continue to grow -- I don't anticipate a majority of the United States, for example, becoming ideologically identical to the "SJW"-type people on Tumblr.

The issue is that a very small but loud group of online activists are becoming able to have disproportionate influence. It's easy for online mobs to form on sites like Twitter or Tumblr, which have messaging systems that promote reblogging/retweeting/"signal boosting" and are neither good for nuanced discussion nor corrections. Companies and organizations depend so heavily on Internet social media for their PR that they quickly bow to mob pressure in terms of self-censorship or firing "problematic" employees.

So it's not so much that the "social justice activists" will spread in terms of population, it's that they can have a chilling effect where the other side doesn't speak out, out of fear of the nuclear option of online shaming being used against them. This can lead to one side dominating the conversation despite being unpersuasive.

(apologies for posting on a new account for this; I don't feel safe discussing social-justice-related topics on accounts that can connect with my real-world persona)

>If you said yes to any of these questions, you're a feminist.

There's danger in treating ideological positions in the same way we treat party affiliations. The idea of the "motte and bailey doctrine" [0] is relevant here, where ideas like "feminism is just the belief that women are people!" are the motte, and more controversial ideas are the bailey that not only do many adherents support, but then use the near-universal acceptance of the motte as reasoning why people should accept the package deal of including the bailey as well.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...