One of the greatest things in a democratic society is the right to protest about issues like this, which is very good for a healthy debate.
However when Tim Cook defended the decision to side with China and to censor and suppress the pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong [1] and then support this one, it is quite extraordinary for this double standards from Apple to pick and choose their causes when both are exercising their right to protest against an injustice.
That's because you've made the mistake of thinking a multibillion dollar corporation can be legitimately altruistic or an ally to activists.
Apple hasn't acted hypocritically at all. Every decision they have made was calculated to fulfull their primary goal: generating profit for shareholders.
It's not hypocritical at all, they don't need anything from Alabama rednecks, they do need the support of the Chinese government. The consistent principle behind both decisions is "Look out for Number One"
But Racism 2.0 has been pushed out and – in some ways – it's a forced upgrade.
Racism 1.0 was widely understood: racists were bad people who made monkey chants on football terraces. It was "the nice people" vs "the mean people". If we "raised awareness", maybe one day it would be "stamped out".
Racism 2.0 is more complex.
It's structural and systemic, so for the first time a lot of of white progressives are discovering that we're part of the problem. Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.
People are having to re-learn stuff they thought they already knew and not everybody is thrilled.
Worse, Racism 2.0 is closed source. The code isn't really published anywhere, at least not in simple language. You have to kind of piece it together yourself from lists of "resources" thrown together by activists, some of whom have opaque agendas.
It's not as simple as it used to be, and it's not surprising that some people are confused.
The "closed source" phenomenon is real. For someone who is not black, the risk/reward profile of participating in this conversation is extraordinarily poor. I'm not stepping in the muck, "Your Silence is Complicity" placards notwithstanding.
I've been able to do it as well, but I don't think it's fair to call it easy. It requires self-control to avoid getting heated and saying something inelegantly, and attentiveness to make sure you avoid pushing any hot buttons. There's no way you can talk as freely and easily about anti-racism as you can about, like, food or sports.
I think it's more that "All Lives Matter" has become a slogan to rebuke the rallying cry that Black Lives Matter. If someone expressed the general concept in a way that wasn't trying to downplay BLM (eg "equality under the law"), I don't think that would be called racist.
Also, you're summing up the topic of racism as referring to the progression of criticizing racism. Actual "Racism 1.0" would be more like "it is good and just to subjugate different tribes". Racism 2.0 would be "they're less capable, it's for their own good".
Well the point of saying "All Lives Matter" isn't actually to claim that all lives matter, so a "good faith" way would kind of be missing the point. The people who invented it and say it don't mean the lives of poor black kids in the inner cities, families of Salvadoran immigrants apprehended at the border, transgender activists in San Francisco, etc... the phrase "All Lives Matter" is just the 2020 version of... (I'll let Lee Atwater do the rest):
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni\\er, ni\\er, ni\\er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni\\er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni\\er, ni\\er.”
This quote is essentially saying... that the root of fiscal conservatism and small government conservatism is racism. In the 1960s and still today, people support states' rights as an indirect way to hurt black people...?
This quote is terrible and one of the most racist things I've ever read. It tries to interject race into forms of political theory that have nothing to do with race. Just absolutely toxic for society.
"All lives matter" as a rebuttal or reminder is about as useful as "LOL it's not actually free you forgot about taxes" when someone mentions "free" healthcare. Everyone already knew that. Context is always part of understanding language and in both those cases the context is pretty damn clear—these aren't even ambiguous or difficult ones. It's just being intentionally obtuse for a plainly-bullshit "gotcha".
No, it's that the message of "black lives matter" is intended as a reminder to a society that acts like it has forgotten this or doesn't give it enough consideration. "All lives matter" as a rebuttal to it is a deliberately-obtuse "gotcha". "Well yeah but all lives matter, so there, you should use that slogan instead of making it about race". Everyone got that already. What (apparently) needed to be pointed out was a more specific thing. And most people understand context or they wouldn't be able to communicate, period, and the context of "black lives matter" obviously doesn't mean other lives don't, as anyone who's not trying to play jerkass quibbling games would already recognize. It's a deliberate misunderstanding for the sake of distraction.
Logically if people have forgotten black lives matter then they have forgotten that all lives matter. I think people who get caught up arguing against logic are purposefully being devisive.
We were recently asked by management to stop using the words whitelist and blacklist, as they are seen as being "hurtful". No real idea how to react to that, given that they are terms of art (and of course, were never any sort of reference to race).
I suppose it's pretty much like most management edicts that come down over time. Just nod your head, keep your mouth shut, and with any luck it will all blow over in a month or two.
I think a lot of this goes too far, but I do agree with whitelist and blacklist. In all aspects of our lives we use "white" to describe things that are good and "black" to describe things that are bad. That movie is "dark." It has a "black-hearted" villain.
While that phenomenon does not have its origin in racism, I do think it reinforces it. I've moved to allow-list and block-list on my company's recommendation. I only remember to do it about 50% of the time, so I'm glad that it's not being policed, but rather a constructive suggestion.
Ok what about your balance sheet being in the black? Should that be neutralized too?
I think it’s going too far. If you want to do something for people go out and help them. Devote time to kids, provide mentorship, etc. This other superficial stuff only satisfies misguided activists and does nothing for affected kids.
Here’s the thing. It’s easy to find someone or something to pillory. It’s time consuming and hard to get on the ground and help. People love “showing” how good they are, but rarely act on it in real life with hard effort —that’s too much work.
As Zizek says, what happens the day after (the revolution)? Everyone is enamored with the effervescence or revolution being the good guys... but no one wants to do the hard work. Everyone’s life has to go on when you get back to reality.
I generally don't like the way these discussions play out because there is plenty of vocabulary we've changed over time when it becomes less palatable to the contemporary taste. It's easy to pull out all of the more innocent examples of the word while ignoring the perspective of those who don't appreciate it.
There are definitely instances of taking it too far, and they tend to be the ones that get disproportionate attention because they generate easy outrage. But in all honesty, if what we're seeing happen right now is progress towards a fairer society, I'd rather not stand in the way of it just because I'm used to having 'master' as my main branch on git, and I'd prefer to have the people most directly affected make their voice heard on this kind of thing.
So no “maître d'” no “maistro”, “meister” either... or is there a line somewhere?
Am I not my dogs master? I mean, of course it should not be used to show relationships between people, but relationships between things or people and animals, I don’t see an issue.
Of course no one can ban a word. Words exist independently of any authority... that said, it’s not an absurd proposition to think people will want to control those words for their own reasons. I don’t think my examples are a stretch given that it’s a stretch to tie conceptual data relationships to human relationships and see something untowards in it.
Do we change the name for “Slavic” people too because it harkens back to their history where Slavs were the default slave people in Western Europe and the origin of the word’s English meaning?
If anything, Slavs would have a point as it unfairly defaults them as being slaves etymologically.
I might well be wrong but this kind of authority over the use of language seems to be much more US-specific than I've seen elsewhere, which you could attribute to the overall dominance of US people in the places where these discussions tend to crop up (github, HN, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.).
I don't really know what to make of it except that these discussions about not using 'master', 'cop', etc. seem _heavily_ biased to the US perspective and current affairs in the US. I can understand it taking place due to the sheer cultural upheaval that has (quite frankly) been a long time coming, but my mild frustration about `US === the whole wide world` can take a step aside while we focus on the injustices fellow humans face.
If it were just a constructive suggestion, it would be harmless enough. My guess, though, is that "errors" in usage will be regarded with increasing gravity. Use the wrong wording, and your boss and colleagues will tacitly start marking you as one of "them", division increases, and the cycle continues.
There is nothing new under the sun. We're just inventing new ways to hate each other.
Reinforces? ... Like the Amex Black Card is bad, why being in the black financially is bad, why cooking delicious ribs on the grill turns the outer portion black, why black is the preferred color for high end limousines, why Chanel and Dior and Bond use black and white logos, why black is used in fashion to emphasize slimness, etc., etc. ad nauseum.
Sorry, I respectfully disagree. I am exposed to a similar phenomenon. I am blind. And blindness is routinely used to indicate all sorts of inabilities. Someone is "blind" to something. The blind leading the blind. The blind men and the elephant. I could go on for days.
However, I am OLD enough to understand that I am not going to change the world. And there are also no public demonstrations going on, cheering "disability is cool". I just have to deal with the reality of my situation, as everyone on this fucked up planet has to learn at some point in their life.
Policing the language does ntt change people.
I’m curious, what words did they ask you to use instead?
I remember in the mid-2000’s we had to stop using master/slave in reference to LDAP and database servers, and (I forget now whether it was IDE or SCSI) the switches on hard drives. The replacement was primary/secondary, which I felt somewhat obfuscated the intended meaning.
A producer makes, a consumer eats. That simply isn't the same as a master/slave relationship. Slaves do not "eat" what masters make. And so on.
But taking a step back, we have decades of lore giving us a sense of what "master/slave", in the technology sense, means. Ditching that for a few seconds of PC glory is madness.
There were no suggested alternatives. I almost suggested that we just invert the usage, but clearly this is not a time in which one can make such jokes.
I suppose I'll just start using definitions instead: e.g., "the list of allowed IPs". Good luck googling that...
> In practice, when a junior wonders why they can't find anything useful when they google or grep for "acceptlist", then what?
Lots of words have synonyms, so that's not a real problem. Sooner or later the search results will catch up, and in the mean time it's always an option for a junior developer to ask a question or figure things out themselves by looking at the implementation.
Not sure what to say to that. For normal corporate use, this would be standard Dilbert-esque silliness. In safety-critical situations, it would be madness.
Consider it a chance to use a term with more semantic meaning.
Guarding access? You have an allow list or a deny list.
Rolling out an experiment? You have an enable list or disable list.
Restricting an input? You have a filter.
> Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.
I'm not sure it ever was? It's been criticized for a long time that pretending not to see colour is just a way of pretending the problems don't exist. Generally the best approach is to find nonwhite voices on the subject - part of the problem is that even within antiracism activism it's easier for white people to get on TV or get an audience for lectures and books.
And part of the reason that there's all the problems right now is that ""racism 1.0"" never went away.
I think most reasonable people really do understand the idea of treating everyone the same regardless of race. Personally, I consider that to be ideal behavior on the subject of race relations, and any other standard seems ethically inferior by comparison.
I had always assumed that that was MLK's central point in his most famous speech. Maybe I misunderstood what he was saying.
It was never the correct thing to say or think, you're correct. Society has been critical of people insisting on that practice anywhere from 1960 to 2020, and there's an obvious reason why most depictions of it in media for the past fifty years have been rich white people with southern accents uttering it as an excuse to do something absolutely racist as a punchline.
I'm inclined to agree. Black authors and scholars have been critiquing the 'color-blind' school of thinking since the 60s; notably, James Baldwin did it live on TV. [0]
> It's structural and systemic, so for the first time a lot of of white progressives are discovering that we're part of the problem. Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.
K-12 schools, even in "red" America, very successfully taught me that sex and color aren't how you judge people, and gave me the impression we were past that.
The dissonance of seeing that not everyone was on-board with that program the way I thought they (we) just about all were, and of backlash against that attitude itself(!) has taken me from legitimately, no-BS, about as close to being not-racist and not-sexist as possible, as a kid, to feeling like I'm more racist and sexist than I was. And I don't just mean that my eyes have been opened to ways I was without realizing it, but actually transforming my thinking to consider those factors way more and (inevitably) incorporate biases from them. It's weird and fairly unpleasant (and, as a symptom of precisely this issue, I must hasten to add that I don't intend this as crying about getting the short end of the stick or setting myself up as victim-in-chief, obviously).
I gotta say, I'm not really enjoying the Racism 2.0 upgrade. Weirdly, "Oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men" is not only fine by the Racism 2.0 standards, even objecting to it makes you problematic by the new standards. I don't think you can really paint me as being "confused" as in "you should educate yourself," which is a fairly common refrain on the support forum. In some sense, Racism 2.0 runs counter to the reason I bought Racism 1.0, because previously the idea behind the software was that we try hard to treat everyone the same no matter what, and now in Racism 2.0, that's bad, and who you are has everything to do with what you are allowed to do, say, and even think.
I'm not a political scientist, but it seems like when a group takes control, there is always some hidden social rules that you just need to "know", and helps identify the out-group. What you say/can't say in "polite company". Feels like just another mechanism for control.
> Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.
It's been widely held up as the standard privileged response that helps secure an unjust status quo through erasure for longer than, really, any of the rest of the phrasing in this sentence was current in how one would express the problem of that statement. As an example (comparatively recent in the history of that expression being widely derided as problematic), when Steven Colbert adopted the faux-right-wing personality for the Colbert Report 15 years ago, “I don’t see race” was one of the standard refrains he used, which wouldn't work if it weren't not only problematic but widely and stereotypically so.
So, no, it didn't just suddenly become the wrong thing to say.
I think this framing is itself problematic. The language of "forced upgrades" and "pushed out" updates implies a sense of victimization and to me seems to imply that the goalposts are being moved. If "All Lives Matter" was Racism 1.0, what was happening before 2013, an extended beta? Moreover, this line of discussion reinforces the idea that somehow the comfort White people even matters when we're talking about racist systems of oppression.
The truth is that racism has always been more complicated than "the nice people" vs "the mean people". Blackness and Whiteness were invented by slave traders to justify the subjugation of the people they intended to enslave. The definitions of Whiteness were carved out around those in power, in the colonies especially, to make sure they retained their wealth and power.
The problem we face as White people now is that we are far enough into the advancement of this system that we unwittingly participate in and benefit from it. This makes me extremely angry. What we have is a system that is so advanced that most of us White people do not see it, a system so geared toward our comfort and privilege that when the system is questioned, it makes us feel uncomfortable and impinged.
I'm reminded of the story about Facebook's AI that created a language that humans couldn't understand. The racist system we were born into, have swum in for our whole lives, and are now confronted with is not something that can be refactored, papered over with code coverage, or pivoted in the same way that we often think of resolving software problems. The system itself is corrupt. We need to rm -rf this repo and init a new one with a fresh perspective and a bold, courageous vision for the kind of society that we want to live in based on our values and lessons learned with. As a White person, that can be scary because it means that the world might not continue to cater and defer to us. But we have to be committed to true justice, true equality for all people.
I genuinely wonder, why is that? If I'm white, this means my life doesn't matter, and when I will be killed I will end up just as +1 in some statistics because of the colour of my skin?
This is extremely concerning. People's hardware should not be remotely edited to broadcast political slogans, even if this particular slogan is a good one.
I don't think that really mitigates the concern. If my microwave started saying "support our troops!", I wouldn't be comforted by the fact that I can throw it out and get a different one.
But your microwave doesn't connect to an online service that you don't pay for. Nobody is forcing you to use Siri, or any of Apple's online services.
It's more similar to a website you use saying "support our troops."
If you don't like using an always-online constantly updated service, then you have the option to not use it. You pay for the convenience of Siri's knowledge and functionality by giving up any control over how the system responds and acts. You can always turn your internet connection off when you use Siri, and thus only use it for things like playing and pausing music.
Well, it doesn't yet. I suppose my smart refrigerator would have been a better example. As more and more components of our lives get a screen and Wifi connection, we're going to need better norms than "online services can do whatever they want".
That is not at all what is happening here. They are not 'remotely editing' your hardware any more than a corporate website who puts a support banner on their website for some cause. Siri, much like websites, is a service. Like a website, you are free to not use it if you so choose. Nothing has changed on your device, and if anything this is less of a feature than a banner on a website because you have to specifically invoke these actions.
I see Siri as an input feature for my phone, not a remote service. For Siri to pick and choose what it wants to accept feels like my keyboard refusing to type out phrases it doesn't like, or my monitor attaching little popups to content it finds offensive.
I feel like your technology should be simply a set of tools that assist you.
If you’re a “bad” person, logically your technology should help you be bad.
And if you’re good, the same.
But never would I want my technology to inform me what is good or bad, or permit me one path over the other. That is my decision as the human in the relationship.
Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised that one day you search for 3D printing something “bad” (as defined by someone) gets you redirected to advocacy groups against something.
Search for abortion resources, search for 3D printing a firearm, search for pirated movies, search for being anonymous in a protest... all get redirected to the right way to think of things.
The FBI should just go ahead and ask them for the good of the people to redirect all terms they categorize as terroristic in nature to their anti radicalization resources...
That already happens with google and topics such as self harm or racism. Googling "I hate X" is going to turn up multiple results like "History of Discrimination Against X" and no articles that actually express hatred for X.
That's because nobody says "I hate X" because they would, rightfully, be ignored. It's not a useful statement to try and publish and get to the top of Google. I just tried a few dogwhistle phrases and it's not hard to find people legitimately espousing these views.
Also: you can very easily find hate groups and where they hang out on the internet through Google. You'll also, correctly, find adequate warning that these groups are probably not places you want to be.
Why do some whites, men, or white men, always want to be a victim when they're the cause of so much pain and suffering collectively? (I say this as a white man, but I don't presume that we haven't fucked up the lives of so many over the centuries).
Maybe it's time for us to just STFU and let other minority groups take the lead and become our leaders because we don't know how to lead compassionately, maybe they can where we failed.
Because I am not about to be indoctrinated with relentless self-loathing on the basis of my skin color or sex, but most especially for past actions of other people over whom I had no control.
To blame white men for the crimes of past white men, well, imagine if history worked like that everywhere. You could do the same with just about any particular group -- they've all exterminated or maltreated someone. And yet you have this focus on just the Caucasian ones (even ones with no history of colonialism in their regional past) ... who taught you to fixate on this? And whom does it benefit?
I can be sympathetic and empathetic to blacks without hating my own skin color. It's called self-respect. I respect myself for not being a bigoted piece of shit like most cops are.
A straw man to your straw man would suggest that Apple shouldn't even sell technology to such people or should at least just brick the phone of anyone responsible for thoughtcrime.
There's a world of difference between exploring the world of information and genocide.
When entities like Apple start doing things like this is it pouring gasoline on conspiracy theory fires, and one can argue makes things worse.
I think they should definitely choose what should go viral though. You can Google ALM to your heart's content on an iPhone, they just don't facilitate it through the lower-resistance modes of querying.
Imagine google coming of age at different times in American history. It's merely a coincidence that what google is preferring aligns with your sensibilities.
What if google were making these editorial decisions during WWII? Would you be redirected away from things supportive Japanese Americans that were place in internment camps?
How about during the red scare? Would you be directed to Hollywood blacklists?
How about during the civil rights era? Would you be directed to content arguing in favor of segregation?
Contrary to popular liberal belief, the Black community in America is not a borg with one hive mind. There's a lot of diversity of thought within that community and people that dissent from the very narrow viewpoint that many gatekeepers who lean left are promoting. There's a lot more thoughtfulness and nuance in discussion than promoting one-sided activism would suggest. In fact, this active filtering robs that community (and other communities that are filtered) of their agency.
Here's a list of people from the black community with dissenting opinions that I can name quickly off the top of my head and I'm sure there are many many more:
Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Roland G. Fryer Jr. Anthony Mackey, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Larry Sharpe, Pastor Corey Brooks, Eric July
It astonishes me how greedily people embrace extinguishing the liberties of others (and externalizing their costs to them), while they feel their echo-chamber forms the majority.
It’s almost like they can’t imagine a scenario where they are the minority, and might wish to pursue their own beliefs in peace...
Especially shameful here on HN, which claims to be an especially intellectually open-minded community!
For shame, that you present an accurate, supported analysis of risks that doesn’t support the current dogma! ;)
What's crazy is that for most of HN's history ending about 3-4 years ago, both of our comments would have been met with upvotes. I wish I had access to the information dang does to see the average age of accounts downvoting comments such as ours.
The last few years definitely have had a feeling of eternal september and of all the eternal septembers I've experienced in my 26 years on the Internet, this is by far the worst and most toxic to open, thoughtful and nuanced discussion.
My general observation is that those that best recognize the importance of such liberties also possess the greatest faculties in abstraction (a fundamental skill for success in engineering, especially software engineering). For it is only through abstraction that someone is able to back out from the concrete issue at hand and see generalizable principles and how they might apply to other issues under other circumstances.
My suspicion is that as HN and tech in general has caught the attention of a broader audience, that the median capacity to abstract has dropped and a plurality lacks the comparable capacity to reason abstractly as once existed on HN.
This would aggregate people for whom downvote means “I don’t agree”, and separately those whose downvote means “that’s an inflammatory/ unsupported/ insane position”.
Soon, those open to reasoned debate would see comments by others known for reasoned debate — regardless of their political/ideological stripe.
The trolls would be relegated each to their own echo-chamber.
Technology is never neutral. It always reflects the biases of its creators, and of the social environment in which it's developed. Those biases may directly contradict the goals you expressed. For example, if self-driving car technology has racist biases, a "good" person may still end up on the inside of a car that chooses an escape route with a pedestrian of color in its path over an escape route which has no pedestrians.
Neutrality is a myth. Actively promoting values and challenging biases is preferable. You don't have to agree with the values promoted, and you're welcome to choose not to use the technology.
This is a fantastic demonstration of what Zizek means when he talks about modern ideology.
> For subjects to believe in an ideology, it must have been presented to them, and been accepted, as non-ideological indeed, as True and Right, and what anyone sensible would believe. As we shall see in 2e, Žižek is alert to the realist insight that there is no more effective political gesture than to declare some contestable matter above political contestation. Just as the third way is said to be post-ideological or national security is claimed to be extra-political, so Žižek argues that ideologies are always presented by their proponents as being discourses about Things too sacred to profane by politics. Hence, Žižek’s bold opening in The Sublime Object of Ideology is to claim that today ideology has not so much disappeared from the political landscape as come into its own. It is exactly because of this success, Žižek argues, that ideology has also been able to be dismissed in accepted political and theoretical opinion.
I think it's actually fairly concerning that the fault lines between ideologies seems to be deepening - people seemed more and more convinced that their positions are absolutely not even contestable. I'm not sure where there is room for civil political discourse and positive change in this kind of scenario.
Huh? I explicitly stated that neutrality is a myth, why would you assume that I'm neutral on which values are promoted? No, I do not support either of those.
Right, so you would be for our ability to break encryption the foreign baddies might use? You never know what baddie might want to use strong encryption...
>If you’re a “bad” person, logically your technology should help you be bad.
I think this oversteps the Silicon Valley idea that technology is always inherently beneficial.
It's really not unfair that I can buy gardening gloves and radish seeds on Amazon, while a domestic terrorist has to sneak around and lie to buy a barrel of nitromethane. We should not be using our technology to enable both equally, and then leave it to the individual to decide whether to plant a garden or a bomb.
what's up with this slavish support for BLM, a violent racist organization that instigates riots, looting and defunding of police? the unquestioning fanaticism everywhere really reminds me Nazification of Germany in 1930s
America isn't the only place that the Atlantic slave trade occurred. It's not the only place where blacks (and others, like Muslims) have been/are persecuted in greater numbers than the "indigenous" populations.
Hence my attempt (perhaps insufficient) to not say that "only" Black lives matter in this case. I'm also not infering that the BLM movement has been saying anything like that in the first place.
Arab slave trade does not refer to arabs being slaves but rather to people from north africa, south europe, and eastern europe being traded - so, caucasians.
Wikipedia says there has been a poll in august 2015 regarding ALM. And "78% of likely American voters said that the statement All Lives Matter was "close[r] to [their] own" point of view than was Black Lives Matter.
Yet, everyone seems to agree that ALM is now a racist move? I am racist if I believe that all people should be treated equally? Those that utter the phrase are accused of subtly trying to transport a message which is anti-black?
The longer I read about it, the more I hate identity politics.
If I honestly believe that BLM is to restricted a phrase, I am now being accused of being racist because I dont explicitly support BLM?
This is madness. Why do activists persue radical and extremist paths which eventually reduces the support they get from the political middle?
There's a type of person who has the aim of dividing other people. Arguing over black lives matter Vs sll lives matter is just a divisive tactic. The correct answer to both is "yes, and [what's the most important thing we need to do right now?]"
ALM was still new, unknown and misunderstood/misidentified in 2015, not to mention the poll was sourced from Rasmussen, a right-leaning polling company.
I’ll assume you’re not intentionally misunderstanding ALM vs. BLM. ALM is the base assumption that we all agree with. But imagine if we were in our happy ALM world, but “B” kept getting shat on. BLM is a response to that, to say, “Hey, BLM too!” If it helps, think of it as an asterisk. “*BLM too.” BLM is not exclusive, it’s an interjection.
Also, these thoughts aren’t mine (though they were obvious to me from the start), they’re fully Googleable.
No, I am not intentionally misunderstanding something. How do you even do that?
But I still done get the word wrestling. From my POV, ALM is not exclusive. But if someone accuses me of being racist just because I am using a phrase that has somehow been declared unwanted by a select few, all they are achieving is that they reduce my willingness to support their rallies.
Language police is horrible. I know it from first hand. I am blind. And since about 10 years or so, I notice that more and more people feel like they
are not allowed to use the word blind while I am around. It is pretty clear why they do that. They are afraid of stepping on someones toes and being shunted for that. Now, all that has been achieved by this is that people feel more awkward around me, because they no longer know how to talk about my condition. They find all sorts of phrases to make sure they never mention the supposedly bad word. However, fuck it, I AM BLIND. Policing the language does not improve my situation at all. In fact, it worsens it.
Look up the Ruwandan Uprising: what color were they? Barbary Slave Trade: what color were they? Khmer Rouge: what color were they? People massacre one another at the drop of a hat, just learn some history.
You have been taught to only fixate on the crimes of Caucasians and to ignore all others.
I'm pretty sure the Ruwandan Uprising were different tribes of black people, so how does a internal conflict among people of the same race even weigh in to the conversation?
That'd be more like the war w/ North and South Korea...
I'm just fixating on the crimes of police, I could care less about other caucasians, I'm worried about police. Even blacks are more likely to kill blacks if they're wearing the blue uniform because of their indoctrination. The blue brotherhood becomes everything. What happens if a political ideology you don't agree w/ decides they want to be the police so they start getting jobs and become the police, maybe they start doing to white people what cops are doing to black people.
What would you do if whites were treated 100% equal to blacks by police but not in a good way, still they sit on your neck, they just stop caring whether you're black or white. Get pulled over for speeding get out, and have a 50% chance of survival?
Nah, you were talking about Hitler and stuff, now you switched topics because I pointed out a problem with your argument. If I point out crimes of police in other countries where whites are not the majority, you will just switch again.
You've fixated on white people, white men, as being evil. That's your fixation, not the crimes of police.
I'm white. I'm not evil. I wouldn't characterize Bernie Sanders as evil either. Skin color has no bearing on evil. However supporting EVIL members of your skin color and not calling them out, that is evil. If you believe that a cop who knows another cop who has used these tactics, and didn't report them is still a 'good guy' then you're probably higher up on that evil scale. Because you think it's okay. It's not all black/white either, it's a scale obviously. Some people are just blind that this goes on every single day.
I mean it's NOT just happening to blacks now, hell if you just SUPPORT or STAND UP for blacks they treat you like you are one...see that old man in Buffalo w/ his head bashed in by cops.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadHowever when Tim Cook defended the decision to side with China and to censor and suppress the pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong [1] and then support this one, it is quite extraordinary for this double standards from Apple to pick and choose their causes when both are exercising their right to protest against an injustice.
A very hypocritical one-sided stance from Apple.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/03/apple-bans-app-used-by-...
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/11/tim-cook-defends-remova...
Apple hasn't acted hypocritically at all. Every decision they have made was calculated to fulfull their primary goal: generating profit for shareholders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook#Early_life_and_educat...
But Racism 2.0 has been pushed out and – in some ways – it's a forced upgrade.
Racism 1.0 was widely understood: racists were bad people who made monkey chants on football terraces. It was "the nice people" vs "the mean people". If we "raised awareness", maybe one day it would be "stamped out".
Racism 2.0 is more complex.
It's structural and systemic, so for the first time a lot of of white progressives are discovering that we're part of the problem. Saying "I don't see colour" is suddenly the wrong thing to say. For a long time it was the correct thing to say and think.
People are having to re-learn stuff they thought they already knew and not everybody is thrilled.
Worse, Racism 2.0 is closed source. The code isn't really published anywhere, at least not in simple language. You have to kind of piece it together yourself from lists of "resources" thrown together by activists, some of whom have opaque agendas.
It's not as simple as it used to be, and it's not surprising that some people are confused.
Also, you're summing up the topic of racism as referring to the progression of criticizing racism. Actual "Racism 1.0" would be more like "it is good and just to subjugate different tribes". Racism 2.0 would be "they're less capable, it's for their own good".
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni\\er, ni\\er, ni\\er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni\\er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni\\er, ni\\er.”
This quote is terrible and one of the most racist things I've ever read. It tries to interject race into forms of political theory that have nothing to do with race. Just absolutely toxic for society.
I suppose it's pretty much like most management edicts that come down over time. Just nod your head, keep your mouth shut, and with any luck it will all blow over in a month or two.
While that phenomenon does not have its origin in racism, I do think it reinforces it. I've moved to allow-list and block-list on my company's recommendation. I only remember to do it about 50% of the time, so I'm glad that it's not being policed, but rather a constructive suggestion.
I think it’s going too far. If you want to do something for people go out and help them. Devote time to kids, provide mentorship, etc. This other superficial stuff only satisfies misguided activists and does nothing for affected kids.
Here’s the thing. It’s easy to find someone or something to pillory. It’s time consuming and hard to get on the ground and help. People love “showing” how good they are, but rarely act on it in real life with hard effort —that’s too much work.
As Zizek says, what happens the day after (the revolution)? Everyone is enamored with the effervescence or revolution being the good guys... but no one wants to do the hard work. Everyone’s life has to go on when you get back to reality.
There are definitely instances of taking it too far, and they tend to be the ones that get disproportionate attention because they generate easy outrage. But in all honesty, if what we're seeing happen right now is progress towards a fairer society, I'd rather not stand in the way of it just because I'm used to having 'master' as my main branch on git, and I'd prefer to have the people most directly affected make their voice heard on this kind of thing.
Am I not my dogs master? I mean, of course it should not be used to show relationships between people, but relationships between things or people and animals, I don’t see an issue.
Do we change the name for “Slavic” people too because it harkens back to their history where Slavs were the default slave people in Western Europe and the origin of the word’s English meaning?
If anything, Slavs would have a point as it unfairly defaults them as being slaves etymologically.
I don't really know what to make of it except that these discussions about not using 'master', 'cop', etc. seem _heavily_ biased to the US perspective and current affairs in the US. I can understand it taking place due to the sheer cultural upheaval that has (quite frankly) been a long time coming, but my mild frustration about `US === the whole wide world` can take a step aside while we focus on the injustices fellow humans face.
There is nothing new under the sun. We're just inventing new ways to hate each other.
I remember in the mid-2000’s we had to stop using master/slave in reference to LDAP and database servers, and (I forget now whether it was IDE or SCSI) the switches on hard drives. The replacement was primary/secondary, which I felt somewhat obfuscated the intended meaning.
primary / replica
Orchestrator / Executor
Even master / minion would be better imo, the I prefer the others already mentioned
But taking a step back, we have decades of lore giving us a sense of what "master/slave", in the technology sense, means. Ditching that for a few seconds of PC glory is madness.
I suppose I'll just start using definitions instead: e.g., "the list of allowed IPs". Good luck googling that...
EDIT nope I’m confused, but leaving comment for completeness
EDIT2 what about andlist and nandlist?
That's pretty verbose. How about acceptlist and denylist (or blocklist)?
For "master/slave" maybe "boss/worker" would be a good substitute?
Lots of words have synonyms, so that's not a real problem. Sooner or later the search results will catch up, and in the mean time it's always an option for a junior developer to ask a question or figure things out themselves by looking at the implementation.
Guarding access? You have an allow list or a deny list. Rolling out an experiment? You have an enable list or disable list. Restricting an input? You have a filter.
You are so fired.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-knodel-terminology-01
I'm not sure it ever was? It's been criticized for a long time that pretending not to see colour is just a way of pretending the problems don't exist. Generally the best approach is to find nonwhite voices on the subject - part of the problem is that even within antiracism activism it's easier for white people to get on TV or get an audience for lectures and books.
And part of the reason that there's all the problems right now is that ""racism 1.0"" never went away.
I had always assumed that that was MLK's central point in his most famous speech. Maybe I misunderstood what he was saying.
I'm inclined to agree. Black authors and scholars have been critiquing the 'color-blind' school of thinking since the 60s; notably, James Baldwin did it live on TV. [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZQQ7o16yQ
K-12 schools, even in "red" America, very successfully taught me that sex and color aren't how you judge people, and gave me the impression we were past that.
The dissonance of seeing that not everyone was on-board with that program the way I thought they (we) just about all were, and of backlash against that attitude itself(!) has taken me from legitimately, no-BS, about as close to being not-racist and not-sexist as possible, as a kid, to feeling like I'm more racist and sexist than I was. And I don't just mean that my eyes have been opened to ways I was without realizing it, but actually transforming my thinking to consider those factors way more and (inevitably) incorporate biases from them. It's weird and fairly unpleasant (and, as a symptom of precisely this issue, I must hasten to add that I don't intend this as crying about getting the short end of the stick or setting myself up as victim-in-chief, obviously).
I don't think that's true, really; "I don't see colour" was always a cop-out to avoid thinking about anything.
It's been widely held up as the standard privileged response that helps secure an unjust status quo through erasure for longer than, really, any of the rest of the phrasing in this sentence was current in how one would express the problem of that statement. As an example (comparatively recent in the history of that expression being widely derided as problematic), when Steven Colbert adopted the faux-right-wing personality for the Colbert Report 15 years ago, “I don’t see race” was one of the standard refrains he used, which wouldn't work if it weren't not only problematic but widely and stereotypically so.
So, no, it didn't just suddenly become the wrong thing to say.
The truth is that racism has always been more complicated than "the nice people" vs "the mean people". Blackness and Whiteness were invented by slave traders to justify the subjugation of the people they intended to enslave. The definitions of Whiteness were carved out around those in power, in the colonies especially, to make sure they retained their wealth and power.
The problem we face as White people now is that we are far enough into the advancement of this system that we unwittingly participate in and benefit from it. This makes me extremely angry. What we have is a system that is so advanced that most of us White people do not see it, a system so geared toward our comfort and privilege that when the system is questioned, it makes us feel uncomfortable and impinged.
I'm reminded of the story about Facebook's AI that created a language that humans couldn't understand. The racist system we were born into, have swum in for our whole lives, and are now confronted with is not something that can be refactored, papered over with code coverage, or pivoted in the same way that we often think of resolving software problems. The system itself is corrupt. We need to rm -rf this repo and init a new one with a fresh perspective and a bold, courageous vision for the kind of society that we want to live in based on our values and lessons learned with. As a White person, that can be scary because it means that the world might not continue to cater and defer to us. But we have to be committed to true justice, true equality for all people.
I genuinely wonder, why is that? If I'm white, this means my life doesn't matter, and when I will be killed I will end up just as +1 in some statistics because of the colour of my skin?
If you’re a “bad” person, logically your technology should help you be bad.
And if you’re good, the same.
But never would I want my technology to inform me what is good or bad, or permit me one path over the other. That is my decision as the human in the relationship.
Search for abortion resources, search for 3D printing a firearm, search for pirated movies, search for being anonymous in a protest... all get redirected to the right way to think of things.
The FBI should just go ahead and ask them for the good of the people to redirect all terms they categorize as terroristic in nature to their anti radicalization resources...
Also: you can very easily find hate groups and where they hang out on the internet through Google. You'll also, correctly, find adequate warning that these groups are probably not places you want to be.
Maybe it's time for us to just STFU and let other minority groups take the lead and become our leaders because we don't know how to lead compassionately, maybe they can where we failed.
To blame white men for the crimes of past white men, well, imagine if history worked like that everywhere. You could do the same with just about any particular group -- they've all exterminated or maltreated someone. And yet you have this focus on just the Caucasian ones (even ones with no history of colonialism in their regional past) ... who taught you to fixate on this? And whom does it benefit?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The key word here is not "bad" but "your". Whose technology is Siri?
With apologies to Godwin, but IBM and the Holocaust [1] will always be relevant in these discussions.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
There's a world of difference between exploring the world of information and genocide.
When entities like Apple start doing things like this is it pouring gasoline on conspiracy theory fires, and one can argue makes things worse.
It's also a classic case of the Streisand Effect.
What thugs are the social, political and business elites supporting today?
What if google were making these editorial decisions during WWII? Would you be redirected away from things supportive Japanese Americans that were place in internment camps?
How about during the red scare? Would you be directed to Hollywood blacklists?
How about during the civil rights era? Would you be directed to content arguing in favor of segregation?
Contrary to popular liberal belief, the Black community in America is not a borg with one hive mind. There's a lot of diversity of thought within that community and people that dissent from the very narrow viewpoint that many gatekeepers who lean left are promoting. There's a lot more thoughtfulness and nuance in discussion than promoting one-sided activism would suggest. In fact, this active filtering robs that community (and other communities that are filtered) of their agency.
Here's a list of people from the black community with dissenting opinions that I can name quickly off the top of my head and I'm sure there are many many more:
Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Roland G. Fryer Jr. Anthony Mackey, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Larry Sharpe, Pastor Corey Brooks, Eric July
It’s almost like they can’t imagine a scenario where they are the minority, and might wish to pursue their own beliefs in peace...
Especially shameful here on HN, which claims to be an especially intellectually open-minded community!
For shame, that you present an accurate, supported analysis of risks that doesn’t support the current dogma! ;)
The last few years definitely have had a feeling of eternal september and of all the eternal septembers I've experienced in my 26 years on the Internet, this is by far the worst and most toxic to open, thoughtful and nuanced discussion.
My general observation is that those that best recognize the importance of such liberties also possess the greatest faculties in abstraction (a fundamental skill for success in engineering, especially software engineering). For it is only through abstraction that someone is able to back out from the concrete issue at hand and see generalizable principles and how they might apply to other issues under other circumstances.
My suspicion is that as HN and tech in general has caught the attention of a broader audience, that the median capacity to abstract has dropped and a plurality lacks the comparable capacity to reason abstractly as once existed on HN.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-...
This would aggregate people for whom downvote means “I don’t agree”, and separately those whose downvote means “that’s an inflammatory/ unsupported/ insane position”.
Soon, those open to reasoned debate would see comments by others known for reasoned debate — regardless of their political/ideological stripe.
The trolls would be relegated each to their own echo-chamber.
Everybody wins!
Neutrality is a myth. Actively promoting values and challenging biases is preferable. You don't have to agree with the values promoted, and you're welcome to choose not to use the technology.
It is that simple.
Technology is built in service to mankind.
> For subjects to believe in an ideology, it must have been presented to them, and been accepted, as non-ideological indeed, as True and Right, and what anyone sensible would believe. As we shall see in 2e, Žižek is alert to the realist insight that there is no more effective political gesture than to declare some contestable matter above political contestation. Just as the third way is said to be post-ideological or national security is claimed to be extra-political, so Žižek argues that ideologies are always presented by their proponents as being discourses about Things too sacred to profane by politics. Hence, Žižek’s bold opening in The Sublime Object of Ideology is to claim that today ideology has not so much disappeared from the political landscape as come into its own. It is exactly because of this success, Žižek argues, that ideology has also been able to be dismissed in accepted political and theoretical opinion.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/zizek/#Ha
I think it's actually fairly concerning that the fault lines between ideologies seems to be deepening - people seemed more and more convinced that their positions are absolutely not even contestable. I'm not sure where there is room for civil political discourse and positive change in this kind of scenario.
That thought process is absolutely poisonous for technology - it’s like a viral brain-lock.
I mean tech is never neutral right?
> And if you’re good, the same.
That is almost tautologically the case of how technology works, but Siri isn’t your technology (where you = the end user), it is Apple’s.
I think this oversteps the Silicon Valley idea that technology is always inherently beneficial.
It's really not unfair that I can buy gardening gloves and radish seeds on Amazon, while a domestic terrorist has to sneak around and lie to buy a barrel of nitromethane. We should not be using our technology to enable both equally, and then leave it to the individual to decide whether to plant a garden or a bomb.
Yes I'm aware of the Atlantic slave trade - it was despicable and shameful.
Ever heard of Arab slave trade?
Yet, everyone seems to agree that ALM is now a racist move? I am racist if I believe that all people should be treated equally? Those that utter the phrase are accused of subtly trying to transport a message which is anti-black? The longer I read about it, the more I hate identity politics. If I honestly believe that BLM is to restricted a phrase, I am now being accused of being racist because I dont explicitly support BLM? This is madness. Why do activists persue radical and extremist paths which eventually reduces the support they get from the political middle?
Also, these thoughts aren’t mine (though they were obvious to me from the start), they’re fully Googleable.
But I still done get the word wrestling. From my POV, ALM is not exclusive. But if someone accuses me of being racist just because I am using a phrase that has somehow been declared unwanted by a select few, all they are achieving is that they reduce my willingness to support their rallies.
Language police is horrible. I know it from first hand. I am blind. And since about 10 years or so, I notice that more and more people feel like they are not allowed to use the word blind while I am around. It is pretty clear why they do that. They are afraid of stepping on someones toes and being shunted for that. Now, all that has been achieved by this is that people feel more awkward around me, because they no longer know how to talk about my condition. They find all sorts of phrases to make sure they never mention the supposedly bad word. However, fuck it, I AM BLIND. Policing the language does not improve my situation at all. In fact, it worsens it.
How many have police murdered?
How many times did blacks bomb an entire city of wealthy white people in America and get away w/ it? Okay what about the opposite? 0:1.
Until we RIGHT the course, we ARE part of the problem.
You have been taught to only fixate on the crimes of Caucasians and to ignore all others.
That'd be more like the war w/ North and South Korea...
I'm just fixating on the crimes of police, I could care less about other caucasians, I'm worried about police. Even blacks are more likely to kill blacks if they're wearing the blue uniform because of their indoctrination. The blue brotherhood becomes everything. What happens if a political ideology you don't agree w/ decides they want to be the police so they start getting jobs and become the police, maybe they start doing to white people what cops are doing to black people.
What would you do if whites were treated 100% equal to blacks by police but not in a good way, still they sit on your neck, they just stop caring whether you're black or white. Get pulled over for speeding get out, and have a 50% chance of survival?
You've fixated on white people, white men, as being evil. That's your fixation, not the crimes of police.
I will leave you to it.
I mean it's NOT just happening to blacks now, hell if you just SUPPORT or STAND UP for blacks they treat you like you are one...see that old man in Buffalo w/ his head bashed in by cops.