There is a great supporting argument for keeping discussions of politics, race, religion, etc out of the workplace to begin with.
It's not possible to call it from outside, but there was no actual racist behavior cited, apart from the list of funny customer names, which is not really racist (more culturalist - if that were a thing), but it is a terrible idea anyway.
It sounds like a bunch of people got upset and quit over white privilege and the usual similar nonsense. Good riddance, why would you want activist employees like that?
I thought so too, until I read the second (third?) article. Quite a few racist statements were made in the meeting itself and many employees mentioned that it was the meeting that convinced them to resign.
I was struck quite a bit by “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
The context it was said in made the statement rather jarring. I am all for their initial stance of "no politics" etc, but their all-hands was a face palm all around.
A lot of the framing around implicit bias and white privilege is actually straight up generalizing about a group based on skin color. That's racist. This business that it's not racist if it's against white people is seriously wrong - and racist.
Employees calling the organization 'White Supremacist' is the thing that should be 'jarring' or at least controversial. There are arguments to be made, sure, but the language is fairly extremist.
Singer clarifies in the later follow up to say he was referring to the people at Basecamp, not in reference to the whole country.
> To which Singer responded: “I said we have different ways of framing … If you want to debate whether it exists anywhere, then yeah. But not here at this company, not with the people I associate with.”
Or he just thinks that the whole situation is ridiculous because there is zero evidence that we have seen relating any of this to white supremacy. Instead, those allegations are just brought out by people on the left anytime they want as a cudgel to stop all debate on a topic.
Given that he has a history of quoting Breitbart, the primary newspaper of “actually racism against whites is the issue” and “black crime” I do not buy that.
I also don’t buy it when they rush to scrub a ton of his chat history after this. That’s fishy as hell.
> those allegations are just brought out by people on the left anytime they want as a cudgel to stop all debate on a topic.
The irony of course is that this entire situation was accelerated by DHH and Fried creating a new policy saying “no politics or get out”. The people stopping all debate here are management, not the amorphous “left”.
> Given that he has a history of quoting Breitbart, the primary newspaper of “actually racism against whites is the issue”, I do not buy that.
You have no idea if that's true or not or the extent of his comments. You're going off of an unsubstantiated claim and treating it as fact.
> I also don’t buy it when they rush to scrub a ton of his chat history after this. That’s fishy as hell.
They didn't scrub history after this. They deleted those forums a week or two before all of this (according to the article), in an apparent attempt to stop the political chatter. It seems when that didn't work they came out with the no politics policy.
> The irony of course is that this entire situation was accelerated by DHH and Fried creating a new policy saying “no politics or get out”. The people stopping all debate here are management, not the amorphous “left”.
There is still zero evidence that any of this has to do with white supremacy, so someone making that claim is ridiculous and is meant to stop all meaningful conversation. Once someone makes that claim the entire debate becomes about that claim and there is no turning back from it. That is very much the reason it is used so much.
It seems they have/had quite a few political activists that were causing contention in the company. I don't blame them one bit for wanting to quell political stuff while on company time.
> You have no idea if that's true or not or the extent of his comments. You're going off of an unsubstantiated claim and treating it as fact.
I find the selective application of epistemic uncertainty fascinating. Why not treat his rebuttal to the article as completely unsubstantiated?
Or for that matter, why didn't he refute quoting Breitbart in the office, if it's not true? He was clearly given a chance to comment, the article includes his version of that meeting. Why are we forced to go into "nobody can possibly know" mode when there are three people saying he did that, and precisely nobody publicly denying it?
It's also not "unsubstantiated". You just don't seem to believe the people who are claiming it. That's very different.
> They didn't scrub history after this. They deleted those forums a week or two before all of this (according to the article), in an apparent attempt to stop the political chatter. It seems when that didn't work they came out with the no politics policy.
You're correct about the timing, my mistake. I do not buy their motivations one bit. Given how publicly political DHH has been, this strikes me much less of "no politics here anymore" and more of "no politics the moment it's critical of us".
> There is still zero evidence that any of this has to do with white supremacy
I don't see any evidence that anyone originally claimed that the list of names was white supremacist, only that it was a bit racist to mock Asian or African names. This is why they appeared to have been talking about implicit bias so much, which became such a hot button issue later. And I think it's perfectly fair to pull in a bit of implicit bias training in this context, as well as some customer data protection training as well.
Discussion of white supremacy cropped up when Ryan Singer allegedly said "I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist", which appears to have made things spiral wildly out of control. I don't think it's a great idea to throw out the term white supremacist without a ton of evidence, but I can 100% see why someone would after having one of their executives effectively accusing everyone on the DEI committee of being racist against whites.
> so someone making that claim is ridiculous and is meant to stop all meaningful conversation.
Ryan tried to shut down discussion with this "Very often, if you express a dissenting view, you get called a Nazi". You don't get to complain about inflammatory, conversation ending rhetoric after coming out of the gate with that. Doubly so when you hold power in the company.
Oh, and all this happened after the company had deleted all the threads and publicly announced the policy change to the world first. Its not internally consistent to accuse the “left” of shutting down the conversation with heated rhetoric, given the timeline of DHH and Fried’s decision to ban previously allowed office speech.
Or he clarified a position that he didn't think needed it originally. Because who's so dumb as to caricature his argument as saying there's no white supremacy anywhere?
People are just looking for someone to lynch, irony intended.
Sorry, I think he’s lying here to cover his own ass. Especially if he’s been in the habit of quoting Breitbart, him pulling the “actually racism against whites is the real issue” is entirely believable.
> I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.
So yes, the article does claim that he said this. Obviously he contests this, but it appears to be just his word alone against other people who were on the call. The balance of evidence does not appear to be on his side, here.
Except none of them are stepping forward from what we can tell. It's all an anonymous patchwork of he-said-she-said except for Singer. His evidence is the only evidence because the rest is completely unverifiable.
Feels a bit too close to “fake news” for my comfort.
Anonymous sources are the norm in all kinds of reporting; there is no real reason to be surprised that no ex employee is volunteering for the kind of harassment that signing their name to this story would draw in, especially now that Breitbart and a variety of alt-right grifters have decided to take big, public pro-Basecamp and anti-“woke” worker stance. It’s easy to say “if it’s real they would say so publicly”, but honestly the vast majority of us here, myself included, would not do so if it meant getting harassed by the Breitbart crowd.
This of course does not mean that this is real. Just because I could imagine myself being an anonymous source in such circumstances does not mean that such sources exist. But in this case we can be savvy media consumers and look at the official pushback from Basecamp and those named, and the pushback is incredibly small in the number of contested details. Singer corrected literally one quote on the record. This implies to me that Newton is largely on the money in terms of factual events.
Also, the flip side is also true; we don’t seem to have a lot of current of former Basecamp employees coming out to defend the company and decry these articles as being wrong. Instead we have ... silence. Now everything I said above about wanting to be anonymous is still true for these hypothetical people as well, but if you’re going to complain about the lack of people on the record attacking the company, then surely the lack of people defending the company (executives excluded, natch) on the record should also be a data point, should it not?
The article asked Singer for a comment, and printed his full reply.
> I objected to an employee’s statement that we live in a white supremacist culture. White supremacism exists, and America’s history of racism still presents terrible problems, but I don’t agree that we should label our entire culture with this ideology.
His reply was focused on white supremacy in America, he didn't mention a misunderstanding about referring to just the company. There's that other quote from him, but it's strange his entire reply focused on the country if he was just referring to Basecamp.
Looking for more accurate truth than the reductive “everything is explained by white supremacy” is different than being a racist.
And either way, I believe that kind of conversation doesn’t belong in public channels at work. They make project management software. The company doesn’t need to be political activists. That’s my
belief and I am entitled to it.
It’s also ok to disagree with that. If social activism is important to you, you can find ways to align that with your career. Good on you for doing that, and good luck.
However, saying that all companies, as well as all of their members have to align with your view of the world is crazy talk. I expect more companies to do this, and you can choose to not work there.
'White Supremacy' classically means men in Pointy White Hats.
The CRT people now use it to mean 'regular white people' because they, in their regular, day to day actions, uphold oppressive systems i.e. 'White Supremacy'.
The denial is usually of the later, not the former.
Many progressives are now using the denial of the later, to imply denial of the former, as a kind of bad faith rhetorical weapon, which I think is unfair.
I think announcing policies on the company blog without telling employees first is always going to go poorly. You don’t have to be an “activist” employee to feel slighted by that.
> “I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
It has hints of "reverse racism" and tends to dismiss that racism is an issue...and if it is an issue, racism against white people is the actual and bigger issue. That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist. Generally, this would be someone who is, in his position, at the very best, wilfully ignorant.
I was not the one dismissed him, nor do I work at basecamp, nor am I Ryan Singer, so I can't be sure that's why he was suspended...can only guess with the same information available to you.
> It has hints of "reverse racism" and tends to dismiss that racism is an issue...and if it is an issue, racism against white people is the actual and bigger issue. That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist.
This is the problem with cultural Marxism / “wokeness”. It’s a sanctified, totalizing ideology that admits zero daylight between “100% agreement” and “you are a white supremacist/literal Nazi”.
In that way it functions exactly like a “state religion”: in public, you’re either a true believer, act like one or are mute and don’t give away your position. Soon they will make you mouth the words or face denunciation. Perhaps we are already there in the vanguard of coastal tech companies.
This whole thing is counter to the very spirit of liberalism.
I don't know, reading the quote you've included in this comment - it seems a lot less "totalizing" than you're saying, considering the quote itself uses the loose terms "closer to the camp of" or "a common defense used by". There's already nuance and wiggle room there, so, I'm not sure how you're immediately launching into a pretty sanctimonious and totalizing statement that "cultural Marxism" admits zero daylight between extremes.
Could you help me understand why you feel "cultural Marxism" is so, totally, totalizing?
Not OP, but you'd have to have blinders on to not see the political left increasingly branding everyone they disagree with as evil / Nazis / white supremacists. That's what happened above, and you're rationalizing it here.
If you think the political left increasingly branding "everyone" as evil / Nazis / white supremacists is bad - wait till you hear about people claiming the "political left" all brand people as evil / Nazis / white supremacists.
> Could you help me understand why you feel "cultural Marxism" is so, totally, totalizing?
It simply means that the ideology won’t stop until it has transformed all of culture. The progress thus far has been academia -> journalism -> tech companies. It’s coming for the rest of society. There is no area of life or society that this ideology does not claim to address.
You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?
> It simply means that the ideology won’t stop until it has transformed all of culture. The progress thus far has been academia -> journalism -> tech companies. It’s coming for the rest of society. There is no area of life or society that this ideology does not claim to address.
So let me get this straight: You're railing against an ideology that you claim has progressed through a large section of society, and you think it is bad, and you think, presumably, that society ought to not be like that, at least in these many areas. And your criticism of that ideology is that it claims to address many areas of society?
> You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?
You missed the bit where I used the word "sanctimonious".
There is no such thing as "cultural marxism", it's a term manufactured by modern libertarians to distract people with a fake culture war while they're robbed blind by corrupt politicians. Like "virtue signalling". It's also a red flag that someone is racist and ignorant, and should be called out in the same way as flat earth, climate denial or any other range of denialist mindsets.
Marxism is a basis for critical theory. The critical theory that made a species jump from academia to the mainstream has its roots in the ideas of Gramsci and Marcuse, among others.
I call it “cultural Marxism” because unlike plain old Marxism, it has relatively little to say about the redistribution of wealth and other economic interests. In this way it’s made itself innocuous to corporate America, which would otherwise mobilize its immune system to reject the ideas outright.
Case in point: I recently sat through some corporate training on privilege that did not, once, mention wealth or economic privilege.
Marxism is about the politics of the underclass - the revolutionary struggle to achieve a just society by upending the inequities of Capitalism. So the proletarian uprising wrests control of society from the bourgeoisie.
Cultural Marxism redefines the oppressed and oppressor along the lines of identity rather than economy. This makes it much more palatable to a capitalist society.
Ah, so it's just like Marxism, except without any of the discussion of Capitalism? And its an ideology about identity, which you feel sets it clearly apart from other ideologies?
"That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist."
This kind of gaslighthing though.
"My opponent disagrees with me and is therefore a White Supremacist, or at least close to one!"
If one person says 'this org is racist because of white privilege' - it's possibly contentious, but not unreasonable to suggest that this statement is racist in and of itself.
Just because you might deny 'reverse racism' exists, doesn't mean that it's true, it's a denial, not a disagreement.
Also, indicating that 'this office is not a place of white supremacy' is not 'denying' someone else experience, or their position that 'racism exists'. It's an observation of the nature of the ostensible problem.
It's not 'wilfully ignorant' it's more like 'wilfully insensitive / disagreeable / inflammatory'
It's not a matter of disagreement about 2 equally valid viewpoints, it's about one side being wrong about everything following a deliberate and calculated campaign of misinformation, and the other side pointing out how wrong they are and how dangerous their ideology is.
No-one likes being told they're wrong, which is why the capitol riots happened on 6 January and Trump still got so many votes despite being an abjectly horrible president, and the head of a party that does nothing for the vast majority of its constituents.
This kind of rhetoric I think might be at the root of the problem.
If you believe the company founders, in the face of being told they occupy their position 'due to privilege' is 'right about everything' then you're the problem.
Telling executives that they are 'denying racism exists' when they are actually only denying that it exists at the company is obviously straw manning.
If you're of the position that 'anyone who questions claims of racism is a white supremacist', then you're entitled to that position, but it's 'war language' that is driving a lot of irresponsible toxicity in the workplace.
"Telling executives that they are 'denying racism exists' when they are actually only denying that it exists at the company is obviously straw manning."
Singer's quote:
“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don’t believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
He wasn't talking about the company, he was talking about society. Unless you think he was saying they "live in" the company ...
Saying he got sacked for questioning it at the company is a spin added later by his apologists.
To the extent that white supremacy is synonymous with racism (which, at least at this point in history, I think is arguable given the fact that we live in a world dominated by the vestiges of the British empire, and that structural inequality is almost entirely against non-white people globally) then people who question the claim of racism are at the very least inadvertently advancing the causes of white supremacy.
Because anyone who claims reverse racism exists is a defacto racist (even if they would deny it) becaus they obviously don't understand how racism works.
If I had someone saying that shit in my company on a Zoom call, I would excuse myself, remove them from the call, schedule a 1 on 1 meeting with them, and explain to them that they need to take training on what racism is and how it is perpetrated, or leave.
Heh, you know, usually there's punctuation we use to denote sarcasm, lest anyone get the impression that this sort of draconian policing of ideology goes on at benkoworks.
I always will openly oppose racism in any company I lead, just as I will always openly denounce libertarianism as a horrible cancer on western democracies.
Of course "reverse racism" exists (although, it certainly may be much less of a problem in the USA than non "reverse" racism). Discriminating against someone because of their race because you believe their racial group or background is privileged is still racism and the application of a stereotype. Just because they're White, Hispanic, or Asian (depending on the type of "reverse racism" we're talking about here) shouldn't give you an excuse to be racist against them. Edit: and also it would be illegal if the company is foolish enough to put it in writing and clearly state they are discriminating against people of a specific ethnic or national background, regardless of what background it is or if you personally believe that background is privileged.
Fair enough to say that speaking this out on a company zoom call in a lot of places would get you in trouble though and speaks to a lack of understanding of tech workplaces - it's only smart self-preservation to stay far away from politics, especially racial politics, in company workspaces unless you're sure you're 100% aligned with the currently dominant creed.
Not in my experience in the workplace. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve never been preached to about Christianity in my work experience. Meanwhile there are usually plenty of meetings and group emails about stuff like diversity, people openly express their support of Democratic politicians or hate toward republican politicians, etc.
If someone at my work stated in a meeting they don’t believe in Christianity I would never expect them to be fired, if they stated that about DEI or even disagreeing with a specific DEI strategy or tactic of the company, i’d expect trouble. If someone has a dissenting opinion there they need to keep quiet for their own good, as this guy at basecamp learned.
One thing to note is technology companies are far more progressive than almost all other companies! Your workplaces are the exception right now.
Also it’s a false equivalence to compare not believing in Christianity and discouraging diversity and inclusion programs.
It’s the same mistake people make in comparing the protective use of force with the oppressive use of force, or comparing being racist with calling out racism.
If Christians were in the minority, and were disadvantaged as a result, and there was a program to promote a higher level of Christian employment, and you said “I don’t think Christianity is even a religion why do we have this stupid program” then you might find you get the same sort of response as claiming there’s no white privilege now.
Yes I agree and that’s why in my post I said “speaks to a lack of understanding of tech workplaces” right before my statement about dominant creeds.
I was not talking about construction sites or other non-tech workplaces.
You were the one who brought up Christianity, but I don’t think you’re really in disagreement with what I said. Perhaps it’s simply the term “creed” that’s at issue here, and substitute it for another one in that case. You go on to present a hypothetical example of management attempting to specifically hire Christians rather than members of other religions, if that actually openly happened we both know there would be a hue and cry and an EEOC or HR investigation. It’s not representative of what tech workplaces look like today.
- Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff
- Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
- Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
- refused to reprimand said employee on the call
- had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Can't believe only 21 employees walked. What idiots these founders are. There is no way to defend this poor management even if you agree with the rule they tried to put in
When they DHH+Jason laid the 7 of us off from Highrise (the Basecamp CRM spin-off) no one even showed up online to say anything to us on our last day. Just the Head of Devops to turn off our access to things. (That guy at least apologized for no-one else being there) :/
Could you speak a little more about your impression of the company while you were there? I know you didn't want to talk about it after you left, but so many of us are/were curious, especially as to how Basecamp's private image compares to its public image.
It's tough to get it all down here in a comment. Maybe now this is all out I'll share more in some channels soon. I will say that last comment in Casey's article: “They don't want to deal with people, which is something you have to do as a manager … Jason and David just threw us away.” That could easily have been written from someone at Highrise. (It wasn't. But it could have been) We killed ourselves to turn that thing around. And it hurt. Some of this coming out I can definitely empathize with and concur with what people experienced. Thanks for asking.
Thanks Nate, I really appreciate the reply, and just want to say how much I appreciate your (and your team's) work on Highrise. You poured everything into it and it's sad to read what happened at the end.
I appreciate all the work you did at Highrise, but after DHH+JF announced they were going to sell it because it was a distraction & renamed 37 Signals to Basecamp, it was difficult to keep using the product… even when they decided they didn't want to sell.
The way in which DHH announced the _conversation_ he had with Salesforce was a thing of amazement all of its own.
Thank you. Oh for sure. (for people not familiar) So we took Highrise over a bit after that announcement, and that was almost an impossible thing to overcome. It was hemorrhaging customers. It was always a turnaround project. Our biggest task for the first couple years was just trying to erase the "marketing" that we had shut down already.
The way a company deals with really difficult things like lay-offs speaks volume about the character, empathy, and skill of leadership at the top.
This is really sad hearing about how crummy DHH and Fried are at one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity.
one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity.
I'd like to highlight this. I'd like to frame it and tape it to the head of every founder and entrepeneur so they have to look at it constantly. Hell, everyone who ever has to oversee other people.
This is absolutely the heart and soul of good management and being a good person, and everyone who thinks they're created a great workplace, but doesn't know this, needs to chant this 1,000,000 times.
I really enjoyed reading about and watching your videos about your turnaround of Highrise as it was happening. Tons of work. Hope you'll publish what happened at the end someday.
Even if your heart isn’t 100% in it, the least you could do is acknowledge and thank the people for their contributions while they were there.
Kind of gives the lie to the progressive, all-in-it-together environment they portray with their public image.
So, just like any other company really, except due to the excessive power of the top two execs, no recourse if you have a problem they don’t perceive as a problem.
I hope people detach themselves from their offices a bit more. There is too much of worship of these companies like basecamp faang etc. Thing to remember is this is just a job and not to take moral guidance from companies.
for what it's worth, I find the picking on DHH for taking this call from bed unnecessary
If he was sick, whether physically sick because of their own actions or otherwise...sick is sick. Seemed like a no-win for him whether he could either refuse to show up because he is sick, or show up to at least listen to what's going on (assuming recording it wasn't an option).
he had over 10 retweets and tweets the same day after this call. And did not use those tweets to thank his old team, just more "apple bad" stuff as if nothing had changed.
DHH has one of the most annoying Twitter feeds. He picks a hobby horse every few months and tweets incessantly about it, until something else grabs his attention. Surely they shouldn't have been surprised that many of the people they chose to hire would be likewise strongly opinionated, and not take kindly to those policy changes.
I had to unfollow him for precisely this reason. It’s just a relentless torrent of negativity. Maybe his feed isn’t a great indication, but he seems like a very unhappy person.
Hear you, but not knowing the exact timeline of events here...and seeing how this is a disaster on so many other levels...I find there is value in showing him grace for being...sick. (There is already so much bad, that his absence/presence is a moot point)
But totally hear what you're saying and appreciate your skepticism!
The timeline of events is pretty evident from DHHs twitter feed + this article. They had the meeting in the morning, and by the afternoon he had mustered up the energy to go back on Twitter to fight with Apple. :)
> (There is already so much bad, that his absence/presence is a moot point)
This dude is one of the two founders of the company and has a leadership/ownership responsibility. I don't think his deciding to duck out is a moot point at all. It's that exact attitude that led to what's happened there.
This might have been the most important meeting in Basecamp's history, so it just feels odd that the co founder was apparently so sick he couldn't sit at his desk for an hour or two. Or even just during the initial introductions before he turned his camera off.
Maybe he was that sick, but I would be kind of pissed if I were one of the employees. The power dynamic is weird, because if a regular employee were sick they would definitely feel the pressure to show up at a desk, on camera, if they were trying to make their case in this meeting.
The article said they extended the buyout offer indefinitely, so I wouldn't be surprised if more people leave over the next few weeks.
Even if you weren't thinking of leaving, 3-6 months severance would be really hard to turn down, especially if you know you can get another job quickly.
If that many employees think they can get another, comparable, job quickly then that is implicitly saying Basecamp's overall compensation package (including how interesting the work is, extra time off in summer, profit sharing, etc, etc) isn't actually especially unique or valuable. Which kind of says something not great about Basecamp in and of itself.
Do you mean a lot more attractive? I would be shocked if the aforementioned lifestyle subsidies were valued by the median employee at even $1000/year; if the profit sharing came out to less than 5 figures in a normal year (again, for a median employee) I would likewise be surprised.
Humans are weird. I’ve found most employees seem to be be more attracted to guaranteed subsidies than to profit sharing. Not all, but most. Just my experience though.
So... hypothetically... (these may or may not be actual basecamp things - I don't know)
> 50% off a gym membership
But I already have a home gym. Will the company give me a check to help pay for my next piece of equipment? Why do I have to go into town to the gym to make use of this benefit?
> Reimbursement of 25% off of Community Supported Agriculture
I've got an orchard with more apples and pears than I know what to do with each year. I consider rhubarb to almost be a weed at this point. I get free eggs from my neighbor (and honey too - helps with the aforementioned apples and pears). Could I get 25% off my next fruit tree purchase instead?
---
Such benefits are entirely missed on me. I wouldn't take advantage of them and so they're not serving the purpose of the company to entice me to stay. They also are a little bit disdainful in that other people (yea, I know... the "someone else is getting something I'm not" is a hard thing to excise from the mind) are getting extra benefits/bonuses/perks that I'm not able to take advantage of.
A 10% profit sharing? Even if its worth "less" than those are previously offered - it's worth more to me.
> - Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
Ironically it seems that, contra to the narrative existing in the minds of quite a few HN posters, it was the Brietbart quoting, "white people are the real victims of racism" guy who had spend over a decade being unable to shut up about politics in the workplace.
The quote in the article? And the fact that the author gave Singer a chance to respond, and Singer did so in some depth, and did not deny or rebut the claim that he said that?
> We all can be sick sometimes, certainly would be better to it in some other way, but maybe he was just that sick?
He was busy hitting Twitter pretty hard during the day, throwing some shade at Apple. No mention of company, employees, anything.
That's bad optics, regardless of how you're feeling. If you're sick, you're sick. If you're too sick to deal with the most pressing issue your company is facing, you should consider yourself too sick to devote chunks of time to Twitter feuds.
It seems like most of these attention hungry founders have extremely poor impulse or emotion control. I’m increasingly of the opinion that a “thought leader” CEO or founder is a red flag for a company, as tales of these people’s greatness always seems to diminish with distance.
What's always funny to me is this phenomenon generally has nothing to do with the actual people involved. It's just a story telling phenomenon. None of the people who know these thought leaders imbue them with qualities they don't have.
That does not seem correct to me. It’s not a “story telling phenomenon” that DHH and Jason Fried are perceived as industry thought leaders, it’s the result of both repeated actions on their part, plus some luck. Those two didn’t accidentally end up in the public conversation, they wrote five books about working, plus god knows how many blog posts, talks, and more.
That is explicitly attention seeking behavior, and it’s a hard prerequisite to becoming a “thought leader” or even just famous enough that a three letter initial is enough to identify yourself.
Yes, it can be that too. I’m just saying that you’ve got to take positive steps towards where they’re at, culturally. It’s not an accident, even if there is certainly some luck and mixed motives.
I don't think choosing to share your thoughts/critiques on what has & hasn't worked for you in industry connotes any kind of assumptions about being a flawless leader. One can have some interesting thoughts worth sharing without being some idealized technical leader. Hell, I'd argue a lot of the thoughts that were shared betrayed some points of concern.
> - Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
The article really doesn't tell us whether that senior employee just went off on a political tangent for no reason whatsoever, or he was responding to an earlier made political statement that he decided to disagree with.
What the article does suggest is that that contribution by that senior employee was preceded by a discussion of the funny names list that involved the mentioning of the "pyramid of hate". That pyramid is already a political statement and should not, if the company were true to its new policy, have been brought up in the discussion.
I'm not sure the context of the Singer's remarks matters much -- they were clearly against the newly announced policy that the meeting itself was about. And as a senior employee and member of the company's leadership, it was more incumbent on him than on others to follow the policy, in order to set the tone and be a good example.
(NB even David and Jason seem to have recognized this -- after the meeting, Singer was suspended; he's since resigned, but this is likely the only one of the several recent resignations that was not entirely of the employee's own volition.)
The discussion of the "funny names" list including the pyramid of hate discussion was what led to the "no politics" rule - it didn't happen in violation of it.
Based on what I followed from Twitter, that senior employee is the one who regularly posted articles from Breitbart to the internal thread that was deleted.
- Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff
- Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
- Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
- refused to reprimand said employee on the call
- had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Can't believe only 21 employees walked. What idiots these founders are. There is no way to defend this poor management even if you agree with the rule they tried to put in
"To a manager, the exchange that led to Singer’s departure could lend credence to the idea that addressing social injustices on company Zoom calls is bound to be disastrous."
Yes, reading this entire exchange between Singer and the unnamed employee shows exactly why there shouldn't be political talk in the workplace. Disastrous indeed.
This story is so strange. First of all, it has been considered unprofessional to talk about politics at work for as long as I can remember. It's odd how you would need a rule implemented about that.
Is this just a generational thing?
On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace.
This also doesn't mean that the Basecamp founders are responsible for systemic racism because they had a list of "funny" names and [gasp] employ at least one conservative.
What has happened to everyone? It's like we have taken the social media rage machine and applied it to real life interactions.
No, it's a class thing. Among unionised labour work has always been a political battlefield. What's new is that you know have a politically activist group of people within upper middle class white collar jobs who, traditionally were conservative in temperament because they were materially well off.
Professionals whose values do not align with their management have figured out that they actually have influence, and the top 1-10% have noticed that they can actually press the top 0.1% if they want to.
Maybe, but don't kid yourself that you (or, the average HN'er) are the working blue collar everyman or share much of their politics. A lot of you would brand a lot of them "nazis" for their opinions.
100% this. Basecamp leadership just discovered that "stakeholder capitalism" isn't a choice made by management, it's something that happens to management because stakeholders are getting more empowered and organized.
I think this is badly missing the point. I think two very specific things happened here:
First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior. I think their attempt to cast this as “political” is deeply cynical; discussing how people behave at work will always be in bounds, even if it touches up against issues that are politicized. The initial trigger here was a discussion about the list of “funny names”; there’s no easy way to sweep that under the rug as off topic, since it’s explicitly at-work behavior.
Second, they did an end run around the employees. Announcing the policy to the world, and implying that the Basecamp workforce was having a problem focusing on their jobs was an asshole move destined to blow up in their face. Nobody likes feeling crapped on by their boss, especially not in public like that.
Honestly, it didn’t have to be about politics. Treating employees like that, especially ones with options, is typically not going to go well.
> First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior.
The current state of politics bled into this. There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture. It wasn't about what was appropriate or not and then handling it. The discussion went far beyond that.
> Second, they did an end run around the employees.
This was really surprising to me. I thought they would have posted publicly after all the employees had learned about this. This is poor change management within the company and a lesson I hope they learn.
I think the "Pyramid of Hate" illustration is really quite immaterial to it all, and overly focusing on it ignores the fact that the founders completely failed to understand their employees' subsequent concerns.
You might feel the illustration is incendiary, sure, but I think coming down as hard as they did on it to a pretty valid concern of "hey maybe no funny names list" did no favors to those concerned, and subsequently doubling and tripling down on it has really really not helped.
Laughing at names did not lead to genocide and no one implied that. What someone did was share why it was important to treat this seriously and not let it slide... lest the offending behaviors continue to escalate. An example was shared from social science on a pyramid of normalization where such behavior eventually gets normalized.
Classic and indisputable example might be Germany in WW2. It wasn’t like citizens woke up and immediately decided that genocide was okay; they slowly were worked into finding it acceptable and palatable as a measure to endorse.
It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.
It is hard to argue that showing the pyramid of hate doesn't imply that laughing at names leads to genocide. That's very much the overt message - it's not even an implication.
Saying E comes after B doesn't mean inevitably B leads to E. And it seems likely the employee wanted to make a point about the level the company was at or the next level up. Not the top of the pyramid.
No. It's saying that allowing any lower level of the pyramid to exist and pervade allows for further levels to be built up. Whereas if that lower level doesn't exist, it's less likely that other forms of hate will develop and subvert society. It's the frog boiling in the water. It's a cautionary tale to know when the water is heating up and how to stop it.
I agree with your assessment. That is exactly why I stated that the overt message of the Pyramid of Hate is that laughing at funny names leads to genocide, because "allowing any lower levels of the pyramid to exist and pervade allows for further levels to be built up". Not sure what the disagreement is tbh.
The employee putting up that pyramid didn't appear to have the outcome they wanted. It turned into much more. This should be a lesson learned.
I've read a fair number of books on helping things through change. The pyramid being put where it was seemed like a bad idea the moment I read it. The way it was responded to is something I would have expected.
There is a lesson here. If you want to bring about change in others it's about leading them rather than saying what you want to say.
It depends. Did Hansson read what the employee wrote? Or did he glance at the diagram and react to 1 word? Hansson's reputation and how he handled this situation make me think something would have set him off inevitably.
Yeah, weirdly this ludicrous standard is never applied to leftist politics, for example suggesting that any criticism of inequality could "escalate" into the Holodomor or the Killing Fields of Cambodia, so therefore its important not to "normalize" such behaviour.
How is that even a valid comparison? It is logical that making fun of people for characteristics related to race could be escalated to more serious racist behavior, and therefore should be discouraged. But where is the logical connection between criticizing inequality and committing genocide?
In the case of Cambodia, I think the connection being suggested is that the genocide targeted "professionals and intellectuals"[0], essentially the bourgeoisie, or the wealthy (it was a communist revolution). So criticizing inequality is being framed as a slippery slope to killing rich people.
Well, I'd argue that the gap between making racist remarks and committing greater acts of racism is a bit smaller than the one between criticizing inequality and emulating the mass genocide of a communist regime. Although the other OP did bring up the Nazis, so I see where he was coming from.
That's because there is a strategic difference between talking about inequality and making fun of someone for having a name that's different than yours. One has an upside, the other doesn't.
People did equate the names list to some mass shooting of Asians though.
A name like, say, "Fuk Yo" is accidentally similar to the English "Fuck you". It's kinda funny in a childish way, but I don't think that making fun of it automatically implies that they think these people are of lesser value. i.e. I don't think it's automatically racism in the first place.
It's inappropriate because making fun of your customers is never a good idea, and it's also inconsiderate and impolite. But that's not the same thing as racism, or evidence of white supremacy.
And maybe some employees who worked on that list were racist; there is no way for us to know. I like to opt for a more good-faith interpretation, which seems very uncommon these days.
The idea that this would "escalate" from a simple list to actual racism seems unlikely. Everyone knows the difference.
Also, the holocaust was a lot more complicated than this "pyramid" lets on. The Nazis took power by force, in some exceptional circumstances, and the Holocaust wasn't widely known among the German people. It's overly simplistic at best.
> It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.
I have never seen a single "slippery slope" argument that I found convincing, including this one. In every single case I've seen everyone is acutely aware of the difference between A and B. I don't consider it an argument, I consider it a fallacy.
>And maybe some employees who worked on that list were racist; there is no way for us to know. I like to opt for a more good-faith interpretation, which seems very uncommon these days.
Racism is the air we breathe. I grew up around mostly white kids, and there is undeniably more fear amongst those kids (myself included) when interacting with black people than with white people. It seems similarly undeniable that affluent white people are more afraid of african american people when its dark out than they are of other white people. When a black person applies to a job, their blackness is not neutral. It seems to me that most people have underlying feeling about blackness, and that people of color have to contend with that when they're going through their lives.
I think this is mostly correct; although I personally wouldn't go as far to say that "racism is the air we breathe", but that's an unimportant detail.
I'm not saying there aren't problems; I just don't see the connection between something like this list and the actual problems, and I certainly don't see a good reason for some of the strong and bold claims that are made about it.
> There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture.
I think that's a misinterpretation of what that graphic is trying to convey. The point isn't that people and groups that exhibit behavior at the bottom of the pyramid are on the march to genocide. It's that there's a spectrum of bigotry and discrimination, and each level of it that is tolerated enables worse behavior. It doesn't mean every situation is going to get to the level of mass-killings.
Normalizing bigoted behavior encourages more bigoted behavior. The same way that normalizing managers who scream and yell at people often leads to others becoming more openly belligerent or otherwise creates a toxic workplace.
Third, they secretly deleted over a decade's worth of company chat history shortly before making the disastrous blog post. Why?
Fourth, they retaliated against employees by taking away benefits in the most humiliating way possible, via the aforementioned disastrous public blog post.
And yet, people are still going to bat for them because...I don't know. It seems like a lot of people have a religious faith in the decision-making capabilities of men like DHH and JF. Seems like it might be related to some of the issues employees tried to raise internally.
any time I find someone like you complaining about “getting cancelled” or “cancel culture”, I just replace “cancel” with “consequences”, since that’s what it really is.
They wanted to protect employees from the consequences of their words and actions.
So, would you say the same thing about a person talking about abortion if the company culture was conservative?
This goes well beyond 'consequences'. its being used as a weapon against people you disagree with or are just political enemies and the end result is thugs and bullies gaining power that didnt earn it and dont deserve it.
Using the phrase "someone like you" in a negative way in an argument on a charged, divisive topic counts as crossing into personal attack. Please make your substantive points without that.
>On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace.
When acronyms became "white supremacy culture"[1], public magnet schools became "systemic racism"[2], showing up to work on time and objective thinking became "whiteness"[3], etc. "racial equality" became just another Motte and Bailey in the hyper-polarized toxic political world we live in.
No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal. What many do oppose is the entryist toxic leftism that's making it's headway into every facet of society. That's the "politics at work" that many are opposed to. Leftism became a religion, and "wokeism" is its proselytization.
>What has happened to everyone? It's like we have taken the social media rage machine and applied it to real life interactions.
That's exactly what's happening. As an example, this is the (former) head data analyst at Basecamp:
> If you are white or a man, especially a cis-gendered heterosexual able-bodied white man, do the fucking work. Learn about the characteristics of white supremacy, push through your discomfort, and reflect on how you show up in the spaces you have power. Be ready to apologize when you screw up (we all do!) and then do better. And whatever you do: do not demand that your friends or colleagues or employees or neighbors or acquaintances who belong to historically marginalized groups explain to you all the ways you perpetuate harm and how society got here. Pay an anti-oppression professional for training and coaching; don’t expect us to get you up to speed for free.
Its so, so rich to see criticism of "leftism" as "becoming a religion", when the right in this country literally worship a golden idol of The Former Guy at their politics conventions.
"No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal." Hmm. Is the likes of Tucker Carlson "sane"? He and other mainstream right wing "thinkers" consistently put out viewpoints that oppose racial equality and oppose anti-racism.
>Its so, so rich to see criticism of "leftism" as "becoming a religion", when the right in this country literally worship a golden idol of The Former Guy at their politics conventions.
Whataboutism. No one is claiming otherwise, certainly not me. Indeed, the left is catching up to the right on interlacing religion and politics.
> Hmm. Is the likes of Tucker Carlson "sane"?
Not sure, probably not. I honestly do not watch Fox News.
> He and other mainstream right wing "thinkers" consistently put out viewpoints that oppose racial equality and oppose anti-racism.
Carlson is one of the most popular right wing commentators in the country. His show is one of the most watched on TV. He is routinely in the top ten polled of GOP candidates for President in 2024.
You say: "No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal." You might be right, but only because there are no sane conservatives not named Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney and I think they have better things to do than hang out on HN.
You're strawmaning here because we agree that Carlson isn't "sane".
Some of your links take things he's said way out of context ("dirty" was referencing the amount of garbage left by illegal immigration at the border, an objective fact), and he's not wrong about leftists wanting to remove borders and import as many people into the West as possible, including an actual Democratic presidential candidate [1].
>(hint: not immigrants from Norway)
They're not flooding in illegally by the tens of thousands every month.
You say: "No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal." You might be right, but only because there are no sane liberals not named Barak Obama or Joe Lieberman and I think they have better things to do than hang out on HN.
You're still strawmaning and partaking in whataboutism here.
What is the strawman? What is the whataboutism? I'm talking directly about your statement:
"No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal."
Tucker Carlson, one of the most popular "conservatives", opposes racial equality and promotes white supremacy. You can call him "not sane" if you want, but he has millions of viewers every day and his views are absolutely mainstream Republicanism in 2021. There are zero Republican voters or public figures who disagree with Carlson or condemn him.
So which is it, are almost all Republicans actually "insane", or are almost all Republicans against racial equality?
"No one sane", and then you build the Tucker Carlson strawman, and continue to use him, after we both conclude he's not "sane".
> What is the whataboutism?
Bringing up right-wing examples here when they were immaterial to my OP.
These are textbook examples of strawmaning and whatabouting.
>Tucker Carlson, one of the most popular "conservatives", opposes racial equality
Where did he oppose racial equality? I did not see any of that in the links you provided. Can you link actual Tucker Carlson videos of him making statements that oppose racial equality?
>You can call him "not sane" if you want, but he has millions of viewers every day and his views are absolutely mainstream Republicanism in 2021.
ChapTrapHouse, TYT, etc. has millions of subscribers that listen every day and their views are absolutely mainstream Democratism in 2021. There are zero Democratic voters or public figured who disagree with CTH/TYT or condemn him
So which is it, are almost all Democrats actually "insane", or are almost all Democrats against racial equality (anti-White, and becoming more anti-Asian)?
You're strawmaning here again because you haven't provided anything that shows Tucker Carlson, or the Republican Party platform, is against racial equality.
Nonetheless, it's all whataboutism. You're incapable of refuting any of my points, including my OP, so you're commiting several fallacies here.
You're just playing word games to refuse to back down on your ridiculous statement, which, again, was:
"No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal."
Do you think Americans and the world really don't remember the past 5 years? Do you think we don't remember The Former Guy coming to relevance specifically because of the racist "birtherism" movement, or calling Mexicans rapists? Are those the actions of someone interested in promoting racial equality?
Lets try a different tact:
Name some mainstream Trump-supporting Republican who has said "I believe in racial equality", or otherwise promote racial equality.
If you can't, don't bother replying, and we can all conclude what we all already know:
The Republican party is the party of white supremacy.
>You're just playing word games to refuse to back down on your ridiculous statement, which, again, was:
No games, just pointing out your bad use of fallacies, and you shifting the goalposts.
>Do you think Americans and the world really don't remember the past 5 years?
Do you think Americans and the world really don't remember the past year? Rioting, burning stores and small businesses down, over 20 death, over a billion dollars in damage, all tied to the BLM riots.
>calling Mexicans rapists?
Never happened [1].
Now you're delusionally inventing things that never happened and using fallacies to make this invented world real in your mind.
Find me where in the Republican Party platform they are for racism.
>Name some mainstream Trump-supporting Republican who has said "I believe in racial equality", or otherwise promote racial equality.
You've literally created a non-provable assertion. Mainstream Republicans follow the Republican Party platform. Can you find me where in the platform it calls for racism? As a matter of fact, it calls for anti-discrimination based on race.
If you can't find where in the Republican Party platform it calls for racism, don't bother replying, and we can all conclude what we all already know:
The Democratic party is the party of anti-white and anti-Asian racism.
Since you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle and have ignored our request to stop, I've banned this account. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what ideology they're battling for, because it destroys the curious conversation this site is supposed to be for. Curious conversation is not about smiting enemies; those two things are in disjoint ranges.
First, please don't take HN threads straight into ideological flamewar hell.
Second, since you've been using HN primarily for that, we've banned the account. We ban accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology they're battling for, because there's nothing more destructive of the intended use of the site. Not to mention its intended spirit, which is gratifying curiosity, not smiting enemies.
I've worked for several companies headquartered out of different regions of the world. The amount of politics at work I've seen has related to where leadership is from.
People are constantly confusing the issue with 'politics'.
This is not about Trump or Obama, that's easily avoided, it's about Identity Politics, which cannot be avoided:
They are arguing over Identity Politics and definitions of privilege.
"“The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”"
The Executive basically stated he doesn't believe the organization or it's culture is rooted in 'White Supremacy' - echoing the aggressive language used nowadays in Critical Race Theory.
The Employee, I believe mischaracterized that statement as 'the denial that racism exists' - which is an unfair, but also pointed out the denial of 'White Priviledge' - which is a valid point to make if one actually believes that.
The argument is existentially problematic - some people believe that groups are not inherently racist, others believe that if there are White executives then the system is inherently racist, going so far as to use terms like 'White Supremacy'.
This 'debate' is raging everywhere right now - schools, public sector, private companies, NGOs etc.
It's hard to rectify because those who don't see systems as overtly or fundamentally racist are challenge by those who do, and those who do, are inclined to believe those that disagree with them are basically evil.
It's a low-grade cultural race war unfortunately, pitting regular people against other regular people, often over some very abstract things, like naming things 'blacklist/whitelist' instead of 'blocklist/playlist' etc..
> On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace.
When in the history of the US has racial inequality not been an inherently political topic? At its founding, the statement "all men are created equal" was highly contentious.
I just re-read that particular bit of history... apparently Jefferson wrote that with aspiration to abolish slavery, despite being a slaveholder himself. And of course, gender equality didn't even get that much consideration
> On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic?
When it was turned into one by politicians and activists, just like masks were.
I'm a firm believer that if you actually sit a few people down and try to have a sane conversation where people actually talk and don't spout slogans, you find that their views aren't all that different, then just put emphasis and importance on slightly different things, and have been presented with subsets of the facts that emphasize those preferences.
The problem is, we're going on a few decades of a concerted effort to confuse and separate us based on language, and specifically meaning of words. What used to be camps choosing words that placed their views in a beneficial light (pro-life vs pro-choice, for example), has moved to very purposefully continuing to use the same words on both sides but to re-frame them to mean something entirely different than intended by that side. For example, Black Lives Matter and how it literally means different things to different people, regardless of the originators intentions and protestations.
Information silos allow this to happen. If you can exert control over the information environment, you can change the definition of words, and then people can't even communicate correctly any more. That's a real goal of those that wield political power. Moderate is just another name for someone dangerously close to being a swing voter to them, so promoting enough animosity that even things overtly against your own interest are seen as the lesser of two evils is a winning strategy.
Lest you think I'm talking about the left or the right, they both do it. And lest you think "sure, but one side does it more", no, they both do it so egregiously that the difference does not matter, and all you're seeing is the effect of Knoll's law in action. Make no mistake about it, you're getting screwed from both sides. That you tell yourself that your side is the more sane one is just the fiction that lets you sleep at night (and hopefully that's all it's doing, and not empowering you to be a complete asshole to people just as screwed over as you are).
"Politicians and activists" obviously didn't politicize masks. No coherent reading of the last 2 years supports that conclusion.
It was the screeching Republican base, who decided on day one that the masks were a symbol of government overreach and I guess got Covid to own the libs.
You think the base got there all on their own, miraculously? The had activists that saw this as a way to push their agenda, and politicians that went along for the ride and reinforced it.
The base is multiple tens of millions of people spread across the entire United States and in many socioeconomic strata. The only time anything gets as widespread acceptance by even a portion of the base like the mask thing is because a narrative was being pushed that most of the base was exposed to. That used to be a hard thing to do (easier if you could rely on a large religious bloc to see it one way), and now it's a frighteningly easy thing to do. That's the point.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell. The GP contained a provocation but the thing to do with those is ignore them, not single them out and then blow on them until they flare into war.
I'm a bit flummoxed that you would say that, since your post is a textbook example of partisan flamewar. That leads to extremely low-quality discussion, inevitably evoking worse from others. Please don't.
Even in a flamewar thread on a flamewar topic, this comment stands out as particularly hellish. We ban accounts that do this on HN. No more of this, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046293, please.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
All: HN's guidelines apply irrespective of whether other people are following them or not. When commenting here, please consider your own behavior first, and make sure it's in the intended spirit.
Weak leadership that fostered a political culture that they eventually lost control of, and a workforce so engulfed in politics that they lost sight of focus. DHH playing sick is just the Cherry on top. I can't say that I don't feel an enormous amount of that petty German word towards to founders who love to preach about company culture having this blow up so spectacularly.
This author, Casey Newton, seems to be trying to push a narrative that Basecamp damaged itself by banning politics at work. But the anecdotes in here convince me that Basecamp did the right thing. The people involved in this exchange with Singer seem unhinged - demanding that someone declare that white supremacy exists at work? This type of cultish demand-oriented discourse is unacceptable in professional organizations and even the rest of society. It creates an unnecessarily hostile workplace, and the lack of nuance in their stances really just shows a lack of mental balance or ability to deal with any differences of opinions.
Let’s be honest - the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) committees that have appeared in companies and governments all over are simply a Trojan horse for far left progressive politics, and a vehicle to take over an institution by making a particular political ideology the official religion of that organization. DEI groups and policies usually serve to prevent any actual diversity, labeling dissenting thought as racist and coating their own racist policies (for example race or gender based hiring/promotion) in vague terms like “justice”. Usually those participating in DEI efforts are so distracted by it that they add no actual value to the business, and I’m sure the third of the company that joined that group at Basecamp were no different.
I’m betting Basecamp will pull through just fine without such toxic employees, and am glad to see companies like Basecamp and Coinbase take steps to keep from having their workplace and company weaponized by activists to serve divisive ideological purposes that have nothing to do with the company’s business.
"demanding that someone declare that white supremacy exists at work" I would just love if you could point out this interaction to us. You have wildly mischaracterized it lmao.
Not the person you replied to, but this was a direct quote:
> “The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”
Isn't this employee declaring that "white supremacy" is "blatant at this company" ? His reaction that such "white supremacy" and "white privilege" "wasn't corrected" made him "sick."
It's albeit not a direct demand that Ryan Singer be called out as a white supremacist, but it does seem to both imply it and express a strong grievance that it was not called out or corrected. Maybe you have a different interpretation of this?
I don't know what was said at the meeting. But Singer did start making comments about white supremacy in America at a meeting about banning political discussion at Basecamp. I could see how it looked like his opinions were given more respect than others.
If he made statements about white supremacy not existing at basecamp, then that was a horrible defense to accusations of white privilege at Basecamp. Shutting down discussions over arguments about phrasing makes it looks like Basecamp would prefer just to ignore issues with discrimination if they did exist.
> I don't know what was said at the meeting. But Singer did start making comments about white supremacy in America at a meeting about banning political discussion at Basecamp
I'm sorry, but do you or do you not know what was said at the meeting? Those two statements contradict each other, unless you're talking about two different meetings.
I quoted something provided by an employee who was there, at the meeting that this article is about.
Singer was quoted as saying “I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,”. Your quote implied that Singer was making comments about white supremacy, and Singer's reply to Casey Newton primarily focused on white supremacy in America.
I wasn't at the meeting, and it sounds like it was extremely charged. I don't think I can make nuanced comments about what was said there. But it seems clear that Singer made comments minimizing white supremacy in America, even his emailed reply does.
This dismissal of people as "unhinged", "cultish", and "lack of mental balance" at best unsympathetic and at worst callous. As others have pointed out, it's not really possible to compartmentalize yourself from "politics" unless you are represented by the majority and what is and isn't "politically acceptable" at work has always been fluid and changing. The fact that they have chosen these words to describe their frustration does not create "an unnecessarily hostile workplace" if they were already experiencing one (which, if you remember, may have something to do with the "Best Names List", and the fact that DHH spent a long blog post detailing how there were "only" a few Asian names on there was completely downplaying the fact they were still making fun of names from other races!).
It blows my mind that we're now so far down the list of transgressions that "list of funny sounding names poorly handled by management" is being touted as some egregious sin justifying claims of white supremacy at the company.
It was a bad idea and it wasn't handled well. But geesh.
So you just missed that whole section which starts with - unprompted - the Head of Strategy deciding to go on a long rant about their own political views in a company meeting?
Like it really doesn't matter what led to that meeting, because I've not seen a version of events where somehow that becomes not a disaster on your "so anyway we announced a policy about you in a blog post where we insulted a whole lot of you recently..." meeting.
The only justification for the DE&I committee is this list. The only other evidence of white supremacy is (lol) one guy saying he doesn't think it's there in the company.
Usually there'll be at least a claim of someone using the N-word, or employees of different races being treated unfairly. We can't even get that! This list existed, and was not handled well by management, and that's enough to accept that simply claiming the company is not white supremacist is too political.
Oh but the guy did share a Breitbart link once, I think, so the whole company was basically a half step away from burning crosses on lawns. Give me a break.
You don't think senior management choosing to use an all hands where their new "no politics" rule - and then using the opportunity to unprompted then go on about their own politics, might make people reconsider who's "no politics" is about to be protected?
I don't think the existence of the list is really the problem, it was just the spark that lead to all this. Everyone, including DHH and Jason agrees that the list was a bad idea. It was the arguments that sprung out of that, and then the ridiculously heavy handed policy changes that started all of this. The list itself doesn't matter, it's becoming increasingly clear that there were pre-existing tensions and there would have been some other event that kicked this off if the list didn't.
If someone feels like the workplace is hostile then they should speak to HR. Is that not the usual channels for this kind of thing? Of course I'm not sure how HR can help if the base of their discomfort on the fact they work with white colleagues.
>This dismissal of people as "unhinged", "cultish", and "lack of mental balance" at best unsympathetic and at worst callous.
It seems to me all these problems at Basecamp could have been avoided in the first place if these people were dismissed for their unhinged and cultish behavior as soon as they started to exhibit it. If they are suffering some sort of mental trauma the proper place to address that is therapy, not at work.
Here's a twitch partner, just earlier today, illustrating how DEI is racist. Expect to see a lot of this;
"Kinda sad, found out I was accepted into a twitch team because of my skin colour so that “diversity” can be preached & not for my values or the blood, sweat n tears I’ve put into my work. Plus then being left out of everything & watching from the sidelines continuously..." https://twitter.com/Sharesee/status/1389522366515056641
It's weird to cite someone complaining about not being included, as an example of inclusion being bad. Sure, fake-DEI is bad, because it's not DEI!
Also weird for someone to complain about "because of my skin colour" when she identifies herself on Twitter as "Bajan and British" first and foremost, not anything about her "values or the blood, sweat n tears".
anytime anyone mentions "left" or "right" in their argument, I couldn't help but thinking the person is now short or actual argument and need to resort to name calling. And it's not just those 2 words, things like assigning people/practices a bunch of adjectives/nouns without elaboration too, that's a pattern very obvious to detect and can discredit your argument really quickly.
DHH was “so sick” that he was barely present for the most important meeting of his career. Fortunately he was able to post on Twitter several hours later storming at Apple, then going on a twitter blocking spree. What a “miraculous recovery”.
I wonder what things will be like for him when he becomes an adult.
Please don't cross into personal attack and name-calling. You may not owe (or feel you owe) $person better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here.
Fair enough! Thanks. I’ll edit! (or apparently I can't, but I'll note it for the future - feel free to take out my last sentence there if you have editing privileges!)
The through line for all of these disasters seems to be a thirst for attention and adulation. Fried and DHH have always been super excited to tell us how to work, but it turns out when a crisis came to their company, they managed to mess it up to an unbelievable degree. Fried was so thirsty for attention that he told us how to manage a crisis like this before he’d even bothered to handle it himself or even tell his own employees about the policy changes first.
If this is how these two are going to manage after decades at this, maybe they should bring in some executives willing to do the actual work of managing instead of bungling it themselves.
Maybe this is just the first crisis we're hearing about. Alternatively, if they only hit one crisis in decades of running a company, they must be doing something right.
In the April discussion about the list of customer names, Singer posted to say that attempting to link the list to genocide was “absurd.” On the Friday call, he went further.
“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
He continued: “Very often, if you express a dissenting view, you get called a Nazi. … I have not felt this is open territory for discussion. If we were to try to get into it as a group discussion it would be very painful and divisive.”
Singer concluded his remarks. Fried responded, “Thank you, Ryan.”
A handful of other speakers followed. Then a Black employee asked if the company could revisit Singer’s remarks. (I’m withholding the employee’s name and other identifying details out of colleagues’ fears that they could be targeted for harassment for speaking out.)
--
Interesting that comments objecting to political hyperbole gets the commenter suspended (leading to resignation) with his name all over the place, while those who called for his censure are deemed as needing to be protected from naming due to "harrassment for speaking out".
Consider someone for whom "white supremacy" means "it is right and appropriate to act deliberately to create and preserve white dominance of other races". Versus someone for whom it means "privilege exists in many, though often subtle ways, and advantages white, male, older, cis, het people".
It's a lot like how "defund police" means radically different things.
CRT definitions of 'White Supremacy' are not about 'people acting deliberately' to support it.
CRT laments that 'regular people' doing 'regular things' act unconsciously to support oppressive systems, hence 'White Supremacy'.
Making a film about 'something' and hiring those people you know to make it, who by virtue of your social network might be 'mostly white' - would be an example of 'White Supremacy'.
Ergo - in their view, unless you are actively fighting to dismantle the concept of whiteness - you're supporting 'White Supremacy'.
I believe there is a kernel of truth in systematic, even unconsciously biased systems, however, I don't remotely agree with many of the assertions. Unfortunately, to disagree with their assertions makes you a 'bad person' in their view.
Have a read [1]. A thesis of 'self examination' i.e. a fairly progressive individual addressing their own 'white supremacy' due to their lack of active assertion of issues of equity etc..
"The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when “a veil of darkness” masks their race."
> Creating that database enabled the team to find the statistical evidence that a “veil of darkness” partially immunized blacks against traffic stops. That term and idea has been around since 2006 when it was used in a study that compared the race of 8,000 drivers in Oakland, California, who were stopped at any time of day or night over a six month period. But the findings from that study were inconclusive because the sample was too small to prove a link between the darkness of the sky and the race of the stopped drivers.
> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day – around 7 p.m. – when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.
> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables – the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.
Aggregating everything and taking an average doesn't prove 'everything is racist', it just proves some portion of people are. It's not traffic stops, 'the police', or 'the system' that is racist, it's individual cops making the decision to pull over one person and not another. If this were an example of systemic racism, there would be a systemic fix, but there isn't. The only way to fix this would be to wipe out or even out the biases of the individual officers. Police departments in the bay area are very ethnically diverse: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/do-bay-area-police-dep...
The claim they were contesting was that the poster couldn't find "a single example of systematic racism". Countering that doesn't require that every single person isn't racist, just that racism exists and has a measurable impact.
> Institutional racism was defined by Sir William Macpherson in the UK's Lawrence report (1999) as: "The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."
If you define any amount of discrimination as a failure to provide an appropriate professional service, then, mathematically, any amount of racism will become 'systemic' or 'institutional' so long as there is an uneven population distribution:
Let's say there are 3 groups. One group is 60% of the population, another is 30%, and the last is 10%. If all three groups have the exact same predisposition to favoring members over outsiders, the 60% group will experience prejudice from 40% of the population. The 10% population will experience it from 90% of the population. The 10% group will experience >10X the incidence of prejudice unless group favoritism is <= 0, which is literally impossible.
If that's what you mean when you say systemic/institutional, it feels like a completely useless thought to me. I, and I think many other people, hear 'systemic', and think 'coming from processes, rules, or procedures defined as part of a system', not from the people operating it. To make a better analogy, when I hear systemic car problem, I think the engine, transmission, or some other component of the car, not the driver.
We're overrepresented in poverty and crime, so it's reasonable that police officers would be biased against black people.
I definitely get stopped more often than my white friends (albeit it changes based on the country). I've been asked several times by police officers in Europe whether I was an immigrant from North Africa with the implication I was dealing drugs.
A lot of north africans immigrants in the country where I was actually deal drugs and I look like I'm from North Africa, so it makes sense for police officers to question me more.
This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.
I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
> This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.
An explicit bias, held by agents of the state, affecting their behavior towards the citizenry with no regard to individual innocence. Congrats, you've demonstrated systemic racism.
> I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
Kristallnacht wasn't legally authorized, either, but it'd be an odd claim that it didn't reflect systemic anti-Jewish bias in Nazi Germany.
I think based on other discussions in the thread, that just pulling out definitions will not be so helpful, so I just want to directly inquire, what sort of problem (since there is obviously a problem with this) do you think causes things like the "war on terror" and "war on drugs"? Do you think that these sorts of political actions would be acceptable to the voting public if they only affected white people?
Both problems are caused by having a corruptible, warmongering, spying and controlling government.
I don't want the government to intervene between me and a drug dealer to prevent me from buying what I want.
I don't want the government to spend billions of taxpayers money (and incurring debt - and devaluing my money) killing dudes in the middle east. There were definitely economical and geopolitical reasons to do the war on terror, but that's not something I wanted. 9/11 was merely the reason to attack a oil rich country.
I don't think there is anything racist with any of these wars.
Black people are disproportionally poorer and that's why they're overrepresented in drug related crimes and jail convictions. This happened mainly because stable families were destroyed in the 70s thanks to welfare policies. I'm not the best at explaining this kind of stuff, listen to Thomas Sowell for more.
I'm against prosecution for any drug related crime - but if drugs were legal, I'm sure a portion of poor people would move to whatever shady business they can do as long as they can survive and conviction rate wouldn't change much. Maybe street scams, maybe stealing, maybe begging.
Sure, go ahead and push for an end on the war on drugs, but you have to solve poverty and stable families as well if you want to see meaningful outcomes.
I largely agree- especially yes, we do have to fix poverty itself if we want to fix the disturbing racial skew in our justice system. However, when I think about the wars on drugs and terror, I think that they are heavily supported by xenophobia and racism. I don't think incredibly highly of the voting public in general, but it strikes me that there might be a much greater voter pushback against our foreign interventions if they were occurring in predominantly white countries, and prominently affecting white people.
I think similarly of the war on drugs. Sure, we absolutely need to fix the precursors to addiction and the things that keep it entrenched, in order to keep black people from being victimized by addiction and imprisonment at such a high rate, but isn't the fact that this obviously unjust, bastardized, and warped form of health policy is at all acceptable to many voters, partially because a lot of white voters don't see it as affecting their communities (even though it definitely does, trust me).
You can say the same thing about the basic conditions of poverty- if a huge chunk of the population did not identify the injustices faced by those who are impoverished as "black people problems", and if the other enormous chunk of americans didn't identify them as "white trash and black people problems", maybe our policies about for-profit schools, food stamps, and HUD, would look a little more promising.
I'll lay my cards on the table, I believe that most structural exploitation occurs on an economic basis, for economic reasons. I think economic class is the primary stratification that supports most of our unjust political structures. However, it is also clear to me that, at an ideological level, these unjust measures hide themselves behind racial boundaries and political borders, so they can remain palatable to those who might have the power to change them. In other words, racism wasn't a motive, but it is a hell of a shield.
You're clearly not looking very hard. As a super simple example, look at the countless studies that have shown that signifiers that point towards you being black on a resume (your name, school, etc.) have a measurable effect on getting interviews. That's textbook systematic racism.
the fact they got into battles over what labels are appropriate and the possible different "definitions" shows they had no idea how to deal with this situation.
Then those vying for change should consider using less offensive, divisive, and frankly ridiculous (i.e. defund the police), language.
It's now tiresome to hear the defense "oh defund doesn't mean _defund_...." -- then don't say it. If the charge of white supremacy isn't meant to insult people based on race (overt racism, itself), then maybe convey the thought more clearly.
Why is this getting so much attention? When I first saw the dozen or so headlines exclaiming 1/3 of the company quit I assumed it was a huge company. The place only has 60 employees!
The company is well known. The people in charge have written books about how to run companies. Hansson created Rails. Politics at work is a hot topic for HN now.
It sounds like the old adage, "the architecture of the company mimics the architecture of the software," applies very well here. In this case, the company's stance on politics scales about as well as Rails.
Shopify and Airbnb were able to become multi-billion dollar companies mostly by running on Rails before it became unsustainable. I'd say Rails scaled pretty well.
While true, I also remember watching a presentation about Shopify where they explained how they spent a whole year migrating to a newer Rails version.
Now, Shopify clearly has the capacity to pull this off. But a smaller company that initially bet on Rails and is now facing a mountain of tech debt might not. To be fair: it is possible to write Rails applications in a way that you don't couple every aspect of your application to Rails internals. But in certain crucial ways, Rails encourages doing exactly that - dragging the DB along your whole application, for example.
I've been a Rails developer for a couple of years and I left that ecosystem in no small part because a huge chunk of that community seems to treat "architecture" as a dirty word and monkeypatching as a solution for everything (and also indulges into making fun of PHP or Java a bit too much for my taste). Of course, everyone's experiences are different and you can do great stuff with Rails, but for me it's something I don't really want to go back to.
On the other hand, it probably also enabled them to get up & running with a MVP fairly fast and low-cost. No one knew it was going to be the big success from the get-go, and most new companies fail.
In hindsight, it was probably a bad choice. At the time however, it was probably a good one.
Besides, things like AirBnB are the exceptions. Most sites don't get anywhere near the traffic they get, and Rails is often a good choice. Is it imperfect and are there trade-offs involved? Of course, but there are with anything.
> Is it imperfect and are there trade-offs involved? Of course, but there are with anything.
No disagreement here. But the argument was made that Rails "scales pretty well" and I believe this is wrong — and I don't even mean in terms of performance (that probably too), but also in terms of architectural complexity. All these problems are solvable of course, but Rails makes it IMHO harder than some other technologies.
I haven't significantly worked with Rails since 2015, so I'm not up to speed with the current state of things, but in general I found that architecturally Rails can scale mostly okay, although it can be a bit tricky if you're not very familiar with the Rails internals, but it's not overly complex either in my experience. I was never a Rails super-expert either, and I managed to bolt on plenty of stuff for customers' specific needs, and the results worked fairly well and weren't too overly complex.
I don't doubt there are certain roadblocks though, and that some things fairly "simple" could be very hard and complex in Rails. I just never encountered them.
I've certainly seen a lot more overly complex crappy bespoke solutions when Rails + a few modifications would have been much better. This is like the old Greenspun's tenth rule: "any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." – there are a lot of "ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of half of Ruby on Rails" out there.
Right now I mostly write web stuff with Go, which is the exact opposite of Ruby/Rails in almost every way. In spite of being so different, I'm fairly comfterable with both approaches, and I'm not entirely sure what I prefer yet (even though I've been doing this in Go for 6 years now); I certainly spent a lot more time on basic stuff that Rails just provides.
Rails is ultimately just a collection of libraries + some glue code, tooling etc., so you can, of course, build a well-architected Rails app with some discipline.
What I'm criticising is that a lot of the official guides (and/or DHH himself) often lead to problems down the road. For example, it is encouraged to do things through model callbacks. Except, once you have your send_email logic in a after_create callback and you figure out that you actually need to create users in different contexts too - e.g. in bulk updates if you need to import some data, where you don't want to always send an email - it will be painful to rewrite your code since you have no abstraction where that code should reside. Even DHH recognised this problem, when he pushed through ActiveRecord::Base.suppress [1] which was consided problematic by most everyone else (including the Rails core team). A better architecture would have a "service" or "concern" layer that would handle such things, but "the Rails way" doesn't advocate for anything outside of models, views and controllers. Though, to be fair, many real-world codebases do include such a service layer - but it's done differently everywhere.
There is also no abstraction for request validations. You're supposed to do all your validations in the model layer. But what if you have multiple requests mapping to the same model layer? Maybe the validations you want to run if an admin user updates a table are very distinct from the validations that should be run for a regular user. Again, while you can use ActiveModel objects for that, Rails doesn't particularly encourage this design and you can end up with a lot of coupling between your persistence layer and something which is essentially part of the business layer, and that can be hard to unentangle later.
Another famous problem IMHO is (by default) every single test loading the whole Rails context. This makes fast unit tests basically impossible and therefore TDD painful (which, IMHO, is particularly bad in a dynamically and heavily monkeypatched language - if you don't have static guarantees, you at least want to be able to test your changes quickly).
All of these are things that in other ecosystems - for example Spring - are handled much better. Now, I have criticisms about Spring too (slow boot times, excessive use of reflection, Hibernate is a mess, etc.) but at least it gives you some good tools to cleanly separate different layers of your application. For example, validation is generally done at DTO level, long before any of your data ever hits the database.
Yeah, I agree the MVC model in Rails is too simplistic. I never liked how everything is stuffed in models; back in Rails 3 (or 2?) it was even worse. I actually wrote a library to solve part of this, which inserted a "form" layer between the controllers and models. It worked quite well.[1]
Actually, Ruby on Rails in general is often "Rails + these 20 gems that everyone uses". I remember someone likening getting started with practical real-world Rails development as starting in Game of Thrones in the middle of season 5, which sounds about right to me.
Even in hindsight I think Rails was a good choice for Airbnb. It got the company to where it needed to be. If they had chosen something else, there would have been different trade offs. The early team really benefited from the productivity benefits of Rails.
Source: I worked at Airbnb for five years and a very early team member told me this.
Because the founders have positioned themselves as the thought leaders how to manage a company really well. 5 books and counting. Meanwhile, this whole thing was a masterclass on how not to manage a team.
There are few stories that grab attention like hubris & comeuppance.
I've worked at a lot of places where politics was discussed casually. In my experience, political discussions at work tend not to be such a bad thing, provided that assholes can keep their mouths shut and not sow acrimony. When I read about the blowup a few days ago, I thought Basecamp had a cryptofascist in there somewhere and when he opened his mouth, shit hit the fan. Sure enough, it was Singer.
> Unfortunately, one participant was stuck on free speech side of the debate. All day the conference has been doing logical programs and term equivalence, but somehow this person didn't deduce the result "free speech fundamentalism == fash", at least within the current evaluation context.
Really? Someone who writes that is where you're looking for guidance? Words fail me to describe how appalling this is.
Free clue: You can believe in strong free speech protection without being fascist. You'd be amazed at how many people do so - who believe in free speech on principle, not because they want to be able to say their secret horrible beliefs out loud. Putting them in the fascist category merely shows that your brain has turned off, and you're willing to harm completely innocent people in order to try to protect against your current bogeymen.
> Really? Someone who writes that is where you're looking for guidance? Words fail me to describe how appalling this is.
Did you read the rest of the blog post? Or did seeing "<my dearly held American value>=fash" stop your thought? As Andy says, free speech really only works in a context where everybody is of equal power. In an asymmetric power context, speech against those with less power is objectively more damaging than speech against those with more power, and is therefore more legitimately subject to restriction. Tolerating speech against the marginalized thus pulls society further in a pro-fascist direction.
You should really consider whether it makes sense to be more appalled by someone calling out tolerance of hate speech as fascist, than by the hate speech itself.
Replying late. I was going to just let all the downvotes be your answer, but after thinking about it for a day, I decided that this deserved more of a reply.
Yes, I read the rest of the blog post.
I see a couple problems with your position here. First, fascists - real fascists - aren't free speech advocates. They restrict the speech of their opponents. So calling someone fascist because they advocate free speech is rather off. In fact, your position is closer to the fascist one.
Second: "fash". Part of the fascist playbook is short, dismissive, contemptuous labels for their opponents. It's part of the dehumanization process. And here you are, doing exactly that.
That's two different parts of the fascist methodology that you (and the blog poster) are exhibiting. You might think carefully about that. When opposing tyranny, be careful of the methods of tyrants, lest you become one.
God sounds like they needed to clean house if this was the kind of shit going on at work. Hopefully they can actually focus on the company goals after all this blows over.
> “My honest sense of why everybody is leaving because they're tired of Jason and David's behavior — the suppression of voices, of any dissent,” one employee told me. “They really don’t care what employees have to say. If they don't think it's an issue, it's not an issue. If they don't experience it, then it's not real. And this was the final straw for a lot of employees
Sounds a hell of a lot like the house cleaning needing to happen is at the top.
That quote is the clearest indication that this isn’t a politics issue, it’s a management issue. This sort of “I don’t think it’s an issue so let’s not handle it” attitude applies just as much/more to actually getting work done. Classic bad manager 101 stuff.
You can have good success by being a bad manager of course! My bet is that there’s a lot of great ICs that counteract whatever messy people mgmt stuff is going on.
This only gets worse if they hadn't. We have hours of these meetings every week. I attend a few hours to keep the target off me and turn off my camera to workout instead.
Honestly, in this story everyone looks like a big child.
I would maybe be more sympathetic to DHH if it wasn't the guy who was so opinionated he pushed through Rails features that everyone else disliked or co-wrote several books on company culture that are glorified ads for basecamp (although "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" is still a thought-provoking read, at least in part). I can only imagine that he might be similarly self-righteous in workplace situations.
I think that, no matter your political views, if a situation gets out of hand that bad over matters that aren't even really directly related to workplace concerns, something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere.
I've seen it happen in a company which was doing just fine.
It happened randomly and completely out of the blue: one software engineer mentioned he didn't believe in the gender gap and he was promptly replied 1000 words essays by other leaders in the company shutting him down, to show that "we don't tolerate certain behaviour".
Guidelines were created to avoid future political discussions in the workplace. No-one left because of it (immediately) and we sadly didn't become famous. The engineer who brought that up quit a few months after.
After that, half of the employees hated thinking there were people thinking something different from them in the company, the other half was afraid to talk in public.
Again, I don't think there was a particular situation in the company: just a naive person who likes to talk frankly and people who get offended and are quick to attack in order to defend the "safe space" for the people who share their beliefs.
Maybe. But this is (was) a 60-person company. That's about the size of the company I'm currently working at. In other words, you should know everyone and interact with a sizeable chunk of these people somewhat regularly. It strikes me as very odd that you would suddenly so fundamentally distrust your co-workers with whom you share so much. But I'm also not in the US and maybe this is just the current climate over there.
(Or maybe it also shows that being a fully-remote company can have downsides, such as coworkers not socialising enough and therefore not trusting each other? Who knows. DHH certainly has championed the "remote work for everyone" approach countless times.)
> It strikes me as very odd that you would suddenly so fundamentally distrust your co-workers with whom you share so much. But I'm also not in the US and maybe this is just the current climate over there.
Yes, it absolutely is the climate here. it’s awful. tribalism, division, distrust and eagerness to demonize anyone who doesn’t tow your line.
We also may be reading a lot into how large this committee was.
If I were at a company of ~58 people, and ~20 of them were forming a DE&I committee to evaluate the company's vendor relationships, speakers, etc., I'd be tempted to join just to get the potential target off of my back. They're not going to fire 1/3 of the workforce, after all.
The culture here is getting bad. We have an "inclusion council" that hands out these diktats. The word ban list (not blacklist!) is approaching 100 words including husband, housekeeping, normal, hacker and meritocracy. Worse part is we're a security company
> 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
That seems like they don’t understand the word. I can’t think of many more communities more inclusive than hackers. It’s certainly not gendered either.
mines only 6, shes defeated some child locks and found a "cheat" in one of her kid games on the iPad and presses every button on every machine she sees. Hack the planet kiddo!!
Come to us. First of all it’s Florida and second of all you can say and think what you like. In fact unique points of view are deeply appreciated and widely supported - and engaging contrarian intellectual conversations most welcome.
Yup. Pro tip: If you're at a SV-influenced company and you find yourself talking about your personal life, don't say "husband," "wife," "boyfriend," or "girlfriend;" say "partner." That signals that you're an Ally rather than an Enemy.
You'll notice other weird speech patterns too. Pay attention to them; they're meaningful.
Curious about the context here - is the guidance page suggesting how to refer to your own relationships, or when referring to an abstract group of relationships?
But isn't your restriction of my language and how I refer to the people I love pretty much the opposite of "inclusion"?
What if my wife would prefer if I referred to her as my "wife" instead of as a generic, faceless "partner"? By insisting that I refer to her as a genderless "partner", you are failing to respect her chosen pronoun.
This is almost certainly for product or marketing materials, and not for you talking about your personal relationships. That is Okta should not talk about building a security tool for you and your wife to use, but instead for you and your partner to use.
Because I have no clue who your partner is (or really if you have one) so I shouldn't assume until I have that information. Note that the words in the example are all plural, presumably referring to multiple other peoples' partners.
Oh, I see what you are saying. I can definitely get behind the use of gender neutral language in product and marketing materials. That part makes sense anyways.
I often see that peculiar speech pattern here on HN! It's like they're afraid to say 'wife' out of fear of offending the woke mob. The same people who are OK with work being a constant struggle seminar.
I use "sibling" rather than "brother" or "sister" and "parent" rather than "mother" or "father" to reduce information leakage. "Partner" could find the same use.
This isn't any woke thing - its just a "don't reveal information that isn't necessary."
Ah, yes. Let's just obfuscate every humanizing aspect of our lives to ensure we are seen as a replaceable cogs in the money making machine instead of real people with feelings.
It's bad where I work too. I'd call myself anti-woke. I just keep to myself. The sad thing is that I feel completely demoralized by it all. Like no one is on my side and I can't express myself at all anymore.
I can't understand the people who say quit, because for every Basecamp or Coinbase there are 10,000 other companies who haven't banned it where it's taking over.
When anyone tries to prescribe language, it's time to look for the exit. For anyone who has not read the book Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)[1], or seen the movie, I strongly recommend reading or watching. George Orwell understood the power of language when he wrote about Newspeak[2].
The most crazy about this stuff in the stirring-stuff-up sense person that I know went to okta specifically because they sensed it would be a good place to engage in this behavior.
Do we have any examples of this D&I stuff working? All I hear about are campuses and companies literally imploding. I never hear any places that were bad, and then got better. Is there any data at all to suggest that these ideas work and result in a better world?
I work at a Fortune 500 company that has gone woke, complete with critical race theory training. I'm literally the only white person in my department. I'm the racial minority. Do you think any of the training even considered that a possibility? Before this change in the company I had never even noticed my race in relation to my coworkers and I absolutely hate them for bringing it to my attention and forcing me against my will to focus on the fact that I'm a racial minority. I've had employers destroy my retirement plan value (pension) and others try to avoid paying me. This feels much more depraved and personal because they are attacking me psychologically. I'm on my way out.
Congratulations, you have an opportunity to experience what it feels like to work in tech as a person of color, or a woman, or any of the many other underrepresented groups in tech. Only those people experience every day at almost all companies, and can't escape it by leaving their existing company.
Maybe see it as a chance to learn and grow instead of something to resent and run from?
As a URM in tech, that's not my own experience. There's rarely attention drawn to the fact that I'm a minority - and I like it that way. Heterogeneity is tough with this: some individuals like and benefit from initiatives that focus on their minority status, while others don't. No group is a monolith - individuals have different needs - not to mention that experiences can differ significantly, too.
I think there's a very fine balance to strike where you want programs to reach the people who benefit -- and certainly leaders and co-workers who need to be more inclusive -- without making those you're trying to help feel uncomfortable by having it so front and center that those who'd like to sit out can't. It's a tough balance, and I've seen companies both go too far and not far enough.
All this is to say I can imagine a situation where OP's environment really is making them more uncomfortable than what many (most?) URM's experience in the work place. Can't say for sure without knowing specifics, of course. It just isn't always a case of "more is better."
My understanding of the initial comment and why I +1 it was that I thought it was focused on the observation that this person has been in a situation in which they are a minority, are realizing they are one and are thinking about things that they wouldn't think about before and hoping that this experience helps build empathy and better understanding of the day to day life as a URM.
The situation the person is in isn't great and leaving sounds worth doing but I didn't think that was what the response was about though I can see how the implication to not run away could be interpreted in a different way
This is of course the worst take. When I was in 4th grade we had to read a short story about a society that enforced sameness, it wasn’t the giver where they did it genetically, rather if you were smart they’d fix headphones to your ears that played a loud obnoxious noise so you couldn’t think, if you were tall or athletic they crippled you, basically they brought everyone down to the same bad level...
That’s the society you’re trying to build.
ETA: people are logging their disagreement in downvotes but I haven’t seen a counter argument to this at any point in this thread, I’m ok with the dv, just interested in hearing the opposing view.
I imagine the downvotes are mainly because the comparison seems pretty off base, regardless of whether one agrees with the good or bad of the original post.
Comparing "you are now in a situation where you may have an opportunity to empathise with difficulties others have had" to "you are trying to build a society where more fortunate people are harmed in the name of sameness" doesn't resonate at all.
Ah, the comparison is coming from the fact that the GP is describing a bad situation he’s in and the response is essentially “you deserve it” and “think of the starving children in Africa”. My point is that sort of thinking creates a less humane society.
Right, I don't really agree with your interpretation, though I can understand how you might read it that way. As I wrote above, I read it as "take this as a learning opportunity to empathise with others", which I would think leads to a _more_ humane society.
Telling someone how to "empathize" is probably the most condescending thing that "progressives" tell others to do.
Somehow it only comes out when the person preaching it feels extreme pity for the person in need of "empathy" and most importantly the preacher is the only one who really understands how to give that empathy, no one else is able to reach their level of enlightenment. Of course this creates a problem when two such preachers are in the same room...
Additionally, most of the time the pitied person doesn't want your pity or empathy they just want to live their life and are usually pretty happy until you come along and start telling them they need empathy and how bad their life really is.
You are exactly right. The funny thing is that the short story in question, Harrison Bergeron, was meant as a satire of right-wing fears of slippery slopes toward sameness. It's no coincidence that the comparison is made here; the comparison is exactly what Kurt Vonnegut was making fun of when he wrote the story.
Most critiques of the story entirely disagree with your interpretation. I couldn’t find anything specific about how the author meant it to be understood but it appears that most understand it as I interpreted it when I was 9 years old.
I am on the other side of this debate, and I have plenty of downvotes from my comments in this thread without counter arguments. That's HN in a nutshell. My advice to you is to get over it.
I’m not complaining about the downvotes, but I’d like to understand what the disagreement is. I’m sorry that people do that. I generally will respond if I disagree instead of downvoting. I’ll take a look at your comment history and see if I have time to address it.
ETA: I’ve looked over your comments, aside from one that appears to be sarcastic everything you say has a response to it. I added my own comment to one of them as well. I think resigning ourselves to Twitter-like flame wars without actually talking things out isn’t very hn like at all.
It's not your fault, and besides, I received a more recent reply to one. These are heated topics that likely won't be resolved on HN comments sections.
Edit: I read your edit. It appears that in your mind, comments that disagree with you resemble a Twitter flame war, and comments agreeing with you are well articulated and thoughtful. In reality, your comments are just as negative and one-sided as the others you disparage.
> Edit: I read your edit. It appears that in your mind, comments that disagree with you resemble a Twitter flame war, and comments agreeing with you are well articulated and thoughtful. In reality, your comments are just as negative and one-sided as the others you disparage.
Just the opposite, I welcome disagreement. I just don’t like being attacked without knowing why.
Not sure who downvoted you, but the fact that you characterize a downvote as an "attack" gets to the core of the problem. Namely, you seem to think even the most minor form of disagreement (a downvote) makes you some sort of victim.
Maybe we could call it a “small attack” or even a “micro-attack”... hey how about.... a micro-aggression.
I kid but obviously a downvote is a negative response to something I wrote, but without the responsibility of actually backing up why they’re having that negative response. I’m kinda lost as to why we’re even having this discussion, you appear upset that I wanted to hear why people were downvoting me. Why does that upset you?
> (Or maybe it also shows that being a fully-remote company can have downsides, such as coworkers not socialising enough and therefore not trusting each other? Who knows. DHH certainly has championed the "remote work for everyone" approach countless times.)
I’d bet remote work was a strong contributor. People don’t form the same humanizing attachments remotely as they do in person, in my experience.
I agree. For the record, I am pro-remote work and was fully onboard long before COVID, but I also suspect that the erosion of social trust can be accelerated in a company by fully remote work. It's a tradeoff that a company can either handle badly or well.
Did you read that comment about Basecamp employees "crying and screaming at their screens" after the Zoom meeting? That just sounds so much like people who are both venting their spleens and at the same time have no connection to their workplace.
Yep, that line in particular stood out to me. It sounds like there was a lot of assuming bad faith going on. For example, taking DHH’s refusal to take a stance as condoning bad behavior, when it looked to me like he was trying to listen rather than talk, and also blindsided.
At the risk of armchair quarterbacking, the whole thing looks like a broken culture, and I get the impression nobody knew just how broken it was until now. Nor do I think any one person or action is to blame. I’d bet that it’s been festering for years.
It’s a fascinating case study, though, and I’m glad we have a view into it.
> I've seen it happen in a company which was doing just fine. It happened randomly and completely out of the blue: one software engineer mentioned he didn't believe in the gender gap
You don't have to leave it anonymous; I think most people know what Google is.
> I think that, no matter your political views, if a situation gets out of hand that bad over matters that aren't even really directly related to workplace concerns, something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier.
Remember, the proximate cause here was something that directly related to what happened at work.
It's not the case that forming a committee that's over 1/3 the size of the company to do unprompted evaluation of vendor relationships for DE&I and approval of guest speakers follows logically from, "there used to be a list of funny sounding names and management didn't handle it well."
It's weird to criticize someone who wrote several books like "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" as "ads for basecamp" and then proceeded to run basecamp (his workplace) as a not-crazy environment. What else would you expect?
Not sure if I'm understanding you correctly but my criticism of the book is that, while it has interesting ideas, a large chunk of it reads as: "We do this thing at Basecamp. Most other companies don't do that. And because of that, Basecamp is an awesome place to work and other places suck.". Instead of, you know, giving a slightly more balanced account of certain things or acknowledging that even your own company has flaws (every company does).
Seems OP's reaction is like what is rife in Australia as 'tall-poppy syndrome' and cutting down prominent achievers. We collectively dislike promoters, but isn't doing something like writing a book to draw attention to your SaaS product exactly the sort of thing a founder should be doing? Especially given it worked in bringing them customers and attention. If you think they're too confident in their assertions, it's easy enough to ignore them.
We celebrate sports stars, CEOs from Atlassian/Canva/etc.
It's not about being successful. It's about not having an ego and acting like you're better than everyone else just because you are successful. Americans are much more willing to tolerate this behaviour than Australians.
To the credit of Americans IMO. Ego is quite common among high achievers and often beneficial as a motivator or confidence booster. Unexamined and disproportionate egos are self punishing as they directly harm chances of success. AFAICT any additional social stigma accomplishes nothing except perhaps the soothing of egos by less successful people. There are real disparities in ability & quality between people for which proven success is the strongest (and perhaps the only real) signal.
That doesn't imply that I have to like his self-promotion book. After all, if I'm to read a book I want to get something out of it. As I already mentioned, the book has good parts, but it reads quite jarring in many places.
Also, I guess this is personal, but a little humility is good for everyone, IMHO, and doesn't necessarily contradict a healthy dose of self-confidence either. DHH seems to have little of it — at least judging from his books and also from his Twitter.
This: "co-wrote several books on company culture that are glorified ads for basecamp" just doesn't seem too questionable to me. The readership made them popular books. His job, in part, is to promote his products - my interpretation of your comment was that your thoughts on his plight were swayed by him writing something that promoted his business. I find him a bit over the top, so I don't follow him on Twitter. I haven't read their books. I've used but didn't continue to use their products. But that doesn't really sway my thoughts on this recent episode.
I think there's a lot of cross-purpose arguing about it all. It's likely that they're a bit painful to work for AND that as founders they'd have concerns about their paid staff getting distracted from their mission at work.
Just because someone isn't skilled at the traditional, mainstream Western methods of conveying empathy doesn't mean they actually lack empathy. This ought to be obvious when considering persons on the extreme end of the autism spectrum, but as time goes on we're learning that the spectrum might subtly encompass far more people than we ever realised.
(With no small amount of irony, I find that many "normal" people have a very hard time truly empathising with the ways in which people on the spectrum are different.)
But it doesn't even have to be something as categorisable as the spectrum. Just as people don't choose their genetics or initial brain chemistry, it's equally true to say that nobody chose their genetic parents or their upbringing. People are the product of their environment; we would do well to keep this in mind even when we (rightly) castigate people for their misdeeds.
> but as time goes on we're learning that the spectrum might subtly encompass far more people than we ever realised.
The autism spectrum is a continuum that fades into normality, with no clear boundary. Part of that continuum is individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP), who have significantly more autistic traits than the average person does, but not enough to reach the diagnostic cutoff for ASD. That cutoff varies from clinician to clinician, and is moving over time, which renders the boundary between BAP and ASD particularly fuzzy.
> (With no small amount of irony, I find that many "normal" people have a very hard time truly empathising with the ways in which people on the spectrum are different.)
Damian Milton speaks of the "double empathy problem" – it is claimed that a defining trait of autism is deficits in empathy, and yet very many non-autistic people are at least as deficient in empathy for autistic people.
Thanks, an interesting response. I will look into Damian Milton.
Based on my own experiences (which are very limited) I don't see a deficit of empathy in people on the spectrum. What I do see is someone who sees the world differently (has a different kind of "filter" to distinguish signal from noise) which causes the response to stimulus to be different. If you see the world differently, your internal model of what another person is is different, and therefore the way one expresses their empathy is different.
Arguably this isn't so different to how concepts of honour and respect can vary greatly between cultures.
Is it possible that they were doing exactly that in trying to focus the staff on work itself? I'd guess I lean politically with the founders and their departing staff, and I don't love the "silent majority" that gets spoken of, but DHH talked about having people approach him who were uncomfortable with having a workplace they felt was politicised.
As a personal example, I work in a shared office space. If a vocal tenant talks loudly about politics, even if it's something I agree with, I cringe and worry that it creates a less welcoming space for anyone in the room that doesn't agree with the points. Seems reasonable that they should expect an office where they can work without feeling on edge.
Perhaps not - asking honestly, What did I miss? Other than people saying they didn't love working for the founders (and that seems to predate this issue). I said that in another comment, that it seemed the internet beat up is at cross-purposes: employees not loving the employers and founders asserting control (with repercussions) are both reasonable positions.
I read the first third-party piece about this and nothing sounded outrageous. Read Jason and DHH's pieces, and then DHH's follow-up entry. I read Jane Yang's bit. And I read some Twitter threads from employees.
Obviously employees are well within their rights to want a workplace where they form HR policy and the founders can want another scenario if they think it's to the detriment of their product. Former can move on to another workplace. Founders can wear the blowback of their decision.
IMO Cutting benefits is more unacceptable than cutting politics talk (which IDC about). Replacing it with an equal amount of money doesn't necessarily shore up because I'll need to pay income tax on any direct payments, and if they only give me the money that they would pay (companies get bulk discounts on gym memberships and the like) then I will be given less money than the service was actually worth.
eg. if Basecamp got bulk gym memberships at 20$/employee but each employee would have to sign up at 40$ per person, Basecamp paying each employee 20$ would not be the same as giving each employee a gym membership.
Unless you qualified for each and every benefit, replacing them all with money might end up being a gain instead of a cut. Anyone who doesn’t have a gym membership or isn’t currently paying tuition would come out ahead this year at least on their new plan.
Fair enough that it might not work so well in subsequent years due to taxes.
> Is it possible that they were doing exactly that in trying to focus the staff on work itself?
A lot of the complaints or commentary I've seen across a few issues, leaving aside this more acute issue was that DHH and JF were entirely comfortable espousing _their_ opinions and feelings on things, but a lot less interested in hearing other people's.
In the sense that they are ultimately responsible for the business/brand, legal repercussions, etc. It's their baby - Jason's run it for 20+ years. Seems like they're effectively saying, by all means push your opinions on your private channels, and we'll do the same. Obviously if someone feels it's handled poorly, they bail (as some have), but I'm guessing the severance and political polarisation could be factors there?
If I'd founded something 20+ years ago (well, I have), and at some point a third of the business was putting work time into deciding HR policy that was alienating other staff, I'd be looking at resolving it too. I've worked for myself for 20+ years so can't be sure, but I haven't heard of anything like that equality-council from any friends working here in Australia. This situation might be more unique to current USA?
I think 20+ people leaving demostrates that it's not solely theirs. When trust and confidence in a company's leaders erodes far enough, the business can not function effectively.
They're also within their rights to say all employees will only make minimum wage, and that their products will now be marked up 1000%, but that doesn't mean employees or customers have to accept that.
I think if you ask a lot of the people who were advocating for things like the DEI committee, the reason they were doing those things is because their lack of comfort with certain things (the name list is an example, but I'm sure there's others) made it more difficult to focus on work. They weren't looking to just argue about unrelated political topics.
If you came across a list that contained names that were being laughed at because of their ethnicity, and you shared that ethnicity, would you feel comfortable working with the people making those jokes?
It would depend on my perception of their intent, but then I live in a place where I am in the majority so ultimately it's hard to truly judge that. The recaps didn't make it sound like there was a targeted ethnicity though (the information I saw to go by: 6/78 names were Asian; English and Nordic examples were given and then it's suggested the bulk were like that - but it's ambiguous as to whether that meant Caucasian, or that they were collated because they were similar examples). Notable names come from all cultures, in my experience (I often watch film credits looking for interesting names).
Assuming that it wasn't malicious or targeted, I'd expect the managerial response to be "Hey - this list is not really showing respect to our customers on a couple of fronts, so please wipe it ASAP. I understand that you weren't aware of why it's truly problematic, but you're aware now and I don't expect to see something like this again."
As I've said elsewhere though, I don't live in a place that feels as politically polarised, so I'm sure that's a serious factor.
That has nothing to do with the company being his. He's one of the larger share owners. The owners can shutter the company if they want, because it IS their company.
I'm not sure about that, after knowing people at Google who had to sit through HR bullshit like "how to respect your direct reports who sexually identify as Otherkin" the notion of a workplace with a hardline stance on none of this bullshit at work sounds highly appealing. Yes this new policy will cause some devs to avoid Basecamp. But there are many many devs who are sick and tired of woke culture infecting their workplaces who will likely flock to Basecamp and other such companies with similar policies.
> after knowing people at Google who had to sit through HR bullshit like "how to respect your direct reports who sexually identify as Otherkin"
Do you have sources for this, or anonymous blogs? Because I'd be concerned what "like" means here. It's obviously not literally this, otherwise it'd the word 'literal'. But to me, the ambiguity can be read (in bad faith) as "I think LGBTQ identities, broadly, are bullshit, and I shouldn't respect a direct report who identifies as bisexual, it's as ridiculous as someone who is believes they're a wolf sexually".
A little bit of disambiguity would do a long way here, as I genuinely can't tell if this is someone who thinks asexuals, bisexuals, etc. are bullshit not worth respecting (aka, a place of ignorance of the speaker), or if Google is literally saying that unheard-of sexual identities are part of its HR policies (which I've never heard of and would love to know to avoid working at Google in the future.)
> Honestly, in this story everyone looks like a big child.
I agree for the most part there. Less so the founders, I think there sin runs more along the lines of being extremely naive (but in a way a lot of people might be, especially when the alternative might be to accept you're screwed).
> something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere.
Well, the tensions exist because they're being pushed for by large influences societally for political gain. The problem is they promoted a workplace environment where it was considered okay to bring it in, as well as to poke fun at clients (which is what kicked it all off).
I see this as an example of the cost of free doughnuts.[1] It's well known that we value the loss of something as more than the gain of something, and we value free things for far more than they're worth. Employees were given free reign for a long time in ways that weren't all that conducive to a diverse work environment or to respecting clients. Now they are being told not to do things that most work places already expect you to know enough not to do, either by explicitly telling you or by culture, such as don't blast your political views out to everyone, and don't be disrespectful to the clients, as that's where your paycheck comes from. My guess is the majority of people that leave if honestly reflecting on this in a few years would acknowledge that maybe announcing and focusing on your differences with those you need to spend time with is not as good a strategy for a happy and productive workplace as focusing on your similarities.
> I think there sin runs more along the lines of being extremely naive [...]
which would be maybe more excusable if it didn't come from the guys who wrote several books about how awesomely they run their company. I guess that's why my sympathy for their situation is somewhat limited.
That's a good reason not to be sympathetic to them in particular. I guess you could say I'm sympathetic to some degree to the problem they were presented, but it was definitely of their own creation, so they shouldn't get a pass.
I mean, it's easy to think you're doing well because you got lucky in personnel and timing for how things went, but maybe have a bit more introspection before writing a book about it and how good your ideas were (there's a lot of non-fiction that could be said about...).
Is that more naivety though? Writing, thinking that they have the answer (or some of them) and then hitting something new that was yet to be seen in their working lives?
If I have sympathy for them, I think it would be because I could see myself making the exact same mistakes: writing confidently as my business road a wave of great timing, thinking that emboldened and involved employees were great for company culture, and then deciding that maybe it was a risky distraction.
There are a lot of dimensions to naivety. DHH has certainly struck me as naive in his arrogant confidence in the past (regarding TDD), and it sounds like he was naive in his approach to a major cultural change at his company. Naive not because he handled it badly, but because he seemed unaware that it needed to be handled delicately.
> I agree for the most part there. Less so the founders,
How anyone can look at this debacle and think of the employees as anything but victims, and the founders as anything but reactionary blowhards, is absolutely incoherent to me.
The founders are obviously the ones in the wrong here, and obviously come out with shattered reputations.
This dynamic is playing out in thousands of companies and startups across the US. Many people in the US, the woke, have redefined "white supremacy" and "racism" to mean most inequalities and behavior that they don't like:
They do not accept non-racist environments, only anti-racist ones. They do not accept that businesses be politically neutral. Businesses must take political stances internally and publicly. To do anything less, or to remain silent, is to be complicit in what they see as white supremacy and systemic racism. And if you disagree with those people, you will be accused of being racist, as Singer was.
The irony, of course, is that Hansson and Fried built a reputation around righteousness and wokeness, and then it came for them, because they were two white guys with power.
And when they realized what was happening, they executed their cultural pivot very poorly. They came out with a hard ban on a bunch of people who have the talent to work elsewhere.
Coinbase, at least, had the good sense to focus on the positive, their orientation as a mission-focused company. At the same time, Coinbase was making its employees rich with options and headed for an IPO.
The two companies will be paired case studies at HBS someday about how to screw it up and how to do it right.
> The irony, of course, is that Hansson and Fried built a reputation around righteousness and wokeness, and then it came for them, because they were two white guys with power.
From the little I know about it, they asked for people to look into inequality issues at work around hiring, then didn't like what was found and said nobody could talk about politics.
Sounds like they talked the talk, but when it came to walking the walk, they walked back and told everyone to be quiet.
>They do not accept non-racist environments, only anti-racist ones. They do not accept that businesses be politically neutral.
Perhaps they are the ones working toward a politically neutral, non-racist environment, and it is you who won't accept it.
In truth, I don't believe either they or you could properly identify what a politically neutral environment really looks like, and you're probably all unreliable and serving your own ends.
At my company that I was formally employed at before moving on to my current startup, we had a minority of employees very aggressively and vocally demanding that the CEO issue an anti-racism statement after the George Floyd murder. A statement was issue condemning what happened and racism. They were not satisfied with this and demanded that the exact words black lives matter be used and also that a donation to the BLM organization be made.
The company sold data analysis software targeted at Excel power users. It didn't have any offices in Minnesota. The idea that the company needed to make these statements was insane. They don't control police forces in Minneapolis they don't control police forces anywhere.
It is literally not their business to comment on these matters.
And something I have repeatedly stated and noticed is that the employees making these demands are mediocre at best. I rarely see talented developers doing this because they're too busy working.
> I rarely see talented developers doing this because they're too busy working.
I love the privilege on display here. You can ignore racial inequality issues because "they are too distracting," meanwhile I have to wake up each morning, read yet another one of my brothers and sisters has been killed by police, and I still have to run my business. Your mediocrity exist in your complacently to the status-quo. On a daily basis we innovate, build, ship, and push tech more than you could ever hope -- and we don't need to ban "political discussions" at work.
If a business chooses to condemn something without backing up that solidarity with meaningful resources and capital, they should be criticized.
Roughly 3/4 of people killed by police in the US are not one of your "brothers and sisters" if by "brothers and sisters" you are referring to humans who share your melanin content and location of ancestral origin (of course all humans are descended from African humans, but to suit the purposes of demagogues, we can ignore that and just stop at the arbitrary point in lineage where we can maximize division to reap power).
As you read this, it is extremely likely that you cant name a single one of the non-black people killed by police last year, can you? Of course not. Or even in the last 5 years, can you? There are 3 times as many of these people as the group you are ethnocentrically focused on.
Let's also talk about the "sisters" aspect. Statistically, women killed by police are minimal. The referenced website, run by activists, removed the filter for women, but you can download the data yourself to see that it's a minimal amount.
Based on the logic of this movement created by people who don't understand basic stats, the discrepancy between men and women must mean that police are systemically sexist against men, right? Because only the outcome matters, and all explanations except bigotry must be ignored.
A big difference these days is that when a non-black person is wrongfully shot by police, the complete lack of national media coverage allows the police to get off scot free.
See Daniel Shaver, who was recorded on camera being executed, unarmed in his underwear, begging for his life, by a psycho cop.
Unlike Chauvin, said psycho cop was exonerated and dismissed with a full pension, as if he honorable retired. Where were you and BLM? Nowhere, because it's a bigoted, ethnocentric movement designed to divide rather than unite.
You should ask yourself why you used the phrase "brothers and sisters" about people who share your ethnnicity, and why you don't use it for all humans, like I do. Ask yourself if you've been sucked into the precursor to pure racism, ethnocentrism. Ask yourself if you've allowed yourself to be misinformed by media designed to monetize your confirmation bias, rather than inform you.
This is a very naive view. Black people are responsible for higher share of murders, for example, than their share of population. We should look at the frequency of interactions with the police, not at the population shares.
I don’t have data to link to but I’m almost certain that if men and women are 50/50 then crime, or police interactions, are more like 80/20. Add onto that math that males have a higher level of aggression and physical ability to pose a threat and I feel the majority of your delta is explained.
Just knowing the percentage of men owning guns is way higher than women owning guns would change your perceived threat level based on sex.
He seems like a good kid, and very smart. Homeless as a teen, white mom kicked out as a teen due to dating a black man, clearly unstable upbringing which is brutal for any kid.
Taught himself how to code at the library.
He was a recipient of the Thiel Fellowship. You get $100,000 for 2 years of living expenses and you get to work on whatever.
Unfortunately he doesn't seem to blog about that and instead focuses on the time a cop forced his head into a steering wheel because he reached in his pocket.
The human mind gravitates towards the negative, probably due to evolutionary pressures.
The US is such a racist place that a white dude who is a well-known Republican gave him $100,000 to do whatever for 2 years but he ignores that and focuses on the negative experiences in his life with the minority of whites who are bigots, ignoring the kindness he clearly must have come across.
I can relate because I had a similar background to him in the sense where I had a very poor and also drug addicted mother who was in and out of homeless shelters. Eventually when my father was able to locate me I got to have a somewhat normal life compared to that, although we were technically below poverty line income wise.
I don't think he ever got that lucky and I can't imagine what he's been through. He seems to have done great things already. I wish him well, and hope he learns to recognize how fortunate he has been in other ways. If being given 100 grand to do whatever for 2 years isn't privilege, then I don't know what is.
Edit:
Importantly, I forgot to add that he CLEARLY capitalized on that fellowship. He's created a pretty badass startup that leverage video/data streaming to allow playing of console/pc games on iOS/Android/etc. Personally of note for me, his startup created a grpc-like serialization format (bebop) that I looked at months ago for a project I was working on. The lesson/reminder for me is that behind every post on the internet is a human being who I probably have a ton in common with. Plus, anyone who buys an old Camaro and fixes it up themselves is automatically relegated to a higher status in my embarrassingly country boy worldview, lol.
Just because you're passive aggressive doesn't mean I am. I meant what I said and there was no insinuation at all. I don't compliment people's software lightly. I would advise you to take your negative filter off.
>Just because you're passive aggressive doesn't mean I am.
No, it's what you wrote that means you're passive aggressive.
>Unfortunately he doesn't seem to blog about that and instead focuses on the time a cop forced his head into a steering wheel because he reached in his pocket.
>The human mind gravitates towards the negative, probably due to evolutionary pressures.
>The US is such a racist place that a white dude who is a well-known Republican gave him $100,000 to do whatever for 2 years but he ignores that and focuses on the negative experiences in his life
>I wish him well, and hope he learns to recognize how fortunate he has been in other ways. If being given 100 grand to do whatever for 2 years isn't privilege, then I don't know what is.
This is the most condescending thing I've read in a while, and clearly a backhanded compliment.
I read Mr. Sampson's blog, and I literally got tears in my eyes. I regretted engaging with him in the way I did, but HN doesn't let me delete posts. It was also too late to edit them.
He and I had something in common, and it's just extremely rare to encounter fellow coders who spent some part of their childhood in "the system" (shelters, foster care, etc) like I did. I've also seen hardcore racists who disown their children for dating a person of color. I even tried to dissuade a man (he was a boss on a construction site i worked at) one time from doing this to his daughter. The hatred in his heart was so deep that it was like talking to a wall.
I saw a commenter continuing to engage, and I wanted to express my emotions I felt after reading his blog. I understand the anger too. I remembered, especially in my mid to late 20s, having the suppressed memories/emotions come back and fuck up my head, and often consume me. It was an attempt to relate and process, and yes, a reminder that these negative memories cause us to forget about being grateful for the good things and good people we encounter on a daily basis. The dehumanization of people who disagree with us, is bad, and I'm not pretending I'm not part of the problem, including some asshole things I said in this thread, which I regret.
Based on your outright hostility and strong political beliefs (you clearly have politics incorporated into your identity), I doubt you'll believe my explanation, but I'm writing this in the off-chance that Mr. Sampson sees this. He's embarked on a difficult path with his startup, and I sincerely wish him well. That's it.
This is better written and less condescending than your original write-up, except for your last childish insult here which you just couldn't resist making. Whatever, I'll take it. Cheers.
Please don't lie and spread hateful rhetoric like the idea that BLM is "bigoted" (against whom, the police?). BLM activists actually were involved in a lot of the Daniel Shaver activism. It is a travesty that the cop that killed him wasn't held accountable, but trying to blame the BLM movement for that when then, and now, they're actively trying to make changes to that system, in ways that are helpful to people of all races, makes me think you're being driven by an irrational hate and fear of the BLM movement.
> ethnocentrism
This word doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. "Ethnocentrism" is an antonym of cultural relativism, which I guess could be seen as a sort of supremacy ideology, but not in the way you seem to be using it.
> Based on the logic of this movement created by people who don't understand basic stats, the discrepancy between men and women must mean that police are systemically sexist against men, right? Because only the outcome matters, and all explanations except bigotry must be ignored.
Certainly there are ways that society fails men, yes. It frames them as more violent and dangerous, and because of this I would indeed expect that (and the stats back up) that men are killed, by police disproportionately compared to women, basically no matter how you measure.
> See Daniel Shaver, who was recorded on camera being executed, unarmed in his underwear, begging for his life, by a psycho cop.
Literally the only substantial voice that stood up and went to bat for Daniel Shaver was BLM. You're right, police violence is far from isolated to Black people. Most BLM activists would agree that stopping police violence has multi-racial benefits!
Opinion articles and FB posts, none of which back up GP's "literally the only substantial voice" claim... So you couldn't find anything, thanks for making my point for me.
Again, where is any official BlackLivesMatter material on Daniel Shaver?
First off it's been over seven years, it's not hard to understand that black lives matter is a decentralized movement that is not centrally represented.
The website is not the movement.
Second, both of those "opinion pieces" have references to high profile black lives matter activists (deray, shaun king, etc) speaking out about Daniel Shaver, so that's about as official as you're going to get.
Third, that "facebook post" documents an actual event organized by the family of Daniel Shaver, thanking the local blm chapter for their support.
If you have a more substantial voice that has done more than blm in bringing attention to this issue in a productive way, feel free to bring that forward.
>it's not hard to understand that black lives matter is a decentralized movement that is not centrally represented.
There are official non-profit organizations that represent the decentralized groups, and you can't find anything from there, which proves my point.
>Second, both of those "opinion pieces" have references to high profile black lives matter activists (deray, shaun king
AHAHAHAHA I needed my lunchtime laugh. Talcum X, AHAHAHAHA!
>Third, that "facebook post" documents an actual event organized by the family of Daniel Shaver, thanking the local blm chapter for their support.
Can't see where it says any of that. Not that it matters, a FB post proves nothing of the GP's claim. This is Trump supporter-level reaching: "LOOK AT THIS FB PHOTO AS PROOF!"
>If you have a more substantial voice that has done more than blm in bringing attention to this issue in a productive way, feel free to bring that forward.
No, you make the claim, you supply evidence that supports that claim. Welcome to the Internet.
>Nobody gives a shit about those non-profit organizations that "represent" the decentralized groups.
Everybody that's donated to BLM does, as do the community organizers that leverage these groups, and the media and news they generate, etc.
>You've had plenty of time to learn this.
IMAX-level projection on not getting it. It's apparent you don't understand the basic concepts.
>I provided evidence
No you didn't. You provided nothing. I'll ask again: find me some official collateral which back up GP's "literally the only substantial voice" claim.
>Seems to me you have a bone to pick about the "official" blm non-profits and can't seem to approach this subject rationally.
You have this backwards. The only logical and rational way to back up this claim is to post proof of it. "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
> meanwhile I have to wake up each morning, read yet another one of my brothers and sisters has been killed…
Unless they have the same parents, they are not your brothers and sisters more than OP is. Imagine an us-vs-then based on skin color is extremely racist and should be criticized.
I believe there is a lot of ground between "companies ought to issue every statement demanded by any employee" and "companies ought to explicitly prohibit any workplace discussion about anything that can remotely be considered political."
This ignores the fact that BLM affiliated groups are far more than race focused, and wrap in huge chunks of neo Marxist and post modernist ideology, such as calling for dissolution of nuclear families as the core social unit.
BLM and their cohorts were never elected to be representatives of black Americans. The default assumption of upper middle class whites who grew up in segregated suburbs is that they must be representative and most black Americans share their very radical views. I can assure you they do not and opinion polls show this.
I spent a few years in foster care and the best family I was in was a black family in Virginia where the head of household was a police officer and his wife was a public defender in a neighboring county. They and most of their church congregation absolutely despise black lives matter the organization, not the message obviously.
The organization gave itself that name to deliberately overload a moral message with their off-putting, alien, and radical ideology.
Your comment is proof that this strategy worked because if I disagree with any single element of the organization and therefore don't donate, according to your comment I am no longer morally correct and must not think that black lives matter. It's a simplistic and moralistic take evidence by your absolute moral certainty.
> A statement was issue condemning what happened and racism. They were not satisfied with this and demanded that the exact words black lives matter be used and also that a donation to the BLM organization be made.
It's weird that hold this case up as an example of unreasonable behavior on the employees part when in actuality their requests are extremely normal and reasonable.
Giving money yourself is one thing, or asking about a company match even. Asking that your company or anybody give their money towards any cause you care about is unreasonable.
In the absence of any specific connection to your business, there are plenty of worthy causes (race inequalities, but also gender inequalities, world hunger, ...) and you can't demand that your company (or any company) actively contribute to all of them lest they be called out for being anti-X.
The fact that you start here by assuming the OP has a nefarious plan simply bec you disagree with him politically is the entire issue. You’re willing to believe him when he says what he believes but you won’t believe for the part that you find distasteful. That’s some major mental gymnastics.
Please show me where I'm assuming a nefarious plan. Putting words in my mouth or thoughts into my my head is doing the very thing that you pretend to condemn here.
Your assertions don’t really stack up with the known facts of the situation.
It seems that there was at the very least one instance of behavior that employees perceived as outwardly racist (the names list) and were seeking to address issues surrounding that behavior.
On the outside, it’s hard to know much more about the details, but it also would appear that employees took issue with other somewhat minor slights that may have amounted to a pattern of behavior, in particular relating to someone with a lot of authority at base camp, who was then given a pass under the guise of political differences.
I think my assertions stack up pretty well with the facts.
The names list hasn't been clearly established as racist. If you have 10 times the European names as you have Asian names, is it racist against Asians, or were there "funny" names in all groups?
The perception of racism is not necessarily racism. That is precisely the point that is being argued. The claim of white supremacy does not mean that an organization is white supremacist. Big claims need big evidence. I haven't seen it.
Minor slights happen. They are inevitable in daily life no matter what your race, gender, sexual orientation or other identity. If you use minor slights to create an uproar in the context of your job, you are a bad employee who should be fired. Tying minor slights to genocide is one way of creating an uproar.
Singer had power and seniority at Basecamp. He once linked to a Breitbart page. While I differ with Breitbart on most issues, I do not see that as prima facie evidence that Singer is white supremacist or racist.
Just because Singer is a white male with authority does not make him, by definition, a white supremacist or a racist.
And if the only cure for that kind of "white supremacy" is replacing all the white males with any power or authority with people of other identities, then I'm opposed to that "cure," because it is a racist and discriminatory cure based on false generalizations about genders and racial groups.
Your assertion was that these people cannot accept race neutral, they’ll only accept anti racism.
With that framing, the perception of whether the list was racist does matter as it explains their motivation. Because they did perceive the list to be racist, it’s just not the case that they were taking issue with the idea of being race neutral.
Second, you are jumping to wild conclusions about what they were asking for. At no point did anyone say that “all white males with any power or authority” must be replaced. If that were true, it would stand to reason that they’d aim their ire at the entire leadership structure itself rather than on the one individual. Your blanket assertion may have some grounding in your personal experiences, but it is overly broad in this instance.
Finally, while the equivalence between minor slights and genocide has been made, that was not the reason why I brought it up. The reason why I mention minor slights is that, while they may be minor in isolation, when taken in context together they can reveal a pattern of behavior that is hard to explain to those on the outside, and thus is difficult to perceive to us as observers. In this instance it seemed that employees wanted to shave a forum to address this and were shut down.
> With that framing, the perception of whether the list was racist does matter as it explains their motivation.
I don't think we know their true motivation. Anyone can claim to perceive something as racist. We cannot control their sense of offense. The act they claim to be racist may or may not be racist.
But what advocates of critical race theory have found is that, by claiming that something is racist, they can bring pressure on their employers.
That is precisely what happened here. Basecamp is now under tremendous pressure. Plenty of ire has been focused on the co-founders as well as Singer. Singer has quit, though we don't know the facts of the case. Accusations of racism are fatal to one's career, whether or not they have a basis in fact.
Another word for "revealed pattern" is "narrative." Many narratives can be told about the same set of facts. And many of those narratives are deeply subjective, or driven by ideology.
I could take many minor actions by Jane Yang and others at Basecamp and interpret them as a power grab.
To be clear, I know that some people and companies do act in racist ways. Such behavior is illegal and should be punished. But the evidentiary bar to establish that is high. That bar has not yet been met here.
In this case, we have very serious accusations and very little evidence, evidence that can be interpreted in several ways. But Basecamp and Singer have already suffered serious consequences, and the claims have been aired publicly.
So they were able to create a scandal without going through the effort of proving anything.
You claim not to know their true motivation, yet your entire argument relies on the assumption that they had malicious intent. You also note that “the act they claim to be racist may or may not be racist” and yet it is clear that you have assumed that it is not throughout your post.
And this is the crux of the issue. Ones entire interpretation of these issues relies on whether or not one believes racism exists as a structural problem or not. Opponents reduce this down to a simple difference of opinion, but if you see that the world treats certain groups differently than others, it is not mere difference of opinion, there are real, tangible consequences that go along with that disagreement.
The thing that you get wrong, that so many people get wrong on all sides of this, is that the issue at hand here isn’t about whether Singer is himself a racist person. When people speak of “white supremacy” refers to a structural system within society that treats people differently on the basis of their race, in a hierarchy that places white people at the top. It’s not a matter of individual intent, but the culmination of ways that people act differently towards each other that nets out to place people in different positions within society.
I think it’s reasonable to disagree on how you go about remedying that situation, but the assertion that “people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race” shouldn’t be that controversial of a statement.
> You claim not to know their true motivation, yet your entire argument relies on the assumption that they had malicious intent. You also note that “the act they claim to be racist may or may not be racist” and yet it is clear that you have assumed that it is not throughout your post.
The person(s) that attacked Singer used social justice activist techniques, claim of and demand for denouncing "white supremacy" in order to reduce a viewpoint opponents moral authority, where "white supremacy" uses the social justice unstated redefinition of the colloquial term to mean "policy or habitual behavior that could perpetrate outcomes not in alignment with social justice dogma".
This activist technique is a kafka trap with no good answer. Keeping that in mind its pretty clear where the accuser comes from.
As a side-note: a discussion/debate between viewpoint opponent break down if serious accusation are made without evidence, and a healthy discussion and work environment need to exclude such bad actors. Kudos to basecamp and coinbase for adopting policies that discourage such behavior.
Just to clear things up, do you agree or disagree with my previous statement that “ people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race”? Further that white people have historically been placed at the top of a hierarchy by society at large, above other groups?
If you agree with both of those statements, do you believe white peoples are still given a higher place in society? Do you believe that to no longer be the case?
> Just to clear things up, do you agree or disagree with my previous statement that “ people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race”? Further that white people have historically been placed at the top of a hierarchy by society at large, above other groups?
You are asking a question positioned using very low-fidelity and poorly scoped social justice dogma.
With Nigerians topping educaction and income stats clearly low-fidelity race characteristics is not a sufficient predictor of outcome. Likewise, asian americans have the highest median income so being majority does not predict the best outcome.
In addition to this, official identity based government and company policies create asymmetry in official hiring as well as promotion policies that favor BIPOC and women.
What does seem like a great predictor is being born into a family-focused culture where kids education is extremely important. This is a commonality between sub-cultures that do well, and skin color is no great predictor for culture. Some of the sub-cultures that does the worst have high rates of single parenting, including sub-cultures of white culture, and single parenting is also a great predictor of lower household income.
I took it as a given that we could agree that there was an explicit system of racial hierarchy in the United States.
Call that social justice dogma if you want, but I’d consider it an objective fact.
Edit: because it seems to be unclear. The word “was” was in reference to the past. It’s an objective fact that there _was_ an explicit system of racial hierarchy in the United States.
> I took it as a given that we could agree that there was an explicit system of racial hierarchy in the United States.
When you think it's explicit instead of implicit you are in a minority even amongst social justice adherents. Social justice started focusing on "implicit" bias and racism because the instances of explicit racism in the 2000s were not numerous enough to support its activist objective of tearing down the system and replacing it.
The whole concept of "systemic oppression" is based around this realization, where social justice argue that capitalism fool people into being happy and content so that they don't oppose an implicitly oppressive system that traps them in a false reality.
> Call that social justice dogma if you want, but I’d consider it an objective fact.
The examples in my previous message show that it's neither descriptive nor factual.
Social justice prescribe a totalizing worldview that use an every-increasing set of politically motivated identity groups to further an activist objective. The objective is to tear down the system and the promise is a utopia once everyone agrees with the utopic vision.
You’re arguing against a straw man, or at best an extreme minority viewpoint.
Given the history of the United States, wherein there existed both legal and extralegal forms of racial discrimination, the primary assertion is that while the obvious forms of racial discrimination have been abolished, there continue be forms of systematic racial discrimination. These people assert that this is a bad thing and it should be corrected. This is not about bringing about a utopia, but about righting a wrong.
None of this is “totalizing”. Indeed, even in the past, during slavery and Jim Crow, you had examples of successful black people and other POC (Web Debois, Fredrick Douglass). The argument is simply that POC face barriers that white people simply don’t face, not that those barriers are impossible to overcome.
Social justice is totalizing as an ideology, I was not referring to past racial discrimination.
In social justice activism "racism" is redefined to mean "inequitable outcomes". So of cause with this change of definition you can say the "group" experience racism when you really just mean that one group does better than another. DEI is the prescribed social justice solution, ignoring how the equity doctrine has destroyed every society it touched.
If you use the colloqial definition of racism then affirmative action, diversity quotas, DEI preferential hiring&promotion are all widespread policies that discriminate against white people based upon their race. DEI programs also use negative racial profiling and stereotyping. The claim that white people do not experience racism is therefore objectively wrong.
So social justice is arguing for explicit racist policies to fix "implicit racism", which really means "equitable outcomes"
I have to reiterate that you are arguing against a straw man.
The notion that DEI advocates have redefined racism to mean “inequitable outcomes” is a framing that has been constructed by conservatives and IDW types, but it is _not_ what DEI is about.
DEI is about what _explains_ the inequitable outcomes.
Given the history of western societies and the United States in particular, it is reasonable to assert that there should be a burden of proof to show that there are no longer racial privileges rather than the converse. Especially when the same hierarchy is displayed when looking at patterns of racial inequalities today. Further, there is significant scholarship that draws direct lines between things like redlining, housing convenants, and sentencing disparities and those same racial inequalities.
There are really only two classes of descriptions that can explain such disparities.
1. All people are inherently equally capable regardless of racial categorization, the disparities we observe at due to barriers placed in front of disadvantaged groups.
Or
2. Some groups are more capable of others, either due to biological or cultural factors.
2 has played out throughout the history of European colonization in different forms, both as a “scientific” practice and through cultural chauvinism. Both are general regarded as white supremacy, because that’s a fairly appropriate label.
One place I do agree with you however is here:
“The claim that white people don’t experience racism is objectively wrong”
The social justice side actually agrees with you and has just started an unhelpful fight over semantics. Whether you want to call is “racism” or “prejudice” it’s not like there is anything special about white people that makes it impossible to discrimination against them. That does differ, though, from structural level discrimination.
> The notion that DEI advocates have redefined racism to mean “inequitable outcomes” is a framing that has been constructed by conservatives and IDW types, but it is _not_ what DEI is about.
The second term of the social justice prescribed D(iversity)E(quity)I(nclusion) solution, equity, literally means redistribution of outcomes.
> The social justice side actually agrees with you and has just started an unhelpful fight over semantics. Whether you want to call is “racism” or “prejudice” it’s not like there is anything special about white people that makes it impossible to discrimination against them. That does differ, though, from structural level discrimination.
How are DEI programs, affirmative action and diversity quotas for hiring&promotion not structural level discrimination? These are policies and laws pushed by the government and corporations.
> The notion that DEI advocates have redefined racism to mean “inequitable outcomes” is a framing that has been constructed by conservatives and IDW types, but it is _not_ what DEI is about.
> DEI is about what _explains_ the inequitable outcomes.
There are more than 3 possible explanations. The most likely one is that your categories, race, are not well fitted to what you are trying to explain. For instance, Nigerians do incredibly well and are considered black and most of them came here not rich.
You are also comparing over timeframes that don't make sense. The america of today is not even comprised of the same populations, and the people that lived these injustices died a looong time ago. As recent as in 1950 89.3% were white with most of the remainder black. Today 60% white, 18.5% hispanic, 12.5% black, 5.8% Asian, 2.3% multirace, and 0.9% other.
Most wealth and status is also currently not gained through inheritance. Most get high status through education and wealth through work. This shows how bad it is that social justice activists push racial discrimination where status and wealth is currently gained through individual merit.
> You are comparing over timeframes that don't make sense. The america of today is not even comprised of the same populations, and the people that lived these injustices died a looong time ago.
The children that integrated schools in the south are still very much alive, and aren’t even that old [1].
“Hispanic” wasn’t even a category in the census until 1970 (they were here, they just weren’t counted). [2] While there has been significant Asian and Latin American immigration in the interim, the stats you cite aren’t comparable due to differences in collection criteria.
> How are DEI programs, affirmative action and diversity quotas for hiring&promotion not structural level discrimination? These are policies and laws pushed by the government and corporations.
The government isn’t allowed to have racial quotas [3]. But I would cede that you make an important point here, that the proposed remedy mirrors the problem that is being brought up. I am not here to argue the virtues of such programs. There is a difference between identifying that a problem exists and agreeing with a proposed solution. My understanding is that you don’t agree that there is a problem, and that is the extent of my concern.
> Most wealth and status is also currently not gained through inheritance. Most get high status through education and wealth through work. This shows how bad it is that social justice activists push racial discrimination where status and wealth is currently gained.
This is a red herring, no one is arguing against education and work. Conservatives just want people to focus on those things in lieu of addressing racial discrimination. Also, treating inheritance as though it’s insignificant is a bit odd… 35 to 45 percent[4] may not be a majority, but it’s hugely significant.
> The children that integrated schools in the south are still very much alive, and aren’t even that old [1].
The supreme court ruling that ended school segregation in public education was in 1954. On the other hand the people classified as white as well as asian experience racial discrimination by DEI education and company initiatives right here right now.
> “Hispanic” wasn’t even a category in the census until 1970 (they were here, they just weren’t counted). [2] While there has been significant Asian and Latin American immigration in the interim, the stats you cite aren’t comparable due to differences in collection criteria.
This is as far as I can tell an admittance that you are making comparisons over timescales that does not make any sense.
> This is a red herring, no one is arguing against education and work. Conservatives just want people to focus on those things in lieu of addressing racial discrimination. Also, treating inheritance as though it’s insignificant is a bit odd… 35 to 45 percent[4] may not be a majority, but it’s hugely significant.
The social justice prescribed DEI solution argues for racial discrimination in access to education and promition&hiring. So the outcome-focused thinking of activists are pushing racial discrimination which is objectively not a way to reduce racism.
For the majority that get wealth through educational and work merit being racially discriminated against in those spheres cause harm. Even for people with inherited wealth, how many would still have any wealth if they weren't also successful at education and work?
> Even for people with inherited wealth, how many would still have any wealth if they weren't also successful at education and work?
As long as they have basic financial literacy around how to invest, education and work would both be unnecessary. It would be extremely easy to maintain their wealth.
> This is as far as I can tell an admittance that you are making comparisons over timescales that does not make any sense.
“Census data on race isn’t comparable over long time scale because of major methodological updates to data collection” => your statement is a huge logical leap.
> The supreme court ruling that ended school segregation in public education was in 1954. On the other hand the people classified as white as well as asian experience racial discrimination by DEI education and company initiatives right here right now.
And you are aware that school segregation did not, in fact, end in 1954, as I’m sure you read the article I posted on ruby bridges. It took decades to integrate schools, and in many ways they never were because of the way school district boundaries align with segregated housing.
DEI initiatives rarely advance strict racial quotas or thumb on the scale affirmative action policies. Indeed, the whole impetus for this discussion, basecamp, was an instance where people were bothered by specific behaviors they felt were discriminatory. As I’ve stated multiple times, I take no issue with you disagreeing with a specific set of policies pushed by DEI initiatives, but that is different from denying the existence of racial discrimination against BIPOC. The existence of policies that discriminate against one group does not preclude the existence of discrimination against another.
> As I’ve stated multiple times, I take no issue with you disagreeing with a specific set of policies pushed by DEI initiatives, but that is different from denying the existence of racial discrimination against BIPOC.
You are arguing that somehow implicit racism is stronger than explicit racism the social justice DEI solution furthers.
You also argue that on whole systemic racism through policy and habitual behavior benefit the whites that experience explicit systemic discrimination furthered by widespread DEI policies.
This is just not a very strong claim.
> As long as they have basic financial literacy around how to invest, education and work would both be unnecessary. It would be extremely easy to maintain their wealth.
The median pre-tax median inheritance is according to Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) $69,000 [1] (the average was $707,291, indicating a small percentage get a much higher inheritance). So 50% of people that inherit get $69k or less, which is not amount that sets you up to live off that asset.
Any anticipated inheritance is also commonly reduced by estate taxes, attorney’s fees, funeral expenses, probate costs, and paying off the deceased’s debts. Having to share the remaining money with siblings, grandchildren, charities, and any other individuals or organizations in a parent’s will could further reduce a child’s take. And a parent who has remarried might leave assets to a new spouse, diminishing or eliminating what children expected to receive.
> DEI initiatives rarely advance strict racial quotas or thumb on the scale affirmative action policies.
This is not accurate. DEI initiatives seeks to increase diversity in hiring by changing the hiring criteria to hire more of favored identities (inclusion) while promoting favored identities to achieve equal outcome (equity).
But DEI does not apply positively to black viewpoint opponents of social justice such as libertarians and conservatives. They are by social justice seen as not exhibiting an "authentic black lived experience". This activism is a terrible denial of individuality based upon race.
“> As I’ve stated multiple times, I take no issue with you disagreeing with a specific set of policies pushed by DEI initiatives, but that is different from denying the existence of racial discrimination against BIPOC.
You are arguing that somehow implicit racism is stronger than explicit racism the social justice DEI solution furthers.”
An honest rewriting of my quoted text using your terminology would be something more like this:
“It would be reasonable to say that the explicitly racist policies advocated by DEI as a remedy are not a proper solution to the problem, but that is different than claiming that implicit racism doesn’t exist”
And yet you’re here claiming that I argue the opposite. At this point you are just arguing in bad faith.
To restate, As clearly as is possible. If you want to assert “while structural racism exists, the policies prescriptions advanced by overzealous and self aggrandizing DEI groups cross the line” I’m happy to cede the debate.
> But DEI does not apply positively to black viewpoint opponents of social justice such as libertarians and conservatives. They are by social justice seen as not exhibiting an "authentic black lived experience". This activism is a terrible denial of individuality based upon race.
You can easily accept that they have a viewpoint while also noting that the vast majority of black people don't identify as libertarian nor as conservatives. Why do you think that a minority should be able to invalidate the majority’s opinion? Because it agrees with your viewpoint?
> The median pre-tax median inheritance is according to Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) $69,000 [1] (the average was $707,291, indicating a small percentage get a much higher inheritance). So 50% of people that inherit get $69k or less, which is not amount that sets you up to live off that asset.
The median inheritor doesn’t become wealthy through inheritance, sure, but they also don’t become wealthy through work & education either. Wealth is a heavily skewed distribution, so it makes little sense to talk about the median when 10% of the country owns something like 3/4th of the wealth. Assuming we are talking about someone who receives a non trivial amount of wealth through inheritance (ie enough for them to be actually wealthy, not 67k) then it is easy to maintain that wealth without work.
> An honest rewriting of my quoted text using your terminology would be something more like this: “It would be reasonable to say that the explicitly racist policies advocated by DEI as a remedy are not a proper solution to the problem, but that is different than claiming that implicit racism doesn’t exist”
Systemic racism just means inequitable outcomes, implicit racism is an "invisible" enemy invented to justify an equity agenda not supported by explicit racism, so I do not see how one can embrace this without embracing DEI as a solution. If social justice used the colloquial definition of racism, which it doesn't, it would be ridiculous to claim that someone is inevitably and exclusively racist because they are white.
I am not saying we shouldn't iterate using the liberal system where corruption happens. However, a committee prescribing outcomes based upon an every-expanding set of politically motivated identity categories is way more prone to corruption because the power is unchecked. A core principle of the liberal system is to check power as it assumed people are and will be imperfect.
> You can easily accept that they have a viewpoint while also noting that the vast majority of black people don't identify as libertarian nor as conservatives. Why do you think that a minority should be able to invalidate the majority’s opinion? Because it agrees with your viewpoint?
Because telling someone that they don't have "an authentic black lived experience" if it doesn't fit an activist mold is both racist and harmful to people listening to each other to find better solutions. It is simply bad process to prescribe a solution while denying any negative feedback, but that is exactly what social justice and DEI does.
> The median inheritor doesn’t become wealthy through inheritance, sure, but they also don’t become wealthy through work & education either. Wealth is a heavily skewed distribution, so it makes little sense to talk about the median when 10% of the country owns something like 3/4th of the wealth. Assuming we are talking about someone who receives a non trivial amount of wealth through inheritance (ie enough for them to be actually wealthy, not 67k) then it is easy to maintain that wealth without work.
I do agree that concentration of wealth is an issue, covid in particular has transferred almost 4 trillion from the middle class to the oligarchs. That said, historically countries that adopted the equity agenda have not fared any better.
However, if only a percentage around 10% rely on inheritance for status&wealth while the rest rely on education and work then forcing equal outcomes through racist policies in education as well as hiring&promotion are gross miscarriages of justice.
> Ones entire interpretation of these issues relies on whether or not one believes racism exists as a structural problem or not.
I think you are right that that belief shapes how we interpret these issues. By racism as a structural problem, I assume you mean this:
> “people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race”
Society is not an actor. It is a collection of people, and the people are actors. Some of them are racist, and some are not.
I do not believe that every situation is permeated with structural racism that must be corrected, but I suspect that people who believe in structural racism tend to find it everywhere and use it to justify the changes they propose.
I don't assume that they had malicious intent. But I do think that they perceive situations through a distorted lens, which often leads to behavior that is harmful to the organizations where they work.
I think that Basecamp and Singer and most organizations and individuals deserve an assumption of innocence.
Racism has to be proven. Accusations must be backed up with evidence. And the burden of evidence is on the accusers. I think critical race theorists start with the assumption that racism is shaping the interaction.
It is not enough to say that structural racism exists and therefore we should believe that it shaped the behavior of people at Basecamp. You have to prove it case by case. Simply claiming structural racism does not justify enormous change.
Statistically, people of different races experience different outcomes in the US on average. But there is a huge standard deviation in those outcomes by race or gender; that is, any given individual may be doing relatively well or poorly relative to the average.
And I think that applying assertions about society and societal ills to individuals, their actions and specific situations is often misguided, because they may deviate wildly from the average.
But that is exactly what critical race theorists tend to do. They treat individuals as representatives of a larger social trend. A male represents the patriarchy. A Caucasian represents white supremacy.
But attacking an individual to remedy a larger statistical discrepancy is in itself a form of injustice. Especially when we diagnose the supposed cause of that discrepancy with vagueness, as a culmination of ways that society acts.
That is not enough to convince me of the claims being made against Singer and Basecamp, or of the rightness of the Basecamp employees in rebellion.
You’ve made it clear that there is no evidence that can be brought forward that would get you to accept that there exists diffuse but consistent behavior that creates structural hierarchies within society.
I think that is possible and that one could prove it statistically.
I do not think that, just because such behavior can be shown to exist on average, that is necessarily exists in specific situations. If you want to apply an anti-racist remedy in a specific situation, you should have to prove racism in that situation.
And I think that the remedies to specific situations will differ a great deal, depending on unique variables. That is, if a person proposes a remedy, they should show how it will fix the specific problem.
I do not agree with one-size-fits-all remedies that try to fix a social ill by turning a specific company on its head without factual evidence of racism in that company.
The company turned itself on its head by shutting down all discussion on the topic.
I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone was calling for singers job before nor during the meeting. All that happened was that a bunch of employees formed a committee that brought a bunch of issues to the fore. They took issue with singers behavior, and the company responded with “cease all of this discussion or take a buyout” and so they took the buyout.
All this amounted to the company backing up a senior employees behavior reflexively at the expense of lower level employees objections.
> The company turned itself on its head by shutting down all discussion on the topic.
Maybe. Or maybe the company was already turned on its head due to the internal conversation. Such a radical reaction from the founders suggests to me that this was the case.
> I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone was calling for singers job before nor during the meeting.
Accusing someone of racism or white supremacy is effectively calling for them to resign or be fired.
> All that happened was that a bunch of employees formed a committee that brought a bunch of issues to the fore.
Right, but again, we don't know if those issues were valid or not. The "funny names" list is not nearly as damning as they seem to think. Given how much information has leaked to the media, I would assume that the strongest evidence they have of racism would already be public. And I have not seen strong evidence.
> All this amounted to the company backing up a senior employees behavior reflexively at the expense of lower level employees objections.
If "backing up a senior employee's behavior" means allowing him to disagree with others about whether his behavior is racist, especially in the absence of evidence that it is racist, then I think they were right to back him up.
Singer's resignation resulted from the show trial of accusations and media leaks, which is a well known playbook for advocates of social change.
I sincerely appreciate the clarity with which you have made your points and responded to the myriad of replies int his thread. You’ve untangled messy thinking right and left with nuanced statements that cut through confusions.
I would love to talk sometime, if you’re open to it. Send me an email: krschacht at gmail
Yes, and Basecamp has with this improved their organization in this aspect.
Social justice activism divides individuals by unchosen group identities into "oppressors" and "oppressed" which is in direct opposition to acknowledging a persons feelings as well as listening to their viewpoints. Social justice activism has due to this predictably lead to resentment and unnecessary conflict in the workplace.
This is exactly what I thought. None of this story makes much sense on an adult level.
You have a list of customer names that you mock? What kind of amateur, disrespectful operation are you running? Are you building a product or pledging a fraternity?
And how does any of that lead to talking about "White Supremacy". And how does voicing an opinion about such a subject seem like a good idea for the workplace regardless of if you think it exists or not?
For a company that has written a lot of books about how to build companies and cultures, this is...laughable.
> And how does any of that lead to talking about "White Supremacy".
Perhaps one step at a time, over the course of repeated conversations that keep dredging up more and more deep-seated resentments that have probably been festering for years and years, because of a longstanding social convention that we're not supposed to openly talk about these sorts of things at the workplace.
Or perhaps, if it's the kind of company where a list like that could continue to exist for so long, there was enough pressure built up that it was more like a levee breaking.
it’s not just the list, there were known racism issues with their head of product too… they deleted years of internal discussion and asked him to keep his opinions quiet (he deleted his tweets earlier this year around the time the d&i committee started) to avoid dealing with it directly
> Honestly, in this story everyone looks like a big child.
I don't know about "child" but there is a similar vibe here. This also comes through in blog posts and Twitter threads I've seen from some of the people involved. A certain assumption that their own account or opinion should automatically be accepted as default. Arrogance? Petulance? Entitlement? Somewhere in that space.
It shouldn't even be a surprise, really. Even if they were able to overlook political differences, DHH and JF were overwhelmingly likely to hire people who were like themselves in some ways. It's what founders and CEOs have always done, and has often been remarked upon since before they were born. "A fish rots from the head" is one of the less charitable forms. People's high self-image and approach to disagreement or confrontation seems to have been one of the (quite likely unconscious) selection criteria here. After that, a blowup of some sort was only a matter of time.
>These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere.
You may be underestimating the power of modern day PC.
I also think partly this is because being a remote company, these discussions, even with a Web Cam just dont convey the message much. Some of these message could have been in private with different colleague during coffee break or in pantry. So I felt it is also a failure or remote work. Remote doesn't work ALL the time, which is something DHH dont get. And VC are required for many businesses, which is something DHH dont get as well.
Another problem was that most of his political message, I guess you could also argue are glorified ads for Basecamp, attract the same people with similar political views. And many of them were sold into the vision, cult of whatever that might be as Basecamp. And the new policy was felt more like a betrayal of their belief. Hence the huge reaction and backlash that happened.
Hmm... So do you reckon this is just something that happens with age? Or has each generation inadvertantly provided an ideological framework for the next one to strangle it with?
> has each generation inadvertantly provided an ideological framework for the next one to strangle it with?
LOL, that's a hilarious way of putting it, but I think it's more about whether people keep learning and growing as they age or decide that they already know everything they need to.
If you stop learning and growing, you're going to be left behind by the people who don't.
I consider the fundamental issue being a paradox between trusting lessons learned from past experiences and adopting to new circumstances.
When you grow older, you gain more experience, and if you're intelligent, probably gain some wisdom along the way. You either trust that inherently imperfect knowledge, or you throw it away and learn everything anew together with the younger generation.
We're mostly trained to treasure knowledge and experience, even if the errors accumulate and times change.
I think the point the OP is making is that an overt statement such as "White power!!1 Jews will not replace us!!!sixonetikitorches" directly exposes a white supremacist opinion, whereas there are less overt actions that, if analysed thoughtfully, also expose white supremacy.
It is very similar to people who say "I'm not racist, I don't think I'm superior to anyone and the dictionary definition of racism is to assume superiority based on race" (this is more or less a direct quote from Pauline Hanson, an Australian Senator who is wildly racist).
What I have found in discussions with people who I think are racist, but who deny it, is that they have an emphasis on personal agency and personal responsibility. So while they might be able to happily have black friends, they see, for example, disparaties in incarceration rates not as a social problem but as an aggregation of personal failures. If one believes that a particular race is, on average, more likely to commit the types of crime for which one should be incarcerated, and one sees incarceration as an "inferior" way of life, then the logical conclusion is that they are racist.
An interesting thing to note about analysing racism this way is that it can also uncover racist attitudes in the very minority populations who are being discriminated against.
Also "defund the police" is a shorthand that typically means "reduce direct law enforcement funding and instead fund other community engagement programs". Of course we need cops, but we don't necessarily need them all armed to the teeth in riot gear showing up for a drug bust (sub-question: do we really need drug busts at all?), and maybe they're not the best first responders in domestic disputes, and so on. Most people for whom "defund the police" is a catchcry recognise this, because there are very few true anarchists in society (and anarchy is kind of where "left meets right" in the political spectrum anyway, which is why libertarianism is such a dangerous and insidious ideology).
Oddly, several members of the defund movement have said they literally want to defund and abolish the police. It's almost like words mean things?
> If one believes that a particular race is, on average, more likely to commit the types of crime for which one should be incarcerated, and one sees incarceration as an "inferior" way of life, then the logical conclusion is that they are racist.
You can try to argue that crime rates show disproportional racial representation for a bunch of reasons. Claiming anyone who states the facts is racist is wrong.
> Oddly, several members of the defund movement have said they literally want to defund and abolish the police. It's almost like words mean things?
Yes those are the "few anarchists" I was referring to. From what I have seen of people discussing the "defund the police" movement it's about a dramatic reform of law enforcement, including much less emphasis on armed police storming about the place.
> You can try to argue that crime rates show disproportional racial representation for a bunch of reasons. Claiming anyone who states the facts is racist is wrong.
I didn't claim anyone stating the facts is wrong, I made the claim that when people attribute a statistical anomaly like disparity in incarceration rates to an aggregation of personal failures rather than a systemic problem, they are logically being racist (even if they don't see it as such).
One of the BLM co-founders and current directory of the BLM non-profit is one of those "few anarchists" who proposed to outright abolish the police.[1] That article also proposes to abolish prisons, the military, borders, capitalism, and includes phrases such as "U.S. [and its] fabricated borders" and calls to "fight the U.S. state".
If you had told me this was written by some troll to make BLM
look bad then I'd believe you. To be fair, there are some good things in that article too, it's not all bad; it contains some anecdotes worth hearing, but that doesn't follow that the conclusions are also good.
This is also the same person who cited Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong as inspirations, by the way.[2] Yes, really, that Mao. I genuinely thought this was inserted by a vandal on the Wikipedia article when I encountered it last week, but the source pans out.
I mean, people don't just get these "abolish the police" and "BLM is a Marxist organisation" out of thin air. Granted, there is a lot of bad-faith trollism from Tucker Carlson and similar people, but if your message is so confused, easily misunderstood, and your leadership says things in support of the most extreme interpretations then quite frankly, you have no one else to blame but yourself.
The BLM organization and the movement are two different things. You’d be lucky to randomly be able to find a single black person who knows any of the founders of the org or any of their principles except to reduce police brutality.
Yes, and people keep saying this, and people keep being confused by this.
I don't understand why people are so resistant, or even outright hostile, in making the social justice movement (including the sentiments BLM expresses) more effective. If you truly care about social justice then being as effective as possible should be the #1 priority, no?
I don't care much for BLM not because I don't care about their goals, but because I don't think it's very effective for a number of reasons. Yet every time I raise this it's either dismissed like your comment does, or met with a surprising amount of hostility. Aren't conversations on how to best affect these kind of changes super-duper important? It appears not, and it seems BLM has become the goal, rather than the vehicle to get at the goal.
Popular movements almost never are the ones to actually institute policy, only influence it, so there's not really much advantage to finding compromise at the level of activism. It's not BLM or the Defund movements job to write legislation that actually achieves their goals, and there's almost no chance what they argue for won't be watered down anyway.
It's best to think of any popular movement as directional - for sure there are individual people in the Defund movement calling for 100% abolition, and others calling for demilitarization, or redirecting of some funding - as of right now, they want the same thing as far as first steps go. If they're successful in redirecting some funding away from police, the non-abolish crowd will move away from the movement and they'll become increasingly irrelevant when it's 10 anarchists arguing for no police instead of massive protests.
> I don't understand why people are so resistant, or even outright hostile, in making the social justice movement (including the sentiments BLM expresses) more effective. If you truly care about social justice then being as effective as possible should be the #1 priority, no?
Again, you're confusing an organization with the movement. The organization has only minor impact on the actual movement. It's like saying that a group named "Democracy for America" reflected what people in the US believed about Democracy.
> Aren't conversations on how to best affect these kind of changes super-duper important? It appears not, and it seems BLM has become the goal, rather than the vehicle to get at the goal.
I support BLM, but I'm not sure I support the goals of the BLM org. Mostly because I barely know them (I realize I could just go to their webpage and read them). I do know what most people I associate believe BLM means though.
Now this does mean there is a problem in that different people have different interpretations of it. But honestly this is always the case for any type of social movement. There's a base for the support, and then a bunch of splinter ideologies.
Those who think that a group of people are inferior based on racial characteristics (and/or ethnicity ... ie. for some definition of "race" even though the very distinction is pretty tenuous if you get into the biology/genetics of it all).
> Also "defund the police" is a shorthand that typically means "reduce direct law enforcement funding and instead fund other community engagement programs".
"Reform the police" is much more universalist term that people across multiple political spectrums would have gotten behind (and it's still memorable).
Perhaps then the slogan should be closer to "Replace the Police". Something that represents both the dismantling and rebuilding of police forces.
Personally I'm a big fan of requiring a much, much higher standard of training than police have now. Especially when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. The best way to minimise the consequences is to ensure that we have maximised their skill potential with the forms of intervention which have the least risk of permanent consequences.
There's probably a larger group of people that want to see portions of the police budget reallocated than the police disbanded and reformed. There's really not a great term that perfectly captures what everyone wants, but at least some common ground is "less funding", which "defund" is at least close to if you squint.
This is not white supremacy, if anything I would say they believe in "black inferiority on average" since they don't direct this sentiment to other non white races and they don't direct it at black individuals who seems worthy in their eyes.
You can argue such a sentiment is racist if those people thought that blacks will not be able to lift themselves up from the situation they are in, on average. But if they do think personal agency could change it, then what is the racial issue here? They are just pointing the current situation in this specific time, not an inherent problem with the black race.
You could argue their solution of personal agency and responsibility is not going to work, but that is not a race question, it is a general social policy question how to lift people from a dire situation, which I agree, developing personal agency is difficult when you don't even know what you don't know.
In my eyes it is more of a class problem and those calls for personal agency will be directed to anybody who is in a bad situation, not necessarly to blacks. It is because it is very hard for people to imagine the lack of mental ability and skills some people have when they are not brought up in a certain culture or class for that matter.
It seems to me that "withdraw money" has a missing parameter.
If you used "withdraw the money from my account", that would imply all of the money. Of course, any customer service person would still want to confirm that by asking for more information before handing your balance over...
You are right! It can mean these things! But it can also mean other things, and (in my opinion) carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and impactful work of understanding what others mean, not just the official definition of the words they used.
"Defund the police" can sound extreme, or counterintuitive, or downright confusing. But it seems urgently important (to me) to understand why so many Americans feel so strongly that they use such intense language, propose such radical changes, and demand something that doesn't make sense to me.
Clearly, there's something I don't "get". It's infinitely more compelling to me to try to "get it" and understand others' viewpoints, and uninteresting to understand why the words they used don't match a conventional definition.
> carefully parsing definitions distracts from the challenging and impactful work of understanding what others mean, not just the official definition of the words they used.
The onus is on both parties to communicate effectively and find language that removes ambiguity. Unfortunately, I think some degree of sophistry is occurring to use ambiguity as a motte and bailey.
Respectfully, I disagree. There's no onus here at all, on either side—this isn't some intellectual debate with formal rules, this is a struggle to make marginalized voices heard.
Effective communication is nowhere near the same as using transparent / effortless language. "The medium is the message"—phrases like "defund the police" and "Black Lives Matter" arrest the attention in ways that "we should reconsider the financial resources allocated to law enforcement" and "I value the lives of Black Americans as equal to those of White Americans and, moreover, those Black lives have historically been undervalued and oppressed" simply do not (and I can't even make a claim that that's what those phrases mean—you'd have to ask someone, and try to understand what they meant).
The effectiveness of communication is nontrivial. There's a reason for the long history of poetry as a way to communicate emotions, a way that tends to transcend the effectiveness of plain language to convey intense emotion in an intuitive form; and that reason is decidedly not that artful use of language removes ambiguity.
Ambiguity highlights precisely the points at which we fail to understand one another, and point to the most critical opportunities to clarify what we mean to each other.
We're talking about withdrawing funding, not a specific amount (like in your $100 example)
If I withdraw money from my bank account, I still usually have money in my bank account also. If we withdraw funding from a authoritative service that serves a public function but has also been leveraged oppressively, it doesn't mean there is no funding
Check it again next year when the political winds have shifted and you'll find that Merriam-Webster has changed the definition again, like they did last year.
And if enough people use a different definition then the dictionary changes.
That doesn’t mean that I can define words however I like. Since defund has a well and consistently used definition I think it’s going be hard for the connotation to change so that “defund police” means something other than defund police.
Your comment strikes me as disingenuous and willfully obstinate.
disingenuous (adj) giving a false appearance of simple frankness
obstinate (adj) pertinaciously adhering to an opinion
pertinacious (adj) marked by an unyieldingly persistent fixedness (as of opinion, purpose, action) that is often annoyingly perverse in fact or in appearance
It looks like you simply googled those words and copy-pasted the definitions. I can do that, too (using a more credible dictionary vis-a-vis American usage, to boot. Mine’s MW, yours is Oxford, which is very British; we’re discussing an American company):
white supremacy (n) the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races
defund (v) to withdraw funding from (as a government-funded program)
This isn’t a helpful approach. Prescriptivist appeals to the dictionary and dismissal of others’ viewpoints are not ways of listening to the perspectives of others or empathizing with different experiences, and seem to be actively preventing constructive discussion in this case.
> This isn’t a helpful approach. Prescriptivist appeals to the dictionary and dismissal of others’ viewpoints are not ways of listening to the perspectives of others or empathizing with different experiences, and seem to be actively preventing constructive discussion in this case.
Agreed. On the flip side, I think it’s just as unhelpful an approach to co-opt a generally understood word (or phrase) and then (unbeknownst to the majority of peers) expand its definition to capture even mainstream behavior that might be construed as undesirable even if not obviously unacceptable, and then beat the same peers in the head with it when they express confusion at the changed meaning of words (or phrases). It’s a cheap rhetorical trick, and gets us further away from collaboratively solving very real and important problems in a pluralistic society.
I hear you. It can be counterproductive to use a totally unfamiliar jargon, especially if it trips the audience up and limits mutual engagement in favor of linguistic squabbling.
That said, I respectfully disagree that it’s “just as unhelpful.” Pedantry over definitions distracts from the underlying issues, while new and inventive and nonstandard usage of language can spur critical analysis and jolt us out of our familiar understanding.
Telling someone “defund isn’t used that way” shuts down the conversation. Demanding we “defund the police” makes me want to start / pursue / expand the conversation: what the heck do you mean by that?
Edit to add: my response sounds overly academic. Another way to put it could be: language is confusing, and it can be problematic if we make it more confusing. But, sometimes I need to get a bit more confused before I can see things in a new / different light, and language can be an effective tool to achieve that “good confusion”
> Pedantry over definitions distracts from the underlying issues, while new and inventive and nonstandard usage of language can spur critical analysis and jolt us out of our familiar understanding.
I understand that that’s the intention behind this strategy, but in practice it actually comes off as a shock-and-awe guerrilla tactic to argumentation that alienates rather than invite collaboration. Again, if the goal is actually to get people to buy into new ideas, attacking them (which is implicitly what happens when you expansively redefine “white supremacy”) is just not a good strategy.
> Telling someone “defund isn’t used that way” shuts down the conversation.
Right, and it sounds like the goal is to maintain open conversation! Constantly demanding that people use your definitions and argue with you on the terms that you unilaterally set is an awful way to maintain open dialogue/conversation with people that might otherwise be open to changing their minds. Insisting that people simply must accept whatever new rules of engagement is en vogue just exacerbates polarization and mistrust.
> shock-and-awe guerrilla tactic…that alienates rather than invite collaboration
That’s a good point, and I’m not sure I have a good answer to it! I believe rhetorical guerrilla warfare is an intentional and important tactic. My gut tells me part of the goal is precisely to make me and others like me feel uncomfortable: I generally have the freedom to not feel alienated, but that’s not a privilege afforded to vast swaths of our society who are historically disadvantaged. I can only imagine the alienation I would feel as a Black engineer—but as a White engineer, I feel right at home on my team of other White engineers, and alienation is something I can just choose to walk away from. Not so for others…
Still, I know that’s not a satisfying answer / response to your comment. You’re right that feeling alienated doesn’t make me more inclined to have open minded / collaborative discussions, in general. But given the structural imbalances at play, I emotionally feel that the graceful and “right” way for me to engage is by listening despite my discomfort, as a tool for learning the perspectives of others not just theoretically, but experientially.
:shrug: None of this is easy…but it’s important to me to pursue mutual care and understanding with as much good faith as I can muster, even when it’s uncomfortable for me.
The point that I’m trying to make is that the biggest beneficiaries of collaborative problem solving here are the very Black engineers you’re talking about.
Playing rhetorical tricks in an attempt to “make people uncomfortable” just muddies the water since everyone sees what’s going on. At best, nothing changes, and at worst this strategy just sets us back.
As long as we continue down the path of polarization and resentment, the further we stray from solving our problems as we remain in the status quo. In the status quo the biggest loser is the very person that stands to benefit the least from the status quo. From what you’ve told me, you’re probably not going to be the loser there.
Merriam-Webster is not the ultimate authority on the English language. If people start using the word to mean something else, then, ipso facto, that's what it means.
> And conversely, you don’t get to assume that others understand you when you use language in ways that aren’t colloquial.
Yep! It was a failure of all parties involved that the two competing definitions of racism weren't laid out on the table, when people started getting huffy.
> Shared definitions is the bedrock of human communication, and absent that, we’re no better than chimps just grunting past each other.
I will say that from the transcripts (and from the way conversations have been going in this thread), the way this usually starts is that one party unilaterally sets the rules of engagement and more or less demands that others accept those terms, and when the others push back on those rules, we all take a step back and admit “failure of all parties”.
It would be a lot easier for us to collaborate on these problems if we can be honest with ourselves about who the aggressor is, and who’s caught on the defense in these kinds of heated exchanges in workplace debates.
Edit: it's clear from your comment history that you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for. (Actually a lot of the time we don't know, or care, what they're battling for. We care about HN not becoming a flamewar hell site.) If you would please stop doing that and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.
There will be a string of such explosions. Many of them.
Those with historically unassailable, unnamed, and most sensitively, unearned, prerogatives, become understandably if unfortunately upset when this state of affairs is questioned.
While they retain a platform and resources to do so, they lash out.
The details will vary; the attempts at spin and chaff will vary; the root issues are no mystery.
We're in a moment of cultural shift.
Those who perceive themselves rightly as historical "winners" are going to fight "loss" of status, control, hegemony, pick a word.
All the more so, to the extent that they are prone to understanding the world in terms of zero-sum games.
(As others have noted, the Basecamp trashfire has nothing to do with "politics," that's one transparent attempt at spin.)
> "But as much as the conversation about Basecamp’s moves has been framed as “politics,” it seems important to remember that the entire affair began when a third of the company — not all of whom are among the 20 who have departed so far, by the way — volunteered to help the company become more diverse and equitable. It was only when their committee dug a skeleton out of the company closet — that list of names — that Fried and Hansson moved to shut the whole thing down."
I've shared and laughed at funny names in the past, as recently as last year. I can't imagine an official or permanent list such as the one pointed out here.
---
It's really fucking hard to talk about stuff like this online or big groups. I would encourage people and companies to have small, offline discussions and start with humility and empathy as the guiding principles.
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I've typed and deleted all of this three times. Anything I say feels like not enough. People are people.
I feel bad for everyone involved. This story made me realize that working at Basecamp is not something I would want to do in the future, primarily because DHH and Fried are so egotistic.
However, it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned. Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd. I imagine myself working at some of my earlier minimum wage jobs in college and putting forth such a requirement to my managers then. It's a non-sequitur.
When I talk to my family and non-tech non-coasts non-city friends about the sort of political polarization I encounter at my high-tech Seattle job, they often think I'm messing with them, that I'm being facetious or exaggerating. Unfortunately, I'm not.
It's all so tiresome. The increasing politicization of everything, and tech being at the center of it, made me realize I have no interest anymore in climbing the corporate ladder. I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.
Refusing to say it isn’t denying it exists. Those are different things.
If I’m trying to count to 100 and someone says “Prepend, please say that white supremacy exists.” And I respond “I’m busy counting to 100 and will not comply with your wishes.” That doesn’t mean I’m denying that white supremacy exists.
It’s odd you would interpret it that way as it’s illogical.
But he wasn't counting to 100, he was at a company-wide all-hands specifically about political and social speech with tensions revolving race. You can't just erase the entire context of quote and meeting just to call someone's interpretation of that event 'illogical'.
I think we disagree on this. I have worked with and for many great leaders who never “acknowledged white supremacy” so it is definitely possible for me, and others to trust such people.
I’m not arguing semantics as my point is that there are many things more important than acknowledging white supremacy exists. This may not be true for others as it seems it’s super important for some.
But if I’m in the business of counting to 100 (or anything) I can be quite successful without including taking about eliminating white supremacy.
Note, I think that systematic racial inequity is bad and must be eliminated. But I don’t think the most effective way to do that is by talking about it all the time. And I think that I can not have any portion of my workday talking about it. This doesn’t mean I am for white supremacy.
I think, at it’s most basic, I don’t think silence is the same as endorsement. The world isn’t black and white (no pun intended) and everyone isn’t forced to choose sides. And it’s certainly not important to state one’s position over and over and over.
There are certain issues (like this one) where silence has historically been used as a form of endorsement. It is certainly not irrational to perceive it as being an endorsement.
Perhaps not irrational, but incorrect. I’d like to see whatever evidence means silence is a form of endorsement.
It’s hard to know, but I have one data point in my own self in that I really don’t talk much about anything and certainly don’t endorse white supremacy and I actively live my life fighting inequity. Someone saying that I endorse something because I don’t speak about it is incorrect as I know myself better than others do.
Following this logic leads to absurdity. Should people spend their days speaking for or against everything? What about people’s right to privacy?
I mean there’s so many example of how silence=support is illogical, I’m not sure how people can hold this opinion. This assumes that there’s a single set of priorities and white supremacy is near the top for everyone.
It’s also fairly odd in that it assumes that the whole world is in America so that even people in remote countries must make statements against white supremacy lest they endorse it. That’s just silly.
On any topic, only a few thousand or perhaps millions express a position. Does that mean everyone else is against or for? Does silence always equal endorsement? Does it mean opposition?
You haven’t stopped this conversation to call out how you recognize murder is evil and are against it. Does that mean you endorse murder? Isn’t murder important enough to speak out against? I certainly think murder is terrible and am shocked that someone would endorse murder through their silence.
Etc etc etc, there’s a million of these. Not everything has to be a conflict and not everyone owes me an answer. Sometimes I just don’t know and don’t get to know. I should only assume when necessary and using some evidence to support my assumption
I am not talking about silence at all times, but specifically silence at times when someone is given the opportunity to speak up about an issue and chooses not to.
Perhaps the increasing prevalence of "opportunities" to denounce things and endorse political beliefs had something to do with the decision to move away from politics in the office. If Thea opportunities can be freely presented at any time and demand a positive response or invite condemnation, surely you can see how this might be considered wasteful from a business point of view.
Arguments from silence are, by definition, illogical fallacies. There could be any number of reasons why someone might choose to remain silent. It's possible they are endorsing it, but you don't really know without additional statements or context.
If someone asks you “do you denounce white supremacy?”, and you stay silent… many people (myself included) would see that as a form of endorsement. I don’t need any additional context, and I don’t see it as being any kind of logical fallacy.
There could be many reasons for silence, such as not wanting to be bullied into saying something, no matter how true it is. In some situations, that might be the nobler option and could take a lot of courage.
All civilized people condemn ethnic/racial supremacists so frankly if someone asks me if I denounce white supremacy I'm going to ignore it.
My choice not to dignify that question with a response is not an indication that I endorse white supremacists any more than my choice not to dignify a question like "do you believe the earth is round" indicates my belief that the planet is flat.
The word “civilized” is doing a lot of heavy lifting for you there.
White supremacy is still very real in America and throughout the rest of the world. The idea that you’d brush off someone asking about white supremacy in the same way as a flat earth denier is absurd, and says more about your own position of priviledge.
And there it is: because I refuse to repeat the words that the woke orthodoxy demands on command you accuse me of "privilege" despite knowing nothing about me or my belief system.
Oh please, now you see yourself as persecuted by the “woke orthodoxy”.
Do you really deny that you have privilege? You’re both white and male, aren’t you? The way you talk actually says a lot more about you than you’re aware of.
So, do you denounce white supremacy?
If you said yes, what if they followed up with the following questions:
- What have you done to fight it?
- Have you donated to XYZ org?
- How much? Why not more? Surely you could afford it?
- How much time have spent volunteering for causes that fight it?
- How much? Why not more? Surely you could afford it?
If you anticipated this line of questioning would follow, where the person asking the question's intent is to test you, and shame you if you were to fail it, would you still engage with that question?
I get that it's super easy to just claim white supremacy is everywhere, but implicitly the claim is that someone put it there and is perpetuating it. At a company of 58 people, you're pointing at a very small group of people as the ones responsible for all of this supposed white supremacy.
Unless everyone swallows the Kool-Aid and apologizes for being so racist, someone in leadership will eventually have to say, "Actually, this isn't a white supremacist company." Otherwise you've essentially surrendered your company to the "woke" mob.
Due to rising costs, the company decided to outsource some production. The end product was just as good in quality and much cheaper, even after shipping and import taxes.
A few employees were concerned about outsourcing to that specific country and started to discuss and petition the senior executives.
The CEO clamped down hard and said it was a business decision and if anyone didn't like it, they could leave. No politics.
In the end, those employees are still here, but the quality of their work has definitely suffered.
Alternatively, you exhibit the kind of people skills that should be a baseline qualification for a senior leader. You don't draw lines in the sand, you don't internally frame this as an them-vs-me thing, you certainly don't try to give your staff condescending mini-lectures about basic topics in social criticism such as how framing works. Brinksmanship isn't going to lead anywhere good, and someone has to take the first step toward de-escalation. While anyone can theoretically be that person, if you're the ostensible adult in the room, then it's your actual job to put aside your sense of honor and be that someone. So you take a deep breath, and get to work: try to be a mediator, understand where these frustrations came from, and figure out what you can do to alleviate them.
Alternatively, if you can't feasibly mediate, because it's basically all your employees airing grievances at you, then you screwed your job up long ago, and it's time to cop to that. The longer you put off eating crow, the more crow you're eventually going to have to eat.
How do you avoid being framed as “us vs. them” when you are being openly called a white supremacist?
What you’re describing is “appeasement.” Presume they’re operating in good faith and that maybe they’re kind of right. So you cut a compromise, and sure enough, the white supremacy is still there! And what do they recommend? More appeasement.
I agree it was a management problem, but the problem is it wasn’t identified and nipped in the bud sooner.
No one was calling anyone a white supremecist in the conversation. They were likely talking about white supremacy as a cultural and political force in the context of how the policy could perpetrate it.
You are correct activists use this undeclared redefinition of the term white supremacy to mean "someone that does not have a social justice activist mindset". Which is exactly the issue.
Why? It is a tool to utilize confusion to remove the targets moral authority. Both yes and no are bad answers that make you loose moral authority, which is the point of the power tool.
Never trust anyone that uses such a tool, as it shows that the activist attacker is willing to smear individuals they disagree with using deceptive language in order to reduce the unlucky targets moral standing. Is this someone that is worthy of trust?
Do you have a counter argument? Do you think such a person should be trusted or do you think this is not how the activism works?
If it’s about my comment on trust: You are welcome to trust someone that use these power tactics based upon lies to undermine the moral authority of viewpoint opponents, I just believe there are so many people of better character out there to build a relationship with.
Social justice tactics when it boils down to it are effective, but not very creative. Domain specific language is coopted and it’s definitions changed to mean what’s useful for activism. Goal is to redirect as much as possible of an organizations resources and attention towards the ideology instead of whatever it used to do.
It’s nonsense that you have to accept a premise to argue against it. That’s exactly what I did. On this website it’s expected that if you don’t have an argument, don’t make one.
With your assertion in mind that there is no issues with the activist technique. Do you denounce pedofilia? Do you denounce defrauding elderly relatives? See how this activist technique works, no answer is good and the question is directed at you as a potential complicit person, and using it is in my opinion a sure sign of a worse character than what I’d like to engage with.
Please point out where I asserted there are no issues with activist techniques. As far as I can remember, all I've done is point out that you constructed an arbitrary binary specifically to decry the creation of arbitrary binaries.
> Please point out where I asserted there are no issues with activist techniques.
Refer to the comment I replied to where you argue "No one was calling anyone a white supremecist", and then justified this conclusion by stating the social justice redefinition of the colloquial term:
> No one was calling anyone a white supremecist in the conversation. They were likely talking about white supremacy as a cultural and political force in the context of how the policy could perpetrate it.
To your other statement:
> all I've done is point out that you constructed an arbitrary binary specifically to decry the creation of arbitrary binaries.
There are many different types of individual viewpoints and behaviors, so a critique of or an unwillingness to accept a type of behavior normally means that you have tons of others you accept. Disagreeing being a binary choice is a social justice dogma that model the world very badly.
That doesn’t change the fact that leadership then must either:
* Accept the claim that the company is and has been supporting white supremacy, de facto surrendering decisions on anything an employee suggests might support white supremacy
* Disagree with the claim
The redefinition of white supremacy (as you’ve defined it) is a bad faith rhetorical tool designed to create these kind of situations. Leaders are under no obligation to appease employees acting in bad faith.
First, you're creating such a stark false dichotomy that it's hard not to wonder if it's somehow deliberate.
Second, saying that white supremacy is present in the company is not the same thing as saying that the company is run by white supremacists. The term functions very differently in the noun sense than it does in the adjective sense.
> First, you're creating such a stark false dichotomy that it's hard not to wonder if it's somehow deliberate.
Perhaps you might enlighten us as to why this is a false dichotomy, and what other options there are.
> Second
You cannot run a company that perpetuates white supremacy without implicitly supporting that white supremacy, whether you know it or not. I've already been clearly told that malice and intent are not required.
Or are you genuinely going to make the case that "someone who supports white supremacy" is not interchangeable with "white supremacist?" I'm not interested in debating your personal redefinitions of terms.
Since we've already touched on the subject of "bad faith rhetorical tools," getting on other people's cases for acknowledging that the English language is soaked in polysemy isn't exactly an encouraging sign. It's difficult to have an enjoyable conversation with someone who's brandishing a cape.
But no one's done that. You keep claiming the other side is doing that, but they keep disagreeing with you. You're ascribing actions that aren't done and proceeding to take offense.
The first step to knowing what someone else thinks is to ask. You seem to have skipped that step, and when they clarified, you disagreed. Who are you to say what they think?
Again this is all you projecting thoughts onto other people.
There's no value in debating bad faith personal redefinitions of words lobbed as insults.
If I called you a pedophile, I imagine you wouldn't be super expectant of a productive conversation about my unique definition of the word or how I think it applies to you. You wouldn't care what I thought, because if I cared what you thought, I wouldn't have smeared you as a pedophile.
You're begging the question. The entire point people have been making is that white supremacy as a socio-political concept is not the same as a white-supremacist in the nazi-saluting way that you seem to have in your head.
You're still mentally skipping the idea of systemic white supremacy and jumping straight from white supremacy to you are a nazi. But that jump comparison only works for white supremacist. There isn't a comparable systemic thing for pedophilia. We don't discuss systemic pedophilia and how society broadly favors pedophiles in the same way that we do talk about systemic favoritism of white people and culture (and even if you personally disagree that society does favor white people and culture, the conversation does happen). When the other person says white supremacy, this is what they mean: cultural systems and norms that favor white people and things associated with white people, often to the detriment of other cultures and peoples.
So again, you're presupposing someone is smearing you, when they've once again never claimed to have done that and further more actively claimed the opposite. And please note that now four different people have pointed out that no, this wasn't calling anyone a white supremacist. So perhaps it is simply you who is the one using a custom definition here.
Part of this seems to be that you keep insisting on making things about individuals, and not the company and systems itself. Consistently you've changed "the company's actions maintain white supremacy" to "the leaders of the company are white supremacists". That's two jumps: company and its actions to the leaders and then an ascription of intent. People can do things by mistake. Groups can do things unintentionally. You're assuming that everyone is presupposing fault and intent, and using that to ascribe nefarious motives to people who at no point appeared to ascribe fault or intent.
It's also totally unclear how
> * Accept the claim that the company is and has been supporting white supremacy, de facto surrendering decisions on anything an employee suggests might support white supremacy
makes sense. This is akin to saying "yes, we've made mistakes before". I don't see how that "surrenders decisions", I mean unless you mean that they're going to say this about certain decision but still assume they made the right decision (or maybe they did, but then they need to justify this).
That's also not what Singer said. Singer said that he doesn't believe we live in a white supremacist culture. In a statement lower in the article he explicitly says it does exist, and I don't see that as necessarily contradictory with anything else he had said during the meeting in question.
Essentially, the core disagreement is about what is or isn't white supremacy. There isn't one way to define this, but if you start asking for things like "disavow white supremacy!" in a conversation like this then you're essentially just chucking good faith out the window. The context here matters a lot.
I wouldn't have "denounced" white supremacy either. If these are the base conditions under which you're prepared to talk to me then quite frankly, fuck you. There is nothing to gain for me, and you're clearly not prepared to take anything I say in good faith. Okay, I might have in a leadership role to keep the peace as a matter of professionalism, but I'd also have started looking for a new job as this is not a healthy atmosphere. I don't want to work with people who think I'm secretly a white supremacist.
The problem is that I've seen many things being labelled as "white supremacy" that seem ... a bit of a stretch. For example people have argued that Alien (the film) is an example of white supremacy as the alien represents a stereotypical black women; "Black women have been portrayed in contemporary white social and political culture as super-fertile and indestructible breeders whose sexual reproduction must be controlled."[1]
When I first read that, it took me quite a while to realize this was even referring to the alien itself, rather than some character that got infected. It seems it purely based on the fact that the alien is black.
There are many, many examples of this, especially in the last year people have been going way to far in re-analysing everything through the lens of race, often with some very harsh words like "white supremacy". Sometimes this is a good thing, but often I find it's not. Either these are general problems that affect everyone (just black folks more, but that doesn't mean the core problem is racism), or it's outright nonsense like the above.
Now, I don't know what argument that person made exactly in support of "White supremacy existing at Basecamp", but if you make such a strong claim – which is essentially calling your leadership/coworkers white supremacists – then you better have some good arguments. I'm skeptical they existed; they're certainly not present in this article beyond wishy-washy "creating a space where people do not feel welcome".
And considering that this discussion left people "crying and screaming at the screen" it seems rather easy to make some people feel "not welcome".
The entire thing stinks; perhaps the leadership could have handled things a bit better here and there, but if you're not willing to take a somewhat nuanced disagreement in good faith then there's nothing you can do except nod and smile on every sort of nonsense they bring up, and anything else will upset people.
You're describing the critical perspective, which is just a framing that motivates discussion. There are versions of it for essentially every sociological phenomenon. The hypersensitivity to it among certain demographics is what's remarkable, much moreso than the thing itself.
White supremacy is so baked into American culture that over 90% of immigrants to the US are non-white.
The US is the least racist nation in the world according to Pew surveys.
What we have an abundance in the US is people who, if racism disappeared tomorrow, would be out of work and have to find a new career. These same people are the ones who act as if the election, to 2 terms, of a black president translates to the US making no progress on race since the 60's.
I grew up in a mostly black county in Virginia. I know what demagoguery looks like, and witnessed it with the GOP for decades. The Democratic party has embraced it, in a big way, since Hillary's loss. It works to win elections, but at the cost of elevating racial reductionism in POC. And the more POC embrace racial reductionism, the more moderate whites will do the same, creating more white supremacists. I've already witnessed colleagues who are moderate getting frustrated in meeting where they are demonized, and next thing you know they are googling and listening/reading conservative authors who mirror their frustration and amplify it.
Singer didn't deny that white supremacy "exists". He simply stated, in my opinion correctly, that it's not embedded in American institutions. Because it's not, as evidenced by the fact that we actively import (to an extent unsurpassed by the vast majority of nations in the world) non-white immigrants to the tune of over a million a year.
My next door neighbor is an Indian immigrant family. My neighbor across the street is from Vietnam. Both are naturalized citizens, and this ethos is going to try to say that the institution that naturalized them is white supremacist. It's patently absurd and irrational, and appeals to gullible college students and losers who desperately want to externalize blame for their failures.
"Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd"
The founders effectively took everyone's voice away. I think that's a very consistent way to get people to leave - especially people who for whom having a voice is more important than working at basecamp
I don't disagree with you, but I think it's a symptom of a much larger problem in the US that many people feel that their workplace is the only place where they have a voice and that the corporation they work for is their only avenue for political agency.
Obviously, you ideally want your job to be politically aligned with you so that your labor doesn't conflict with your beliefs. But today it seems like many feel so disconnected and disenfranchised from any communities outside of work they they put all their eggs in that basket, and that ultimately never goes well.
> The founders effectively took everyone's voice away
Setting aside the merits of all the underlying arguments, the founders were clearly only talking about their "voice" within the context of their employment at basecamp, not their ability to have a voice in all other possible contexts. And thus the following is a non sequitur:
> having a voice is more important than working at basecamp
Being an employee at basecamp is a necessary prerequisite for having a voice as an employee at basecamp.
I understand your frustration with the polarization of political discourse in the workplace- I imagine it is stressful for all involved. However I think the notion that everything is becoming more and more political, is a little bit misleading. What of your work does not affect society? Do the products and services produced by the firms that employ you not affect it? Do the employees not work for wages necessary for their immediate survival? Do most working people not spend a substantial portion of their daily lives in a fashion dictated by those furnishing those wages?
I have trouble imagining how labor could ever lack a political dimension, and the distinction that presents itself to me between the past supposedly 'less politicized' workplaces, is that workers (or at least minoritized workers) were simply less safe to discuss politics and justice in this context that dominates their life and survival.
I doubt most of the people who resigned resigned because of that employee. They probably resigned because DHH decided that, because the discussion had made him uncomfortable, no one should be able to discuss anything "political" at work anymore. That's a very "take your ball and go home" attitude which I wouldn't want in my employer either. And given that this seems to be pretty normal behaviour for him, it was probably the last straw for a lot of employees.
This was my thought too. The guys at the top just might be arrogant and difficult. My opinion is that Singer wouldn’t say “white supremacy exists” not because he’s a white supremacist, as people keeps interpreting this, but because he didn’t want to be told what to do by an underling. Trump did the same thing in interviews, press conferences, and I think even in a debate.
> They probably resigned because DHH decided that, because the discussion had made him uncomfortable
That's completely understating the entirety of what happened; the culmination of which seemed to be frivolous HR complaints. Has anyone disputed the details of the fuller context available through David's blogs and other sources?
> no one should be able to discuss anything "political" at work anymore
Can't they though? Here is what Jason had to say:
> 1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account...People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can't happen where the work happens anymore.
> it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned
I totally get it. Toxic people tend to clump. And they eventually aim their toxicity at each other. You don't want them in the workplace or really, in your life at all.
> Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd.
Not only is it absurd, the whole demand to say such a thing was a Kafka trap to begin with.
> I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.
It's not a liability, at least not in the long term. The time when being 'woke' is beneficial to advancement will come to an end. Because if the fervor one has for politics is what a company values, then they'll get increasing fervor until the place is too toxic to be productive.
Your inability to generate a constant stream of passion for your opinions and hate for contrary opinions is a sign that you are normal. That you are reasonable. And that you are dependable. It's nothing at all to apologize for.
There will always be companies that have employees with different political, religious, and social opinions who will find common ground in their desire to build cool shit and provide value. Go find one of those places and be happy.
I think the company will be better off with the 30% gone. They can regroup. Calling it a racist company because some of the head guys are republican that don't see white supremacists every time they see a white person walking down the street is idiocy. Both sides of the fence have turn to zealotry rather than finding common ground. Let the 30% go form their on basecamp rival that is focused on promoting the idea that all white people are racists by their very nature and see how far it goes. Getting politics out of the company sounds good to me. I don't care about your color or your issues, I just want coworkers I can depend on and get along with and don't wear their politics on their sleeves or feel they're owed a special privilege because of their skin color rather than what they bring to the team.
It’s a catch-22. Princeton gave an excuse to be investigated by the federal government when the head admitted that they’re an institution of “white supremacy”
Yes, the well known unforgivable crime of referencing that a publication you do not like exists. I think this is a pretty good basis for upending someone's career.
Promoting, not referencing. Whether I "like" it is irrelevant, it has a very specific political viewpoint. Your "explanation" is entirely misdirection.
Yes, the well known unforgivable crime of referencing that a publication with "a very specific political viewpoint" exists. I think this is a pretty good basis for upending someone's career.
A key point not being talked about enough is that the employees quit after being offered 6 months salary as severance, no questions asked. Heck a large chunk of the workforce of the best run company in the world would take up that offer. I imagine few of them actually cared too much about this whole saga.
I guess I'm weird. If I were offered 6 months of severance to quit a job at a successful company where I enjoyed the work and my coworkers, why would I take the offer? I've turned down offers that paid over 30% more because I like where I am. I don't think it's so uncommon.
>When I talk to my family and non-tech non-coasts non-city friends about the sort of political polarization I encounter at my high-tech Seattle job, they often think I'm messing with them, that I'm being facetious or exaggerating.
Finally! I have been pointing this out as being mostly a tech circle thing. But almost every time I get downvoted for it.
The question here is, why Tech? What is specific about Tech as an industry, and that is not just in US, it is also spreading in UK, ( or mostly English speaking countries ). I assume it has something to do with Social Media. But then other industry also have access to social media usage as well.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 657 ms ] threadIt's not possible to call it from outside, but there was no actual racist behavior cited, apart from the list of funny customer names, which is not really racist (more culturalist - if that were a thing), but it is a terrible idea anyway.
It sounds like a bunch of people got upset and quit over white privilege and the usual similar nonsense. Good riddance, why would you want activist employees like that?
The context it was said in made the statement rather jarring. I am all for their initial stance of "no politics" etc, but their all-hands was a face palm all around.
A lot of the framing around implicit bias and white privilege is actually straight up generalizing about a group based on skin color. That's racist. This business that it's not racist if it's against white people is seriously wrong - and racist.
Employees calling the organization 'White Supremacist' is the thing that should be 'jarring' or at least controversial. There are arguments to be made, sure, but the language is fairly extremist.
> To which Singer responded: “I said we have different ways of framing … If you want to debate whether it exists anywhere, then yeah. But not here at this company, not with the people I associate with.”
Edit: to add quote
I also don’t buy it when they rush to scrub a ton of his chat history after this. That’s fishy as hell.
> those allegations are just brought out by people on the left anytime they want as a cudgel to stop all debate on a topic.
The irony of course is that this entire situation was accelerated by DHH and Fried creating a new policy saying “no politics or get out”. The people stopping all debate here are management, not the amorphous “left”.
You have no idea if that's true or not or the extent of his comments. You're going off of an unsubstantiated claim and treating it as fact.
> I also don’t buy it when they rush to scrub a ton of his chat history after this. That’s fishy as hell.
They didn't scrub history after this. They deleted those forums a week or two before all of this (according to the article), in an apparent attempt to stop the political chatter. It seems when that didn't work they came out with the no politics policy.
> The irony of course is that this entire situation was accelerated by DHH and Fried creating a new policy saying “no politics or get out”. The people stopping all debate here are management, not the amorphous “left”.
There is still zero evidence that any of this has to do with white supremacy, so someone making that claim is ridiculous and is meant to stop all meaningful conversation. Once someone makes that claim the entire debate becomes about that claim and there is no turning back from it. That is very much the reason it is used so much.
It seems they have/had quite a few political activists that were causing contention in the company. I don't blame them one bit for wanting to quell political stuff while on company time.
I find the selective application of epistemic uncertainty fascinating. Why not treat his rebuttal to the article as completely unsubstantiated?
Or for that matter, why didn't he refute quoting Breitbart in the office, if it's not true? He was clearly given a chance to comment, the article includes his version of that meeting. Why are we forced to go into "nobody can possibly know" mode when there are three people saying he did that, and precisely nobody publicly denying it?
It's also not "unsubstantiated". You just don't seem to believe the people who are claiming it. That's very different.
> They didn't scrub history after this. They deleted those forums a week or two before all of this (according to the article), in an apparent attempt to stop the political chatter. It seems when that didn't work they came out with the no politics policy.
You're correct about the timing, my mistake. I do not buy their motivations one bit. Given how publicly political DHH has been, this strikes me much less of "no politics here anymore" and more of "no politics the moment it's critical of us".
> There is still zero evidence that any of this has to do with white supremacy
I don't see any evidence that anyone originally claimed that the list of names was white supremacist, only that it was a bit racist to mock Asian or African names. This is why they appeared to have been talking about implicit bias so much, which became such a hot button issue later. And I think it's perfectly fair to pull in a bit of implicit bias training in this context, as well as some customer data protection training as well.
Discussion of white supremacy cropped up when Ryan Singer allegedly said "I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist", which appears to have made things spiral wildly out of control. I don't think it's a great idea to throw out the term white supremacist without a ton of evidence, but I can 100% see why someone would after having one of their executives effectively accusing everyone on the DEI committee of being racist against whites.
> so someone making that claim is ridiculous and is meant to stop all meaningful conversation.
Ryan tried to shut down discussion with this "Very often, if you express a dissenting view, you get called a Nazi". You don't get to complain about inflammatory, conversation ending rhetoric after coming out of the gate with that. Doubly so when you hold power in the company.
Oh, and all this happened after the company had deleted all the threads and publicly announced the policy change to the world first. Its not internally consistent to accuse the “left” of shutting down the conversation with heated rhetoric, given the timeline of DHH and Fried’s decision to ban previously allowed office speech.
People are just looking for someone to lynch, irony intended.
I realize this thread has all sorts of such things going on in it, but this was a noticeable step hellward.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So yes, the article does claim that he said this. Obviously he contests this, but it appears to be just his word alone against other people who were on the call. The balance of evidence does not appear to be on his side, here.
Anonymous sources are the norm in all kinds of reporting; there is no real reason to be surprised that no ex employee is volunteering for the kind of harassment that signing their name to this story would draw in, especially now that Breitbart and a variety of alt-right grifters have decided to take big, public pro-Basecamp and anti-“woke” worker stance. It’s easy to say “if it’s real they would say so publicly”, but honestly the vast majority of us here, myself included, would not do so if it meant getting harassed by the Breitbart crowd.
This of course does not mean that this is real. Just because I could imagine myself being an anonymous source in such circumstances does not mean that such sources exist. But in this case we can be savvy media consumers and look at the official pushback from Basecamp and those named, and the pushback is incredibly small in the number of contested details. Singer corrected literally one quote on the record. This implies to me that Newton is largely on the money in terms of factual events.
Also, the flip side is also true; we don’t seem to have a lot of current of former Basecamp employees coming out to defend the company and decry these articles as being wrong. Instead we have ... silence. Now everything I said above about wanting to be anonymous is still true for these hypothetical people as well, but if you’re going to complain about the lack of people on the record attacking the company, then surely the lack of people defending the company (executives excluded, natch) on the record should also be a data point, should it not?
> I objected to an employee’s statement that we live in a white supremacist culture. White supremacism exists, and America’s history of racism still presents terrible problems, but I don’t agree that we should label our entire culture with this ideology.
His reply was focused on white supremacy in America, he didn't mention a misunderstanding about referring to just the company. There's that other quote from him, but it's strange his entire reply focused on the country if he was just referring to Basecamp.
And in the meantime his interlocutors have acted to remain anonymous... I grant benefit of the doubt to Singer.
And either way, I believe that kind of conversation doesn’t belong in public channels at work. They make project management software. The company doesn’t need to be political activists. That’s my belief and I am entitled to it.
It’s also ok to disagree with that. If social activism is important to you, you can find ways to align that with your career. Good on you for doing that, and good luck.
However, saying that all companies, as well as all of their members have to align with your view of the world is crazy talk. I expect more companies to do this, and you can choose to not work there.
'White Supremacy' classically means men in Pointy White Hats.
The CRT people now use it to mean 'regular white people' because they, in their regular, day to day actions, uphold oppressive systems i.e. 'White Supremacy'.
The denial is usually of the later, not the former.
Many progressives are now using the denial of the later, to imply denial of the former, as a kind of bad faith rhetorical weapon, which I think is unfair.
> “I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
I was not the one dismissed him, nor do I work at basecamp, nor am I Ryan Singer, so I can't be sure that's why he was suspended...can only guess with the same information available to you.
This is the problem with cultural Marxism / “wokeness”. It’s a sanctified, totalizing ideology that admits zero daylight between “100% agreement” and “you are a white supremacist/literal Nazi”.
In that way it functions exactly like a “state religion”: in public, you’re either a true believer, act like one or are mute and don’t give away your position. Soon they will make you mouth the words or face denunciation. Perhaps we are already there in the vanguard of coastal tech companies.
This whole thing is counter to the very spirit of liberalism.
Could you help me understand why you feel "cultural Marxism" is so, totally, totalizing?
It simply means that the ideology won’t stop until it has transformed all of culture. The progress thus far has been academia -> journalism -> tech companies. It’s coming for the rest of society. There is no area of life or society that this ideology does not claim to address.
You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?
So let me get this straight: You're railing against an ideology that you claim has progressed through a large section of society, and you think it is bad, and you think, presumably, that society ought to not be like that, at least in these many areas. And your criticism of that ideology is that it claims to address many areas of society?
> You missed “sanctified” - the ideology resists criticism. Do you not see that this is the way religion used to be?
You missed the bit where I used the word "sanctimonious".
The irony of this whole section of the thread in the context of racism...
I call it “cultural Marxism” because unlike plain old Marxism, it has relatively little to say about the redistribution of wealth and other economic interests. In this way it’s made itself innocuous to corporate America, which would otherwise mobilize its immune system to reject the ideas outright.
Case in point: I recently sat through some corporate training on privilege that did not, once, mention wealth or economic privilege.
Cultural Marxism redefines the oppressed and oppressor along the lines of identity rather than economy. This makes it much more palatable to a capitalist society.
"That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist."
This kind of gaslighthing though.
"My opponent disagrees with me and is therefore a White Supremacist, or at least close to one!"
If one person says 'this org is racist because of white privilege' - it's possibly contentious, but not unreasonable to suggest that this statement is racist in and of itself.
Just because you might deny 'reverse racism' exists, doesn't mean that it's true, it's a denial, not a disagreement.
Also, indicating that 'this office is not a place of white supremacy' is not 'denying' someone else experience, or their position that 'racism exists'. It's an observation of the nature of the ostensible problem.
It's not 'wilfully ignorant' it's more like 'wilfully insensitive / disagreeable / inflammatory'
No-one likes being told they're wrong, which is why the capitol riots happened on 6 January and Trump still got so many votes despite being an abjectly horrible president, and the head of a party that does nothing for the vast majority of its constituents.
If you believe the company founders, in the face of being told they occupy their position 'due to privilege' is 'right about everything' then you're the problem.
Telling executives that they are 'denying racism exists' when they are actually only denying that it exists at the company is obviously straw manning.
If you're of the position that 'anyone who questions claims of racism is a white supremacist', then you're entitled to that position, but it's 'war language' that is driving a lot of irresponsible toxicity in the workplace.
Singer's quote:
“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don’t believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
He wasn't talking about the company, he was talking about society. Unless you think he was saying they "live in" the company ...
Saying he got sacked for questioning it at the company is a spin added later by his apologists.
To the extent that white supremacy is synonymous with racism (which, at least at this point in history, I think is arguable given the fact that we live in a world dominated by the vestiges of the British empire, and that structural inequality is almost entirely against non-white people globally) then people who question the claim of racism are at the very least inadvertently advancing the causes of white supremacy.
If I had someone saying that shit in my company on a Zoom call, I would excuse myself, remove them from the call, schedule a 1 on 1 meeting with them, and explain to them that they need to take training on what racism is and how it is perpetrated, or leave.
Fair enough to say that speaking this out on a company zoom call in a lot of places would get you in trouble though and speaks to a lack of understanding of tech workplaces - it's only smart self-preservation to stay far away from politics, especially racial politics, in company workspaces unless you're sure you're 100% aligned with the currently dominant creed.
If someone at my work stated in a meeting they don’t believe in Christianity I would never expect them to be fired, if they stated that about DEI or even disagreeing with a specific DEI strategy or tactic of the company, i’d expect trouble. If someone has a dissenting opinion there they need to keep quiet for their own good, as this guy at basecamp learned.
Also it’s a false equivalence to compare not believing in Christianity and discouraging diversity and inclusion programs.
It’s the same mistake people make in comparing the protective use of force with the oppressive use of force, or comparing being racist with calling out racism.
If Christians were in the minority, and were disadvantaged as a result, and there was a program to promote a higher level of Christian employment, and you said “I don’t think Christianity is even a religion why do we have this stupid program” then you might find you get the same sort of response as claiming there’s no white privilege now.
I was not talking about construction sites or other non-tech workplaces.
You were the one who brought up Christianity, but I don’t think you’re really in disagreement with what I said. Perhaps it’s simply the term “creed” that’s at issue here, and substitute it for another one in that case. You go on to present a hypothetical example of management attempting to specifically hire Christians rather than members of other religions, if that actually openly happened we both know there would be a hue and cry and an EEOC or HR investigation. It’s not representative of what tech workplaces look like today.
- Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff
- Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
- Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
- refused to reprimand said employee on the call
- had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Can't believe only 21 employees walked. What idiots these founders are. There is no way to defend this poor management even if you agree with the rule they tried to put in
The way in which DHH announced the _conversation_ he had with Salesforce was a thing of amazement all of its own.
"I thought YOU had class!"
This is really sad hearing about how crummy DHH and Fried are at one central piece of management: having very hard conversations with people while still treating them with respect and dignity.
I'd like to highlight this. I'd like to frame it and tape it to the head of every founder and entrepeneur so they have to look at it constantly. Hell, everyone who ever has to oversee other people. This is absolutely the heart and soul of good management and being a good person, and everyone who thinks they're created a great workplace, but doesn't know this, needs to chant this 1,000,000 times.
Kind of gives the lie to the progressive, all-in-it-together environment they portray with their public image.
So, just like any other company really, except due to the excessive power of the top two execs, no recourse if you have a problem they don’t perceive as a problem.
If he was sick, whether physically sick because of their own actions or otherwise...sick is sick. Seemed like a no-win for him whether he could either refuse to show up because he is sick, or show up to at least listen to what's going on (assuming recording it wasn't an option).
Color me skeptical.
But totally hear what you're saying and appreciate your skepticism!
> (There is already so much bad, that his absence/presence is a moot point)
This dude is one of the two founders of the company and has a leadership/ownership responsibility. I don't think his deciding to duck out is a moot point at all. It's that exact attitude that led to what's happened there.
Maybe he was that sick, but I would be kind of pissed if I were one of the employees. The power dynamic is weird, because if a regular employee were sick they would definitely feel the pressure to show up at a desk, on camera, if they were trying to make their case in this meeting.
The article said they extended the buyout offer indefinitely, so I wouldn't be surprised if more people leave over the next few weeks.
Even if you weren't thinking of leaving, 3-6 months severance would be really hard to turn down, especially if you know you can get another job quickly.
Obviously, both is better.
> 50% off a gym membership
But I already have a home gym. Will the company give me a check to help pay for my next piece of equipment? Why do I have to go into town to the gym to make use of this benefit?
> Reimbursement of 25% off of Community Supported Agriculture
I've got an orchard with more apples and pears than I know what to do with each year. I consider rhubarb to almost be a weed at this point. I get free eggs from my neighbor (and honey too - helps with the aforementioned apples and pears). Could I get 25% off my next fruit tree purchase instead?
---
Such benefits are entirely missed on me. I wouldn't take advantage of them and so they're not serving the purpose of the company to entice me to stay. They also are a little bit disdainful in that other people (yea, I know... the "someone else is getting something I'm not" is a hard thing to excise from the mind) are getting extra benefits/bonuses/perks that I'm not able to take advantage of.
A 10% profit sharing? Even if its worth "less" than those are previously offered - it's worth more to me.
Ironically it seems that, contra to the narrative existing in the minds of quite a few HN posters, it was the Brietbart quoting, "white people are the real victims of racism" guy who had spend over a decade being unable to shut up about politics in the workplace.
Bad
> - Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
I am not sure where you are getting this, but I might have missed it.
> - Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
Yes, on 90th minute - we are not sure what was said before that.
> - refused to reprimand said employee on the call
For what? I don't understand.
> - had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
We all can be sick sometimes, certainly would be better to it in some other way, but maybe he was just that sick?
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Pretty bad, especially considering comments from Highrise employee in this thread.
He was busy hitting Twitter pretty hard during the day, throwing some shade at Apple. No mention of company, employees, anything.
That's bad optics, regardless of how you're feeling. If you're sick, you're sick. If you're too sick to deal with the most pressing issue your company is facing, you should consider yourself too sick to devote chunks of time to Twitter feuds.
That is explicitly attention seeking behavior, and it’s a hard prerequisite to becoming a “thought leader” or even just famous enough that a three letter initial is enough to identify yourself.
There's a LOT of projection that has gone here.
The article really doesn't tell us whether that senior employee just went off on a political tangent for no reason whatsoever, or he was responding to an earlier made political statement that he decided to disagree with.
What the article does suggest is that that contribution by that senior employee was preceded by a discussion of the funny names list that involved the mentioning of the "pyramid of hate". That pyramid is already a political statement and should not, if the company were true to its new policy, have been brought up in the discussion.
(NB even David and Jason seem to have recognized this -- after the meeting, Singer was suspended; he's since resigned, but this is likely the only one of the several recent resignations that was not entirely of the employee's own volition.)
- Announced a new company policy publicly before telling the staff
- Deleted internal threads that would go against their narrative of why they did so
- Had a conservative senior employee go off about politics on the call discussing the new no politics policy.
- refused to reprimand said employee on the call
- had one founder take this extremely sensitive call from his bed with his camera off and on mute.
- After the employees resigned, did not send any sort of public message thanking them for their time at the company.
Can't believe only 21 employees walked. What idiots these founders are. There is no way to defend this poor management even if you agree with the rule they tried to put in
Yes, reading this entire exchange between Singer and the unnamed employee shows exactly why there shouldn't be political talk in the workplace. Disastrous indeed.
On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace.
This also doesn't mean that the Basecamp founders are responsible for systemic racism because they had a list of "funny" names and [gasp] employ at least one conservative.
What has happened to everyone? It's like we have taken the social media rage machine and applied it to real life interactions.
It became more so when a major segment of the USA decided they didn't care to hide being racist anymore after the 2008 elections.
No, it's a class thing. Among unionised labour work has always been a political battlefield. What's new is that you know have a politically activist group of people within upper middle class white collar jobs who, traditionally were conservative in temperament because they were materially well off.
Professionals whose values do not align with their management have figured out that they actually have influence, and the top 1-10% have noticed that they can actually press the top 0.1% if they want to.
First, the executives absolutely clamped down hard on a discussion about workplace behavior. I think their attempt to cast this as “political” is deeply cynical; discussing how people behave at work will always be in bounds, even if it touches up against issues that are politicized. The initial trigger here was a discussion about the list of “funny names”; there’s no easy way to sweep that under the rug as off topic, since it’s explicitly at-work behavior.
Second, they did an end run around the employees. Announcing the policy to the world, and implying that the Basecamp workforce was having a problem focusing on their jobs was an asshole move destined to blow up in their face. Nobody likes feeling crapped on by their boss, especially not in public like that.
Honestly, it didn’t have to be about politics. Treating employees like that, especially ones with options, is typically not going to go well.
The current state of politics bled into this. There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture. It wasn't about what was appropriate or not and then handling it. The discussion went far beyond that.
> Second, they did an end run around the employees.
This was really surprising to me. I thought they would have posted publicly after all the employees had learned about this. This is poor change management within the company and a lesson I hope they learn.
You might feel the illustration is incendiary, sure, but I think coming down as hard as they did on it to a pretty valid concern of "hey maybe no funny names list" did no favors to those concerned, and subsequently doubling and tripling down on it has really really not helped.
Classic and indisputable example might be Germany in WW2. It wasn’t like citizens woke up and immediately decided that genocide was okay; they slowly were worked into finding it acceptable and palatable as a measure to endorse.
It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.
I've read a fair number of books on helping things through change. The pyramid being put where it was seemed like a bad idea the moment I read it. The way it was responded to is something I would have expected.
There is a lesson here. If you want to bring about change in others it's about leading them rather than saying what you want to say.
I don't find it challenging to make that argument at all.
"Laughing at names leads to genocide" to me implies that laughing at names is a necessary and sufficient condition to a genocide.
The pyramid of hate, to me, implies that laughing at names is a necessary but not sufficient condition of genocide.
Therefore showing the pyramid of hate does not imply that laughing at names leads to genocide, as it lacks the sufficiency condition.
Not so hard to argue.
I can point to numerous people being killed by calls to action around abortion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Fields
Please don't create accounts to do that.
A name like, say, "Fuk Yo" is accidentally similar to the English "Fuck you". It's kinda funny in a childish way, but I don't think that making fun of it automatically implies that they think these people are of lesser value. i.e. I don't think it's automatically racism in the first place.
It's inappropriate because making fun of your customers is never a good idea, and it's also inconsiderate and impolite. But that's not the same thing as racism, or evidence of white supremacy.
And maybe some employees who worked on that list were racist; there is no way for us to know. I like to opt for a more good-faith interpretation, which seems very uncommon these days.
The idea that this would "escalate" from a simple list to actual racism seems unlikely. Everyone knows the difference.
Also, the holocaust was a lot more complicated than this "pyramid" lets on. The Nazis took power by force, in some exceptional circumstances, and the Holocaust wasn't widely known among the German people. It's overly simplistic at best.
> It is only meant to illustrate the classic slippery slope.
I have never seen a single "slippery slope" argument that I found convincing, including this one. In every single case I've seen everyone is acutely aware of the difference between A and B. I don't consider it an argument, I consider it a fallacy.
Racism is the air we breathe. I grew up around mostly white kids, and there is undeniably more fear amongst those kids (myself included) when interacting with black people than with white people. It seems similarly undeniable that affluent white people are more afraid of african american people when its dark out than they are of other white people. When a black person applies to a job, their blackness is not neutral. It seems to me that most people have underlying feeling about blackness, and that people of color have to contend with that when they're going through their lives.
I'm not saying there aren't problems; I just don't see the connection between something like this list and the actual problems, and I certainly don't see a good reason for some of the strong and bold claims that are made about it.
I think that's a misinterpretation of what that graphic is trying to convey. The point isn't that people and groups that exhibit behavior at the bottom of the pyramid are on the march to genocide. It's that there's a spectrum of bigotry and discrimination, and each level of it that is tolerated enables worse behavior. It doesn't mean every situation is going to get to the level of mass-killings.
Normalizing bigoted behavior encourages more bigoted behavior. The same way that normalizing managers who scream and yell at people often leads to others becoming more openly belligerent or otherwise creates a toxic workplace.
Fourth, they retaliated against employees by taking away benefits in the most humiliating way possible, via the aforementioned disastrous public blog post.
And yet, people are still going to bat for them because...I don't know. It seems like a lot of people have a religious faith in the decision-making capabilities of men like DHH and JF. Seems like it might be related to some of the issues employees tried to raise internally.
I can think of a reason. To protect employees who are not part of the woke mob from being “canceled” by the woke mob.
They wanted to protect employees from the consequences of their words and actions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This goes well beyond 'consequences'. its being used as a weapon against people you disagree with or are just political enemies and the end result is thugs and bullies gaining power that didnt earn it and dont deserve it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When acronyms became "white supremacy culture"[1], public magnet schools became "systemic racism"[2], showing up to work on time and objective thinking became "whiteness"[3], etc. "racial equality" became just another Motte and Bailey in the hyper-polarized toxic political world we live in.
No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal. What many do oppose is the entryist toxic leftism that's making it's headway into every facet of society. That's the "politics at work" that many are opposed to. Leftism became a religion, and "wokeism" is its proselytization.
>What has happened to everyone? It's like we have taken the social media rage machine and applied it to real life interactions.
That's exactly what's happening. As an example, this is the (former) head data analyst at Basecamp:
From https://janeyang.org/2021/03/18/live-forward/
> If you are white or a man, especially a cis-gendered heterosexual able-bodied white man, do the fucking work. Learn about the characteristics of white supremacy, push through your discomfort, and reflect on how you show up in the spaces you have power. Be ready to apologize when you screw up (we all do!) and then do better. And whatever you do: do not demand that your friends or colleagues or employees or neighbors or acquaintances who belong to historically marginalized groups explain to you all the ways you perpetuate harm and how society got here. Pay an anti-oppression professional for training and coaching; don’t expect us to get you up to speed for free.
[1]https://abc7news.com/sfusd-renaming-schools-board-meeting-sa... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Fran... [3]https://tri-statedefender.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/whi...
"No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal." Hmm. Is the likes of Tucker Carlson "sane"? He and other mainstream right wing "thinkers" consistently put out viewpoints that oppose racial equality and oppose anti-racism.
Are you an anti-racist?
Whataboutism. No one is claiming otherwise, certainly not me. Indeed, the left is catching up to the right on interlacing religion and politics.
> Hmm. Is the likes of Tucker Carlson "sane"?
Not sure, probably not. I honestly do not watch Fox News.
> He and other mainstream right wing "thinkers" consistently put out viewpoints that oppose racial equality and oppose anti-racism.
Links to racist viewpoints he's put out?
>Are you an anti-racist?
Please define "anti-racist".
https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-tucker-carlson...
Carlson says immigrants make America 'Poorer' and 'Dirtier' (hint: not immigrants from Norway)
https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-tucker-carlson-migrants-di...
Carlson is one of the most popular right wing commentators in the country. His show is one of the most watched on TV. He is routinely in the top ten polled of GOP candidates for President in 2024.
You say: "No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal." You might be right, but only because there are no sane conservatives not named Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney and I think they have better things to do than hang out on HN.
Some of your links take things he's said way out of context ("dirty" was referencing the amount of garbage left by illegal immigration at the border, an objective fact), and he's not wrong about leftists wanting to remove borders and import as many people into the West as possible, including an actual Democratic presidential candidate [1].
>(hint: not immigrants from Norway)
They're not flooding in illegally by the tens of thousands every month.
You say: "No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal." You might be right, but only because there are no sane liberals not named Barak Obama or Joe Lieberman and I think they have better things to do than hang out on HN.
You're still strawmaning and partaking in whataboutism here.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/07/are-democrats...
"No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal."
Tucker Carlson, one of the most popular "conservatives", opposes racial equality and promotes white supremacy. You can call him "not sane" if you want, but he has millions of viewers every day and his views are absolutely mainstream Republicanism in 2021. There are zero Republican voters or public figures who disagree with Carlson or condemn him.
So which is it, are almost all Republicans actually "insane", or are almost all Republicans against racial equality?
"No one sane", and then you build the Tucker Carlson strawman, and continue to use him, after we both conclude he's not "sane".
> What is the whataboutism?
Bringing up right-wing examples here when they were immaterial to my OP.
These are textbook examples of strawmaning and whatabouting.
>Tucker Carlson, one of the most popular "conservatives", opposes racial equality
Where did he oppose racial equality? I did not see any of that in the links you provided. Can you link actual Tucker Carlson videos of him making statements that oppose racial equality?
>You can call him "not sane" if you want, but he has millions of viewers every day and his views are absolutely mainstream Republicanism in 2021.
ChapTrapHouse, TYT, etc. has millions of subscribers that listen every day and their views are absolutely mainstream Democratism in 2021. There are zero Democratic voters or public figured who disagree with CTH/TYT or condemn him
So which is it, are almost all Democrats actually "insane", or are almost all Democrats against racial equality (anti-White, and becoming more anti-Asian)?
You're strawmaning here again because you haven't provided anything that shows Tucker Carlson, or the Republican Party platform, is against racial equality.
Nonetheless, it's all whataboutism. You're incapable of refuting any of my points, including my OP, so you're commiting several fallacies here.
"No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal."
Do you think Americans and the world really don't remember the past 5 years? Do you think we don't remember The Former Guy coming to relevance specifically because of the racist "birtherism" movement, or calling Mexicans rapists? Are those the actions of someone interested in promoting racial equality?
Lets try a different tact:
Name some mainstream Trump-supporting Republican who has said "I believe in racial equality", or otherwise promote racial equality.
If you can't, don't bother replying, and we can all conclude what we all already know:
The Republican party is the party of white supremacy.
No games, just pointing out your bad use of fallacies, and you shifting the goalposts.
>Do you think Americans and the world really don't remember the past 5 years?
Do you think Americans and the world really don't remember the past year? Rioting, burning stores and small businesses down, over 20 death, over a billion dollars in damage, all tied to the BLM riots.
>calling Mexicans rapists?
Never happened [1].
Now you're delusionally inventing things that never happened and using fallacies to make this invented world real in your mind.
Find me where in the Republican Party platform they are for racism.
>Name some mainstream Trump-supporting Republican who has said "I believe in racial equality", or otherwise promote racial equality.
You've literally created a non-provable assertion. Mainstream Republicans follow the Republican Party platform. Can you find me where in the platform it calls for racism? As a matter of fact, it calls for anti-discrimination based on race.
If you can't find where in the Republican Party platform it calls for racism, don't bother replying, and we can all conclude what we all already know:
The Democratic party is the party of anti-white and anti-Asian racism.
[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/aug/08/tim-kaine/...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Second, since you've been using HN primarily for that, we've banned the account. We ban accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology they're battling for, because there's nothing more destructive of the intended use of the site. Not to mention its intended spirit, which is gratifying curiosity, not smiting enemies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've worked for several companies headquartered out of different regions of the world. The amount of politics at work I've seen has related to where leadership is from.
This is not about Trump or Obama, that's easily avoided, it's about Identity Politics, which cannot be avoided:
They are arguing over Identity Politics and definitions of privilege.
"“The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”"
The Executive basically stated he doesn't believe the organization or it's culture is rooted in 'White Supremacy' - echoing the aggressive language used nowadays in Critical Race Theory.
The Employee, I believe mischaracterized that statement as 'the denial that racism exists' - which is an unfair, but also pointed out the denial of 'White Priviledge' - which is a valid point to make if one actually believes that.
The argument is existentially problematic - some people believe that groups are not inherently racist, others believe that if there are White executives then the system is inherently racist, going so far as to use terms like 'White Supremacy'.
This 'debate' is raging everywhere right now - schools, public sector, private companies, NGOs etc.
It's hard to rectify because those who don't see systems as overtly or fundamentally racist are challenge by those who do, and those who do, are inclined to believe those that disagree with them are basically evil.
It's a low-grade cultural race war unfortunately, pitting regular people against other regular people, often over some very abstract things, like naming things 'blacklist/whitelist' instead of 'blocklist/playlist' etc..
When in the history of the US has racial inequality not been an inherently political topic? At its founding, the statement "all men are created equal" was highly contentious.
When it was turned into one by politicians and activists, just like masks were.
I'm a firm believer that if you actually sit a few people down and try to have a sane conversation where people actually talk and don't spout slogans, you find that their views aren't all that different, then just put emphasis and importance on slightly different things, and have been presented with subsets of the facts that emphasize those preferences.
The problem is, we're going on a few decades of a concerted effort to confuse and separate us based on language, and specifically meaning of words. What used to be camps choosing words that placed their views in a beneficial light (pro-life vs pro-choice, for example), has moved to very purposefully continuing to use the same words on both sides but to re-frame them to mean something entirely different than intended by that side. For example, Black Lives Matter and how it literally means different things to different people, regardless of the originators intentions and protestations.
Information silos allow this to happen. If you can exert control over the information environment, you can change the definition of words, and then people can't even communicate correctly any more. That's a real goal of those that wield political power. Moderate is just another name for someone dangerously close to being a swing voter to them, so promoting enough animosity that even things overtly against your own interest are seen as the lesser of two evils is a winning strategy.
Lest you think I'm talking about the left or the right, they both do it. And lest you think "sure, but one side does it more", no, they both do it so egregiously that the difference does not matter, and all you're seeing is the effect of Knoll's law in action. Make no mistake about it, you're getting screwed from both sides. That you tell yourself that your side is the more sane one is just the fiction that lets you sleep at night (and hopefully that's all it's doing, and not empowering you to be a complete asshole to people just as screwed over as you are).
"Politicians and activists" obviously didn't politicize masks. No coherent reading of the last 2 years supports that conclusion.
It was the screeching Republican base, who decided on day one that the masks were a symbol of government overreach and I guess got Covid to own the libs.
The base is multiple tens of millions of people spread across the entire United States and in many socioeconomic strata. The only time anything gets as widespread acceptance by even a portion of the base like the mask thing is because a narrative was being pushed that most of the base was exposed to. That used to be a hard thing to do (easier if you could rely on a large religious bloc to see it one way), and now it's a frighteningly easy thing to do. That's the point.
Yes, more or less? I can't think of a single right-wing activist or politician who was truly rabble-rousing for the cause.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What other category would you put it in?
Equality vs hierarchy is literally the core of the difference between right and left, that is the definition of inherently political.
When you have "Black employees" who are racist, that's when. You know, "bend the knee" etc. Everybody white "does X" and are white supremacists.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
All: HN's guidelines apply irrespective of whether other people are following them or not. When commenting here, please consider your own behavior first, and make sure it's in the intended spirit.
Since literally forever.
Like when wasn't it?
Weak leadership that fostered a political culture that they eventually lost control of, and a workforce so engulfed in politics that they lost sight of focus. DHH playing sick is just the Cherry on top. I can't say that I don't feel an enormous amount of that petty German word towards to founders who love to preach about company culture having this blow up so spectacularly.
Let’s be honest - the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) committees that have appeared in companies and governments all over are simply a Trojan horse for far left progressive politics, and a vehicle to take over an institution by making a particular political ideology the official religion of that organization. DEI groups and policies usually serve to prevent any actual diversity, labeling dissenting thought as racist and coating their own racist policies (for example race or gender based hiring/promotion) in vague terms like “justice”. Usually those participating in DEI efforts are so distracted by it that they add no actual value to the business, and I’m sure the third of the company that joined that group at Basecamp were no different.
I’m betting Basecamp will pull through just fine without such toxic employees, and am glad to see companies like Basecamp and Coinbase take steps to keep from having their workplace and company weaponized by activists to serve divisive ideological purposes that have nothing to do with the company’s business.
> “The fact that you can be a white male, and come to this meeting and call people racist and say ‘white supremacy doesn't exist’ when it's blatant at this company is white privilege,” the employee said. “The fact that he wasn’t corrected and was in fact thanked — it makes me sick.”
Isn't this employee declaring that "white supremacy" is "blatant at this company" ? His reaction that such "white supremacy" and "white privilege" "wasn't corrected" made him "sick."
It's albeit not a direct demand that Ryan Singer be called out as a white supremacist, but it does seem to both imply it and express a strong grievance that it was not called out or corrected. Maybe you have a different interpretation of this?
If he made statements about white supremacy not existing at basecamp, then that was a horrible defense to accusations of white privilege at Basecamp. Shutting down discussions over arguments about phrasing makes it looks like Basecamp would prefer just to ignore issues with discrimination if they did exist.
I'm sorry, but do you or do you not know what was said at the meeting? Those two statements contradict each other, unless you're talking about two different meetings.
I quoted something provided by an employee who was there, at the meeting that this article is about.
I wasn't at the meeting, and it sounds like it was extremely charged. I don't think I can make nuanced comments about what was said there. But it seems clear that Singer made comments minimizing white supremacy in America, even his emailed reply does.
It was a bad idea and it wasn't handled well. But geesh.
Like it really doesn't matter what led to that meeting, because I've not seen a version of events where somehow that becomes not a disaster on your "so anyway we announced a policy about you in a blog post where we insulted a whole lot of you recently..." meeting.
The only justification for the DE&I committee is this list. The only other evidence of white supremacy is (lol) one guy saying he doesn't think it's there in the company.
Usually there'll be at least a claim of someone using the N-word, or employees of different races being treated unfairly. We can't even get that! This list existed, and was not handled well by management, and that's enough to accept that simply claiming the company is not white supremacist is too political.
Oh but the guy did share a Breitbart link once, I think, so the whole company was basically a half step away from burning crosses on lawns. Give me a break.
Still a far cry from evidence of white supremacy at the company.
It seems to me all these problems at Basecamp could have been avoided in the first place if these people were dismissed for their unhinged and cultish behavior as soon as they started to exhibit it. If they are suffering some sort of mental trauma the proper place to address that is therapy, not at work.
"Kinda sad, found out I was accepted into a twitch team because of my skin colour so that “diversity” can be preached & not for my values or the blood, sweat n tears I’ve put into my work. Plus then being left out of everything & watching from the sidelines continuously..." https://twitter.com/Sharesee/status/1389522366515056641
Also weird for someone to complain about "because of my skin colour" when she identifies herself on Twitter as "Bajan and British" first and foremost, not anything about her "values or the blood, sweat n tears".
The parent didn’t say inclusion is bad, but the execution of DEI policies is bad.
I wonder what things will be like for him when he becomes an adult.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If this is how these two are going to manage after decades at this, maybe they should bring in some executives willing to do the actual work of managing instead of bungling it themselves.
If you're curious to get going on this subject so as to not make these mistakes, "HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management" is a great resource.
“I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture,” Singer said. “I don't believe in a lot of the framing around implicit bias. I think a lot of this is actually racist.”
He continued: “Very often, if you express a dissenting view, you get called a Nazi. … I have not felt this is open territory for discussion. If we were to try to get into it as a group discussion it would be very painful and divisive.”
Singer concluded his remarks. Fried responded, “Thank you, Ryan.”
A handful of other speakers followed. Then a Black employee asked if the company could revisit Singer’s remarks. (I’m withholding the employee’s name and other identifying details out of colleagues’ fears that they could be targeted for harassment for speaking out.)
--
Interesting that comments objecting to political hyperbole gets the commenter suspended (leading to resignation) with his name all over the place, while those who called for his censure are deemed as needing to be protected from naming due to "harrassment for speaking out".
Consider someone for whom "white supremacy" means "it is right and appropriate to act deliberately to create and preserve white dominance of other races". Versus someone for whom it means "privilege exists in many, though often subtle ways, and advantages white, male, older, cis, het people".
It's a lot like how "defund police" means radically different things.
CRT definitions of 'White Supremacy' are not about 'people acting deliberately' to support it.
CRT laments that 'regular people' doing 'regular things' act unconsciously to support oppressive systems, hence 'White Supremacy'.
Making a film about 'something' and hiring those people you know to make it, who by virtue of your social network might be 'mostly white' - would be an example of 'White Supremacy'.
Ergo - in their view, unless you are actively fighting to dismantle the concept of whiteness - you're supporting 'White Supremacy'.
I believe there is a kernel of truth in systematic, even unconsciously biased systems, however, I don't remotely agree with many of the assertions. Unfortunately, to disagree with their assertions makes you a 'bad person' in their view.
Have a read [1]. A thesis of 'self examination' i.e. a fairly progressive individual addressing their own 'white supremacy' due to their lack of active assertion of issues of equity etc..
http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/06/25/disman...
The people not dismantling the system are not white supremacists, they just don't believe we have systemic racism.
I'm definitely not a white supremacist (I'm not even white) and I can't find a single instance of systemic racism.
Sure, I met a bunch of racist individuals, but that doesn't prove systemic racism.
https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/05/05/veil-dar...
"The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when “a veil of darkness” masks their race."
> Creating that database enabled the team to find the statistical evidence that a “veil of darkness” partially immunized blacks against traffic stops. That term and idea has been around since 2006 when it was used in a study that compared the race of 8,000 drivers in Oakland, California, who were stopped at any time of day or night over a six month period. But the findings from that study were inconclusive because the sample was too small to prove a link between the darkness of the sky and the race of the stopped drivers.
> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day – around 7 p.m. – when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.
> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables – the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
> Institutional racism was defined by Sir William Macpherson in the UK's Lawrence report (1999) as: "The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."
Let's say there are 3 groups. One group is 60% of the population, another is 30%, and the last is 10%. If all three groups have the exact same predisposition to favoring members over outsiders, the 60% group will experience prejudice from 40% of the population. The 10% population will experience it from 90% of the population. The 10% group will experience >10X the incidence of prejudice unless group favoritism is <= 0, which is literally impossible.
If that's what you mean when you say systemic/institutional, it feels like a completely useless thought to me. I, and I think many other people, hear 'systemic', and think 'coming from processes, rules, or procedures defined as part of a system', not from the people operating it. To make a better analogy, when I hear systemic car problem, I think the engine, transmission, or some other component of the car, not the driver.
I definitely get stopped more often than my white friends (albeit it changes based on the country). I've been asked several times by police officers in Europe whether I was an immigrant from North Africa with the implication I was dealing drugs.
A lot of north africans immigrants in the country where I was actually deal drugs and I look like I'm from North Africa, so it makes sense for police officers to question me more.
This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.
I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
An explicit bias, held by agents of the state, affecting their behavior towards the citizenry with no regard to individual innocence. Congrats, you've demonstrated systemic racism.
> I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
Kristallnacht wasn't legally authorized, either, but it'd be an odd claim that it didn't reflect systemic anti-Jewish bias in Nazi Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
systemic: > relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part.
How many racist people are needed before it's not a particular part"?
I don't want the government to intervene between me and a drug dealer to prevent me from buying what I want.
I don't want the government to spend billions of taxpayers money (and incurring debt - and devaluing my money) killing dudes in the middle east. There were definitely economical and geopolitical reasons to do the war on terror, but that's not something I wanted. 9/11 was merely the reason to attack a oil rich country.
I don't think there is anything racist with any of these wars.
Black people are disproportionally poorer and that's why they're overrepresented in drug related crimes and jail convictions. This happened mainly because stable families were destroyed in the 70s thanks to welfare policies. I'm not the best at explaining this kind of stuff, listen to Thomas Sowell for more.
I'm against prosecution for any drug related crime - but if drugs were legal, I'm sure a portion of poor people would move to whatever shady business they can do as long as they can survive and conviction rate wouldn't change much. Maybe street scams, maybe stealing, maybe begging.
Sure, go ahead and push for an end on the war on drugs, but you have to solve poverty and stable families as well if you want to see meaningful outcomes.
I think similarly of the war on drugs. Sure, we absolutely need to fix the precursors to addiction and the things that keep it entrenched, in order to keep black people from being victimized by addiction and imprisonment at such a high rate, but isn't the fact that this obviously unjust, bastardized, and warped form of health policy is at all acceptable to many voters, partially because a lot of white voters don't see it as affecting their communities (even though it definitely does, trust me).
You can say the same thing about the basic conditions of poverty- if a huge chunk of the population did not identify the injustices faced by those who are impoverished as "black people problems", and if the other enormous chunk of americans didn't identify them as "white trash and black people problems", maybe our policies about for-profit schools, food stamps, and HUD, would look a little more promising.
I'll lay my cards on the table, I believe that most structural exploitation occurs on an economic basis, for economic reasons. I think economic class is the primary stratification that supports most of our unjust political structures. However, it is also clear to me that, at an ideological level, these unjust measures hide themselves behind racial boundaries and political borders, so they can remain palatable to those who might have the power to change them. In other words, racism wasn't a motive, but it is a hell of a shield.
It's now tiresome to hear the defense "oh defund doesn't mean _defund_...." -- then don't say it. If the charge of white supremacy isn't meant to insult people based on race (overt racism, itself), then maybe convey the thought more clearly.
It sounds like the old adage, "the architecture of the company mimics the architecture of the software," applies very well here. In this case, the company's stance on politics scales about as well as Rails.
Now, Shopify clearly has the capacity to pull this off. But a smaller company that initially bet on Rails and is now facing a mountain of tech debt might not. To be fair: it is possible to write Rails applications in a way that you don't couple every aspect of your application to Rails internals. But in certain crucial ways, Rails encourages doing exactly that - dragging the DB along your whole application, for example.
I've been a Rails developer for a couple of years and I left that ecosystem in no small part because a huge chunk of that community seems to treat "architecture" as a dirty word and monkeypatching as a solution for everything (and also indulges into making fun of PHP or Java a bit too much for my taste). Of course, everyone's experiences are different and you can do great stuff with Rails, but for me it's something I don't really want to go back to.
In hindsight, it was probably a bad choice. At the time however, it was probably a good one.
Besides, things like AirBnB are the exceptions. Most sites don't get anywhere near the traffic they get, and Rails is often a good choice. Is it imperfect and are there trade-offs involved? Of course, but there are with anything.
No disagreement here. But the argument was made that Rails "scales pretty well" and I believe this is wrong — and I don't even mean in terms of performance (that probably too), but also in terms of architectural complexity. All these problems are solvable of course, but Rails makes it IMHO harder than some other technologies.
I don't doubt there are certain roadblocks though, and that some things fairly "simple" could be very hard and complex in Rails. I just never encountered them.
I've certainly seen a lot more overly complex crappy bespoke solutions when Rails + a few modifications would have been much better. This is like the old Greenspun's tenth rule: "any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." – there are a lot of "ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of half of Ruby on Rails" out there.
Right now I mostly write web stuff with Go, which is the exact opposite of Ruby/Rails in almost every way. In spite of being so different, I'm fairly comfterable with both approaches, and I'm not entirely sure what I prefer yet (even though I've been doing this in Go for 6 years now); I certainly spent a lot more time on basic stuff that Rails just provides.
What I'm criticising is that a lot of the official guides (and/or DHH himself) often lead to problems down the road. For example, it is encouraged to do things through model callbacks. Except, once you have your send_email logic in a after_create callback and you figure out that you actually need to create users in different contexts too - e.g. in bulk updates if you need to import some data, where you don't want to always send an email - it will be painful to rewrite your code since you have no abstraction where that code should reside. Even DHH recognised this problem, when he pushed through ActiveRecord::Base.suppress [1] which was consided problematic by most everyone else (including the Rails core team). A better architecture would have a "service" or "concern" layer that would handle such things, but "the Rails way" doesn't advocate for anything outside of models, views and controllers. Though, to be fair, many real-world codebases do include such a service layer - but it's done differently everywhere.
There is also no abstraction for request validations. You're supposed to do all your validations in the model layer. But what if you have multiple requests mapping to the same model layer? Maybe the validations you want to run if an admin user updates a table are very distinct from the validations that should be run for a regular user. Again, while you can use ActiveModel objects for that, Rails doesn't particularly encourage this design and you can end up with a lot of coupling between your persistence layer and something which is essentially part of the business layer, and that can be hard to unentangle later.
Another famous problem IMHO is (by default) every single test loading the whole Rails context. This makes fast unit tests basically impossible and therefore TDD painful (which, IMHO, is particularly bad in a dynamically and heavily monkeypatched language - if you don't have static guarantees, you at least want to be able to test your changes quickly).
All of these are things that in other ecosystems - for example Spring - are handled much better. Now, I have criticisms about Spring too (slow boot times, excessive use of reflection, Hibernate is a mess, etc.) but at least it gives you some good tools to cleanly separate different layers of your application. For example, validation is generally done at DTO level, long before any of your data ever hits the database.
[1] https://medium.com/spritle-software/rails-5-activerecord-sup...
Actually, Ruby on Rails in general is often "Rails + these 20 gems that everyone uses". I remember someone likening getting started with practical real-world Rails development as starting in Game of Thrones in the middle of season 5, which sounds about right to me.
[1]: https://github.com/bluerail/form_this
Source: I worked at Airbnb for five years and a very early team member told me this.
There are few stories that grab attention like hubris & comeuppance.
I'm beginning to understand why Andy Wingo emphasized filtering out fash when doing your hiring: https://www.wingolog.org/archives/2017/09/04/the-hardest-thi...
Really? Someone who writes that is where you're looking for guidance? Words fail me to describe how appalling this is.
Free clue: You can believe in strong free speech protection without being fascist. You'd be amazed at how many people do so - who believe in free speech on principle, not because they want to be able to say their secret horrible beliefs out loud. Putting them in the fascist category merely shows that your brain has turned off, and you're willing to harm completely innocent people in order to try to protect against your current bogeymen.
Did you read the rest of the blog post? Or did seeing "<my dearly held American value>=fash" stop your thought? As Andy says, free speech really only works in a context where everybody is of equal power. In an asymmetric power context, speech against those with less power is objectively more damaging than speech against those with more power, and is therefore more legitimately subject to restriction. Tolerating speech against the marginalized thus pulls society further in a pro-fascist direction.
You should really consider whether it makes sense to be more appalled by someone calling out tolerance of hate speech as fascist, than by the hate speech itself.
Yes, I read the rest of the blog post.
I see a couple problems with your position here. First, fascists - real fascists - aren't free speech advocates. They restrict the speech of their opponents. So calling someone fascist because they advocate free speech is rather off. In fact, your position is closer to the fascist one.
Second: "fash". Part of the fascist playbook is short, dismissive, contemptuous labels for their opponents. It's part of the dehumanization process. And here you are, doing exactly that.
That's two different parts of the fascist methodology that you (and the blog poster) are exhibiting. You might think carefully about that. When opposing tyranny, be careful of the methods of tyrants, lest you become one.
Sounds a hell of a lot like the house cleaning needing to happen is at the top.
That quote is the clearest indication that this isn’t a politics issue, it’s a management issue. This sort of “I don’t think it’s an issue so let’s not handle it” attitude applies just as much/more to actually getting work done. Classic bad manager 101 stuff.
You can have good success by being a bad manager of course! My bet is that there’s a lot of great ICs that counteract whatever messy people mgmt stuff is going on.
I would maybe be more sympathetic to DHH if it wasn't the guy who was so opinionated he pushed through Rails features that everyone else disliked or co-wrote several books on company culture that are glorified ads for basecamp (although "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" is still a thought-provoking read, at least in part). I can only imagine that he might be similarly self-righteous in workplace situations.
I think that, no matter your political views, if a situation gets out of hand that bad over matters that aren't even really directly related to workplace concerns, something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere.
It happened randomly and completely out of the blue: one software engineer mentioned he didn't believe in the gender gap and he was promptly replied 1000 words essays by other leaders in the company shutting him down, to show that "we don't tolerate certain behaviour".
Guidelines were created to avoid future political discussions in the workplace. No-one left because of it (immediately) and we sadly didn't become famous. The engineer who brought that up quit a few months after.
After that, half of the employees hated thinking there were people thinking something different from them in the company, the other half was afraid to talk in public.
Again, I don't think there was a particular situation in the company: just a naive person who likes to talk frankly and people who get offended and are quick to attack in order to defend the "safe space" for the people who share their beliefs.
(Or maybe it also shows that being a fully-remote company can have downsides, such as coworkers not socialising enough and therefore not trusting each other? Who knows. DHH certainly has championed the "remote work for everyone" approach countless times.)
Yes, it absolutely is the climate here. it’s awful. tribalism, division, distrust and eagerness to demonize anyone who doesn’t tow your line.
we’re doomed
If I were at a company of ~58 people, and ~20 of them were forming a DE&I committee to evaluate the company's vendor relationships, speakers, etc., I'd be tempted to join just to get the potential target off of my back. They're not going to fire 1/3 of the workforce, after all.
edit: "here" is okta, not basecamp
How am I supposed to talk about my husband doing the housekeeping?
"My Man Spouse is doing the domestic science"
> 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
Are all gendered words banned?
What the hell happened to us?!
Yup. Pro tip: If you're at a SV-influenced company and you find yourself talking about your personal life, don't say "husband," "wife," "boyfriend," or "girlfriend;" say "partner." That signals that you're an Ally rather than an Enemy.
You'll notice other weird speech patterns too. Pay attention to them; they're meaningful.
"More inclusive: Spouses/partners <> Less inclusive: Wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends"
What if my wife would prefer if I referred to her as my "wife" instead of as a generic, faceless "partner"? By insisting that I refer to her as a genderless "partner", you are failing to respect her chosen pronoun.
Because I have no clue who your partner is (or really if you have one) so I shouldn't assume until I have that information. Note that the words in the example are all plural, presumably referring to multiple other peoples' partners.
This isn't any woke thing - its just a "don't reveal information that isn't necessary."
You earn the details of my life by being my friend, not through a contractual relationship.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
"Co-founder + CEO of @okta, proud husband + father, addicted to exercise."
Similar verbiage on their company site as well haha
wtf
Maybe see it as a chance to learn and grow instead of something to resent and run from?
I think there's a very fine balance to strike where you want programs to reach the people who benefit -- and certainly leaders and co-workers who need to be more inclusive -- without making those you're trying to help feel uncomfortable by having it so front and center that those who'd like to sit out can't. It's a tough balance, and I've seen companies both go too far and not far enough.
All this is to say I can imagine a situation where OP's environment really is making them more uncomfortable than what many (most?) URM's experience in the work place. Can't say for sure without knowing specifics, of course. It just isn't always a case of "more is better."
The situation the person is in isn't great and leaving sounds worth doing but I didn't think that was what the response was about though I can see how the implication to not run away could be interpreted in a different way
It might be forgivable if the studies showed that this hyper focus on race at work actually reduced racism, but it doesn’t. It’s just pure evil.
That’s the society you’re trying to build.
ETA: people are logging their disagreement in downvotes but I haven’t seen a counter argument to this at any point in this thread, I’m ok with the dv, just interested in hearing the opposing view.
Comparing "you are now in a situation where you may have an opportunity to empathise with difficulties others have had" to "you are trying to build a society where more fortunate people are harmed in the name of sameness" doesn't resonate at all.
Somehow it only comes out when the person preaching it feels extreme pity for the person in need of "empathy" and most importantly the preacher is the only one who really understands how to give that empathy, no one else is able to reach their level of enlightenment. Of course this creates a problem when two such preachers are in the same room...
Additionally, most of the time the pitied person doesn't want your pity or empathy they just want to live their life and are usually pretty happy until you come along and start telling them they need empathy and how bad their life really is.
ETA: I’ve looked over your comments, aside from one that appears to be sarcastic everything you say has a response to it. I added my own comment to one of them as well. I think resigning ourselves to Twitter-like flame wars without actually talking things out isn’t very hn like at all.
Edit: I read your edit. It appears that in your mind, comments that disagree with you resemble a Twitter flame war, and comments agreeing with you are well articulated and thoughtful. In reality, your comments are just as negative and one-sided as the others you disparage.
Just the opposite, I welcome disagreement. I just don’t like being attacked without knowing why.
I kid but obviously a downvote is a negative response to something I wrote, but without the responsibility of actually backing up why they’re having that negative response. I’m kinda lost as to why we’re even having this discussion, you appear upset that I wanted to hear why people were downvoting me. Why does that upset you?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113264/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
2021: Uh...guys...?
I’d bet remote work was a strong contributor. People don’t form the same humanizing attachments remotely as they do in person, in my experience.
Did you read that comment about Basecamp employees "crying and screaming at their screens" after the Zoom meeting? That just sounds so much like people who are both venting their spleens and at the same time have no connection to their workplace.
At the risk of armchair quarterbacking, the whole thing looks like a broken culture, and I get the impression nobody knew just how broken it was until now. Nor do I think any one person or action is to blame. I’d bet that it’s been festering for years.
It’s a fascinating case study, though, and I’m glad we have a view into it.
You don't have to leave it anonymous; I think most people know what Google is.
/s
Remember, the proximate cause here was something that directly related to what happened at work.
It's not the case that forming a committee that's over 1/3 the size of the company to do unprompted evaluation of vendor relationships for DE&I and approval of guest speakers follows logically from, "there used to be a list of funny sounding names and management didn't handle it well."
Yeah that seems to have been the trigger but I'm not sure that such a list should lead to everything described in the article.
How that lead to demanding someone denounce white supremacy at a meeting seems like things have long since disconnected from the funny names list.
It's not about being successful. It's about not having an ego and acting like you're better than everyone else just because you are successful. Americans are much more willing to tolerate this behaviour than Australians.
Also, I guess this is personal, but a little humility is good for everyone, IMHO, and doesn't necessarily contradict a healthy dose of self-confidence either. DHH seems to have little of it — at least judging from his books and also from his Twitter.
I think there's a lot of cross-purpose arguing about it all. It's likely that they're a bit painful to work for AND that as founders they'd have concerns about their paid staff getting distracted from their mission at work.
(With no small amount of irony, I find that many "normal" people have a very hard time truly empathising with the ways in which people on the spectrum are different.)
But it doesn't even have to be something as categorisable as the spectrum. Just as people don't choose their genetics or initial brain chemistry, it's equally true to say that nobody chose their genetic parents or their upbringing. People are the product of their environment; we would do well to keep this in mind even when we (rightly) castigate people for their misdeeds.
The autism spectrum is a continuum that fades into normality, with no clear boundary. Part of that continuum is individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP), who have significantly more autistic traits than the average person does, but not enough to reach the diagnostic cutoff for ASD. That cutoff varies from clinician to clinician, and is moving over time, which renders the boundary between BAP and ASD particularly fuzzy.
> (With no small amount of irony, I find that many "normal" people have a very hard time truly empathising with the ways in which people on the spectrum are different.)
Damian Milton speaks of the "double empathy problem" – it is claimed that a defining trait of autism is deficits in empathy, and yet very many non-autistic people are at least as deficient in empathy for autistic people.
Based on my own experiences (which are very limited) I don't see a deficit of empathy in people on the spectrum. What I do see is someone who sees the world differently (has a different kind of "filter" to distinguish signal from noise) which causes the response to stimulus to be different. If you see the world differently, your internal model of what another person is is different, and therefore the way one expresses their empathy is different.
Arguably this isn't so different to how concepts of honour and respect can vary greatly between cultures.
If you want to attract and keep talent you need to listen to their views and involve in them defining the values of the company.
As a personal example, I work in a shared office space. If a vocal tenant talks loudly about politics, even if it's something I agree with, I cringe and worry that it creates a less welcoming space for anyone in the room that doesn't agree with the points. Seems reasonable that they should expect an office where they can work without feeling on edge.
If it was purely about talking about politics at work then everyone wouldn't have resigned.
I read the first third-party piece about this and nothing sounded outrageous. Read Jason and DHH's pieces, and then DHH's follow-up entry. I read Jane Yang's bit. And I read some Twitter threads from employees.
Obviously employees are well within their rights to want a workplace where they form HR policy and the founders can want another scenario if they think it's to the detriment of their product. Former can move on to another workplace. Founders can wear the blowback of their decision.
eg. if Basecamp got bulk gym memberships at 20$/employee but each employee would have to sign up at 40$ per person, Basecamp paying each employee 20$ would not be the same as giving each employee a gym membership.
Fair enough that it might not work so well in subsequent years due to taxes.
A lot of the complaints or commentary I've seen across a few issues, leaving aside this more acute issue was that DHH and JF were entirely comfortable espousing _their_ opinions and feelings on things, but a lot less interested in hearing other people's.
If I'd founded something 20+ years ago (well, I have), and at some point a third of the business was putting work time into deciding HR policy that was alienating other staff, I'd be looking at resolving it too. I've worked for myself for 20+ years so can't be sure, but I haven't heard of anything like that equality-council from any friends working here in Australia. This situation might be more unique to current USA?
They're also within their rights to say all employees will only make minimum wage, and that their products will now be marked up 1000%, but that doesn't mean employees or customers have to accept that.
If you came across a list that contained names that were being laughed at because of their ethnicity, and you shared that ethnicity, would you feel comfortable working with the people making those jokes?
Assuming that it wasn't malicious or targeted, I'd expect the managerial response to be "Hey - this list is not really showing respect to our customers on a couple of fronts, so please wipe it ASAP. I understand that you weren't aware of why it's truly problematic, but you're aware now and I don't expect to see something like this again."
As I've said elsewhere though, I don't live in a place that feels as politically polarised, so I'm sure that's a serious factor.
Do you have sources for this, or anonymous blogs? Because I'd be concerned what "like" means here. It's obviously not literally this, otherwise it'd the word 'literal'. But to me, the ambiguity can be read (in bad faith) as "I think LGBTQ identities, broadly, are bullshit, and I shouldn't respect a direct report who identifies as bisexual, it's as ridiculous as someone who is believes they're a wolf sexually".
A little bit of disambiguity would do a long way here, as I genuinely can't tell if this is someone who thinks asexuals, bisexuals, etc. are bullshit not worth respecting (aka, a place of ignorance of the speaker), or if Google is literally saying that unheard-of sexual identities are part of its HR policies (which I've never heard of and would love to know to avoid working at Google in the future.)
Although I'm also just some random stranger on the internet, so take this post as you will.
I agree for the most part there. Less so the founders, I think there sin runs more along the lines of being extremely naive (but in a way a lot of people might be, especially when the alternative might be to accept you're screwed).
> something must have gone fundamentally wrong much earlier. These levels of tension and distrust don't just arise out of nowhere.
Well, the tensions exist because they're being pushed for by large influences societally for political gain. The problem is they promoted a workplace environment where it was considered okay to bring it in, as well as to poke fun at clients (which is what kicked it all off).
I see this as an example of the cost of free doughnuts.[1] It's well known that we value the loss of something as more than the gain of something, and we value free things for far more than they're worth. Employees were given free reign for a long time in ways that weren't all that conducive to a diverse work environment or to respecting clients. Now they are being told not to do things that most work places already expect you to know enough not to do, either by explicitly telling you or by culture, such as don't blast your political views out to everyone, and don't be disrespectful to the clients, as that's where your paycheck comes from. My guess is the majority of people that leave if honestly reflecting on this in a few years would acknowledge that maybe announcing and focusing on your differences with those you need to spend time with is not as good a strategy for a happy and productive workplace as focusing on your similarities.
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
which would be maybe more excusable if it didn't come from the guys who wrote several books about how awesomely they run their company. I guess that's why my sympathy for their situation is somewhat limited.
I mean, it's easy to think you're doing well because you got lucky in personnel and timing for how things went, but maybe have a bit more introspection before writing a book about it and how good your ideas were (there's a lot of non-fiction that could be said about...).
If I have sympathy for them, I think it would be because I could see myself making the exact same mistakes: writing confidently as my business road a wave of great timing, thinking that emboldened and involved employees were great for company culture, and then deciding that maybe it was a risky distraction.
Fried and DHH are a lot of things, but naive isn’t one of them.
How anyone can look at this debacle and think of the employees as anything but victims, and the founders as anything but reactionary blowhards, is absolutely incoherent to me.
The founders are obviously the ones in the wrong here, and obviously come out with shattered reputations.
They do not accept non-racist environments, only anti-racist ones. They do not accept that businesses be politically neutral. Businesses must take political stances internally and publicly. To do anything less, or to remain silent, is to be complicit in what they see as white supremacy and systemic racism. And if you disagree with those people, you will be accused of being racist, as Singer was.
The irony, of course, is that Hansson and Fried built a reputation around righteousness and wokeness, and then it came for them, because they were two white guys with power.
And when they realized what was happening, they executed their cultural pivot very poorly. They came out with a hard ban on a bunch of people who have the talent to work elsewhere.
Coinbase, at least, had the good sense to focus on the positive, their orientation as a mission-focused company. At the same time, Coinbase was making its employees rich with options and headed for an IPO.
The two companies will be paired case studies at HBS someday about how to screw it up and how to do it right.
That's extremely predictable at this point.
Sounds like they talked the talk, but when it came to walking the walk, they walked back and told everyone to be quiet.
Perhaps they are the ones working toward a politically neutral, non-racist environment, and it is you who won't accept it.
In truth, I don't believe either they or you could properly identify what a politically neutral environment really looks like, and you're probably all unreliable and serving your own ends.
At my company that I was formally employed at before moving on to my current startup, we had a minority of employees very aggressively and vocally demanding that the CEO issue an anti-racism statement after the George Floyd murder. A statement was issue condemning what happened and racism. They were not satisfied with this and demanded that the exact words black lives matter be used and also that a donation to the BLM organization be made.
The company sold data analysis software targeted at Excel power users. It didn't have any offices in Minnesota. The idea that the company needed to make these statements was insane. They don't control police forces in Minneapolis they don't control police forces anywhere.
It is literally not their business to comment on these matters.
And something I have repeatedly stated and noticed is that the employees making these demands are mediocre at best. I rarely see talented developers doing this because they're too busy working.
I love the privilege on display here. You can ignore racial inequality issues because "they are too distracting," meanwhile I have to wake up each morning, read yet another one of my brothers and sisters has been killed by police, and I still have to run my business. Your mediocrity exist in your complacently to the status-quo. On a daily basis we innovate, build, ship, and push tech more than you could ever hope -- and we don't need to ban "political discussions" at work.
If a business chooses to condemn something without backing up that solidarity with meaningful resources and capital, they should be criticized.
You act as if the only people who are killed by police are "one of my brothers and sisters".
Let's unpack that, shall we?
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
Roughly 3/4 of people killed by police in the US are not one of your "brothers and sisters" if by "brothers and sisters" you are referring to humans who share your melanin content and location of ancestral origin (of course all humans are descended from African humans, but to suit the purposes of demagogues, we can ignore that and just stop at the arbitrary point in lineage where we can maximize division to reap power).
As you read this, it is extremely likely that you cant name a single one of the non-black people killed by police last year, can you? Of course not. Or even in the last 5 years, can you? There are 3 times as many of these people as the group you are ethnocentrically focused on.
Let's also talk about the "sisters" aspect. Statistically, women killed by police are minimal. The referenced website, run by activists, removed the filter for women, but you can download the data yourself to see that it's a minimal amount.
Based on the logic of this movement created by people who don't understand basic stats, the discrepancy between men and women must mean that police are systemically sexist against men, right? Because only the outcome matters, and all explanations except bigotry must be ignored.
A big difference these days is that when a non-black person is wrongfully shot by police, the complete lack of national media coverage allows the police to get off scot free.
See Daniel Shaver, who was recorded on camera being executed, unarmed in his underwear, begging for his life, by a psycho cop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv_eyGw4s3w
Unlike Chauvin, said psycho cop was exonerated and dismissed with a full pension, as if he honorable retired. Where were you and BLM? Nowhere, because it's a bigoted, ethnocentric movement designed to divide rather than unite.
You should ask yourself why you used the phrase "brothers and sisters" about people who share your ethnnicity, and why you don't use it for all humans, like I do. Ask yourself if you've been sucked into the precursor to pure racism, ethnocentrism. Ask yourself if you've allowed yourself to be misinformed by media designed to monetize your confirmation bias, rather than inform you.
>Black people were 28% of those killed by police in 2020 despite being only 13% of the population.
You basically just proved the point you were replying to, that racial inequality exists in policing.
I'm asking in good faith, because I think you have insightful comments and I'm curious, even if I disagree with you on a few things.
Just knowing the percentage of men owning guns is way higher than women owning guns would change your perceived threat level based on sex.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/29/how-male-an...
Also feels safe to assume men murder at a higher rate, are cereal killers, and generally a more dangerous type of human than a female.
Enjoy your sad, weird life https://andrew.im/
What "real views"? He laid out a fairly neutral and convincing case for apolitical workspaces.
I can't tell if your posts are parody or not.
Have a nice day.
Taught himself how to code at the library.
He was a recipient of the Thiel Fellowship. You get $100,000 for 2 years of living expenses and you get to work on whatever.
Unfortunately he doesn't seem to blog about that and instead focuses on the time a cop forced his head into a steering wheel because he reached in his pocket.
The human mind gravitates towards the negative, probably due to evolutionary pressures.
The US is such a racist place that a white dude who is a well-known Republican gave him $100,000 to do whatever for 2 years but he ignores that and focuses on the negative experiences in his life with the minority of whites who are bigots, ignoring the kindness he clearly must have come across.
I can relate because I had a similar background to him in the sense where I had a very poor and also drug addicted mother who was in and out of homeless shelters. Eventually when my father was able to locate me I got to have a somewhat normal life compared to that, although we were technically below poverty line income wise.
I don't think he ever got that lucky and I can't imagine what he's been through. He seems to have done great things already. I wish him well, and hope he learns to recognize how fortunate he has been in other ways. If being given 100 grand to do whatever for 2 years isn't privilege, then I don't know what is.
Edit:
Importantly, I forgot to add that he CLEARLY capitalized on that fellowship. He's created a pretty badass startup that leverage video/data streaming to allow playing of console/pc games on iOS/Android/etc. Personally of note for me, his startup created a grpc-like serialization format (bebop) that I looked at months ago for a project I was working on. The lesson/reminder for me is that behind every post on the internet is a human being who I probably have a ton in common with. Plus, anyone who buys an old Camaro and fixes it up themselves is automatically relegated to a higher status in my embarrassingly country boy worldview, lol.
Really, this whole write-up about him is a thinly veiled backhanded compliment. Extremely petty and childish.
No, it's what you wrote that means you're passive aggressive.
>Unfortunately he doesn't seem to blog about that and instead focuses on the time a cop forced his head into a steering wheel because he reached in his pocket.
>The human mind gravitates towards the negative, probably due to evolutionary pressures.
>The US is such a racist place that a white dude who is a well-known Republican gave him $100,000 to do whatever for 2 years but he ignores that and focuses on the negative experiences in his life
>I wish him well, and hope he learns to recognize how fortunate he has been in other ways. If being given 100 grand to do whatever for 2 years isn't privilege, then I don't know what is.
This is the most condescending thing I've read in a while, and clearly a backhanded compliment.
I read Mr. Sampson's blog, and I literally got tears in my eyes. I regretted engaging with him in the way I did, but HN doesn't let me delete posts. It was also too late to edit them.
He and I had something in common, and it's just extremely rare to encounter fellow coders who spent some part of their childhood in "the system" (shelters, foster care, etc) like I did. I've also seen hardcore racists who disown their children for dating a person of color. I even tried to dissuade a man (he was a boss on a construction site i worked at) one time from doing this to his daughter. The hatred in his heart was so deep that it was like talking to a wall.
I saw a commenter continuing to engage, and I wanted to express my emotions I felt after reading his blog. I understand the anger too. I remembered, especially in my mid to late 20s, having the suppressed memories/emotions come back and fuck up my head, and often consume me. It was an attempt to relate and process, and yes, a reminder that these negative memories cause us to forget about being grateful for the good things and good people we encounter on a daily basis. The dehumanization of people who disagree with us, is bad, and I'm not pretending I'm not part of the problem, including some asshole things I said in this thread, which I regret.
Based on your outright hostility and strong political beliefs (you clearly have politics incorporated into your identity), I doubt you'll believe my explanation, but I'm writing this in the off-chance that Mr. Sampson sees this. He's embarked on a difficult path with his startup, and I sincerely wish him well. That's it.
https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/mesa-rally-...
Please don't lie and spread hateful rhetoric like the idea that BLM is "bigoted" (against whom, the police?). BLM activists actually were involved in a lot of the Daniel Shaver activism. It is a travesty that the cop that killed him wasn't held accountable, but trying to blame the BLM movement for that when then, and now, they're actively trying to make changes to that system, in ways that are helpful to people of all races, makes me think you're being driven by an irrational hate and fear of the BLM movement.
> ethnocentrism
This word doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. "Ethnocentrism" is an antonym of cultural relativism, which I guess could be seen as a sort of supremacy ideology, but not in the way you seem to be using it.
> Based on the logic of this movement created by people who don't understand basic stats, the discrepancy between men and women must mean that police are systemically sexist against men, right? Because only the outcome matters, and all explanations except bigotry must be ignored.
Certainly there are ways that society fails men, yes. It frames them as more violent and dangerous, and because of this I would indeed expect that (and the stats back up) that men are killed, by police disproportionately compared to women, basically no matter how you measure.
Literally the only substantial voice that stood up and went to bat for Daniel Shaver was BLM. You're right, police violence is far from isolated to Black people. Most BLM activists would agree that stopping police violence has multi-racial benefits!
I don't believe this is true. Can you like anything on BlackLivesMatter.com that touches on Daniel Shaver's death?
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/12/09/black-lives-mat...
https://www.facebook.com/JusticeForDaniel/photos/i-just-want...
| BlackLivesMatter.com
The movement is so much more than that website. There's also a big difference between black lives matter and Black Lives Matter.
Again, where is any official BlackLivesMatter material on Daniel Shaver?
The website is not the movement.
Second, both of those "opinion pieces" have references to high profile black lives matter activists (deray, shaun king, etc) speaking out about Daniel Shaver, so that's about as official as you're going to get.
Third, that "facebook post" documents an actual event organized by the family of Daniel Shaver, thanking the local blm chapter for their support.
If you have a more substantial voice that has done more than blm in bringing attention to this issue in a productive way, feel free to bring that forward.
Which was three years after BLM was created.
>it's not hard to understand that black lives matter is a decentralized movement that is not centrally represented.
There are official non-profit organizations that represent the decentralized groups, and you can't find anything from there, which proves my point.
>Second, both of those "opinion pieces" have references to high profile black lives matter activists (deray, shaun king
AHAHAHAHA I needed my lunchtime laugh. Talcum X, AHAHAHAHA!
>Third, that "facebook post" documents an actual event organized by the family of Daniel Shaver, thanking the local blm chapter for their support.
Can't see where it says any of that. Not that it matters, a FB post proves nothing of the GP's claim. This is Trump supporter-level reaching: "LOOK AT THIS FB PHOTO AS PROOF!"
>If you have a more substantial voice that has done more than blm in bringing attention to this issue in a productive way, feel free to bring that forward.
No, you make the claim, you supply evidence that supports that claim. Welcome to the Internet.
I provided evidence, now you provide a counter-claim that there was more substantial support from non-blm sources.
Seems to me you have a bone to pick about the "official" blm non-profits and can't seem to approach this subject rationally.
Everybody that's donated to BLM does, as do the community organizers that leverage these groups, and the media and news they generate, etc.
>You've had plenty of time to learn this.
IMAX-level projection on not getting it. It's apparent you don't understand the basic concepts.
>I provided evidence
No you didn't. You provided nothing. I'll ask again: find me some official collateral which back up GP's "literally the only substantial voice" claim.
>Seems to me you have a bone to pick about the "official" blm non-profits and can't seem to approach this subject rationally.
You have this backwards. The only logical and rational way to back up this claim is to post proof of it. "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
What about climate change? Should they also commit meaningful capital and resources to that?
How should they balance those with other priorities, like their fiduciary duty to their shareholders?
Unless they have the same parents, they are not your brothers and sisters more than OP is. Imagine an us-vs-then based on skin color is extremely racist and should be criticized.
How? 95% of the employees that left Basecamp have pronouns in their Twitter bios. There’s your signal.
It's basic, morally right, and easily completed during a single lunch break. There's absolutely no reason to overthink this.
BLM and their cohorts were never elected to be representatives of black Americans. The default assumption of upper middle class whites who grew up in segregated suburbs is that they must be representative and most black Americans share their very radical views. I can assure you they do not and opinion polls show this.
I spent a few years in foster care and the best family I was in was a black family in Virginia where the head of household was a police officer and his wife was a public defender in a neighboring county. They and most of their church congregation absolutely despise black lives matter the organization, not the message obviously.
The organization gave itself that name to deliberately overload a moral message with their off-putting, alien, and radical ideology.
Your comment is proof that this strategy worked because if I disagree with any single element of the organization and therefore don't donate, according to your comment I am no longer morally correct and must not think that black lives matter. It's a simplistic and moralistic take evidence by your absolute moral certainty.
It's weird that hold this case up as an example of unreasonable behavior on the employees part when in actuality their requests are extremely normal and reasonable.
In the absence of any specific connection to your business, there are plenty of worthy causes (race inequalities, but also gender inequalities, world hunger, ...) and you can't demand that your company (or any company) actively contribute to all of them lest they be called out for being anti-X.
It seems that there was at the very least one instance of behavior that employees perceived as outwardly racist (the names list) and were seeking to address issues surrounding that behavior.
On the outside, it’s hard to know much more about the details, but it also would appear that employees took issue with other somewhat minor slights that may have amounted to a pattern of behavior, in particular relating to someone with a lot of authority at base camp, who was then given a pass under the guise of political differences.
The names list hasn't been clearly established as racist. If you have 10 times the European names as you have Asian names, is it racist against Asians, or were there "funny" names in all groups?
The perception of racism is not necessarily racism. That is precisely the point that is being argued. The claim of white supremacy does not mean that an organization is white supremacist. Big claims need big evidence. I haven't seen it.
Minor slights happen. They are inevitable in daily life no matter what your race, gender, sexual orientation or other identity. If you use minor slights to create an uproar in the context of your job, you are a bad employee who should be fired. Tying minor slights to genocide is one way of creating an uproar.
Singer had power and seniority at Basecamp. He once linked to a Breitbart page. While I differ with Breitbart on most issues, I do not see that as prima facie evidence that Singer is white supremacist or racist.
Just because Singer is a white male with authority does not make him, by definition, a white supremacist or a racist.
And if the only cure for that kind of "white supremacy" is replacing all the white males with any power or authority with people of other identities, then I'm opposed to that "cure," because it is a racist and discriminatory cure based on false generalizations about genders and racial groups.
With that framing, the perception of whether the list was racist does matter as it explains their motivation. Because they did perceive the list to be racist, it’s just not the case that they were taking issue with the idea of being race neutral.
Second, you are jumping to wild conclusions about what they were asking for. At no point did anyone say that “all white males with any power or authority” must be replaced. If that were true, it would stand to reason that they’d aim their ire at the entire leadership structure itself rather than on the one individual. Your blanket assertion may have some grounding in your personal experiences, but it is overly broad in this instance.
Finally, while the equivalence between minor slights and genocide has been made, that was not the reason why I brought it up. The reason why I mention minor slights is that, while they may be minor in isolation, when taken in context together they can reveal a pattern of behavior that is hard to explain to those on the outside, and thus is difficult to perceive to us as observers. In this instance it seemed that employees wanted to shave a forum to address this and were shut down.
I don't think we know their true motivation. Anyone can claim to perceive something as racist. We cannot control their sense of offense. The act they claim to be racist may or may not be racist.
But what advocates of critical race theory have found is that, by claiming that something is racist, they can bring pressure on their employers.
That is precisely what happened here. Basecamp is now under tremendous pressure. Plenty of ire has been focused on the co-founders as well as Singer. Singer has quit, though we don't know the facts of the case. Accusations of racism are fatal to one's career, whether or not they have a basis in fact.
Another word for "revealed pattern" is "narrative." Many narratives can be told about the same set of facts. And many of those narratives are deeply subjective, or driven by ideology.
I could take many minor actions by Jane Yang and others at Basecamp and interpret them as a power grab.
To be clear, I know that some people and companies do act in racist ways. Such behavior is illegal and should be punished. But the evidentiary bar to establish that is high. That bar has not yet been met here.
In this case, we have very serious accusations and very little evidence, evidence that can be interpreted in several ways. But Basecamp and Singer have already suffered serious consequences, and the claims have been aired publicly.
So they were able to create a scandal without going through the effort of proving anything.
And this is the crux of the issue. Ones entire interpretation of these issues relies on whether or not one believes racism exists as a structural problem or not. Opponents reduce this down to a simple difference of opinion, but if you see that the world treats certain groups differently than others, it is not mere difference of opinion, there are real, tangible consequences that go along with that disagreement.
The thing that you get wrong, that so many people get wrong on all sides of this, is that the issue at hand here isn’t about whether Singer is himself a racist person. When people speak of “white supremacy” refers to a structural system within society that treats people differently on the basis of their race, in a hierarchy that places white people at the top. It’s not a matter of individual intent, but the culmination of ways that people act differently towards each other that nets out to place people in different positions within society.
I think it’s reasonable to disagree on how you go about remedying that situation, but the assertion that “people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race” shouldn’t be that controversial of a statement.
The person(s) that attacked Singer used social justice activist techniques, claim of and demand for denouncing "white supremacy" in order to reduce a viewpoint opponents moral authority, where "white supremacy" uses the social justice unstated redefinition of the colloquial term to mean "policy or habitual behavior that could perpetrate outcomes not in alignment with social justice dogma".
This activist technique is a kafka trap with no good answer. Keeping that in mind its pretty clear where the accuser comes from.
As a side-note: a discussion/debate between viewpoint opponent break down if serious accusation are made without evidence, and a healthy discussion and work environment need to exclude such bad actors. Kudos to basecamp and coinbase for adopting policies that discourage such behavior.
If you agree with both of those statements, do you believe white peoples are still given a higher place in society? Do you believe that to no longer be the case?
I’ll limit this to the United States.
You are asking a question positioned using very low-fidelity and poorly scoped social justice dogma.
With Nigerians topping educaction and income stats clearly low-fidelity race characteristics is not a sufficient predictor of outcome. Likewise, asian americans have the highest median income so being majority does not predict the best outcome.
In addition to this, official identity based government and company policies create asymmetry in official hiring as well as promotion policies that favor BIPOC and women.
What does seem like a great predictor is being born into a family-focused culture where kids education is extremely important. This is a commonality between sub-cultures that do well, and skin color is no great predictor for culture. Some of the sub-cultures that does the worst have high rates of single parenting, including sub-cultures of white culture, and single parenting is also a great predictor of lower household income.
Call that social justice dogma if you want, but I’d consider it an objective fact.
Edit: because it seems to be unclear. The word “was” was in reference to the past. It’s an objective fact that there _was_ an explicit system of racial hierarchy in the United States.
When you think it's explicit instead of implicit you are in a minority even amongst social justice adherents. Social justice started focusing on "implicit" bias and racism because the instances of explicit racism in the 2000s were not numerous enough to support its activist objective of tearing down the system and replacing it.
The whole concept of "systemic oppression" is based around this realization, where social justice argue that capitalism fool people into being happy and content so that they don't oppose an implicitly oppressive system that traps them in a false reality.
> Call that social justice dogma if you want, but I’d consider it an objective fact.
The examples in my previous message show that it's neither descriptive nor factual.
Social justice prescribe a totalizing worldview that use an every-increasing set of politically motivated identity groups to further an activist objective. The objective is to tear down the system and the promise is a utopia once everyone agrees with the utopic vision.
Given the history of the United States, wherein there existed both legal and extralegal forms of racial discrimination, the primary assertion is that while the obvious forms of racial discrimination have been abolished, there continue be forms of systematic racial discrimination. These people assert that this is a bad thing and it should be corrected. This is not about bringing about a utopia, but about righting a wrong.
None of this is “totalizing”. Indeed, even in the past, during slavery and Jim Crow, you had examples of successful black people and other POC (Web Debois, Fredrick Douglass). The argument is simply that POC face barriers that white people simply don’t face, not that those barriers are impossible to overcome.
In social justice activism "racism" is redefined to mean "inequitable outcomes". So of cause with this change of definition you can say the "group" experience racism when you really just mean that one group does better than another. DEI is the prescribed social justice solution, ignoring how the equity doctrine has destroyed every society it touched.
If you use the colloqial definition of racism then affirmative action, diversity quotas, DEI preferential hiring&promotion are all widespread policies that discriminate against white people based upon their race. DEI programs also use negative racial profiling and stereotyping. The claim that white people do not experience racism is therefore objectively wrong.
So social justice is arguing for explicit racist policies to fix "implicit racism", which really means "equitable outcomes"
The notion that DEI advocates have redefined racism to mean “inequitable outcomes” is a framing that has been constructed by conservatives and IDW types, but it is _not_ what DEI is about.
DEI is about what _explains_ the inequitable outcomes.
Given the history of western societies and the United States in particular, it is reasonable to assert that there should be a burden of proof to show that there are no longer racial privileges rather than the converse. Especially when the same hierarchy is displayed when looking at patterns of racial inequalities today. Further, there is significant scholarship that draws direct lines between things like redlining, housing convenants, and sentencing disparities and those same racial inequalities.
There are really only two classes of descriptions that can explain such disparities.
1. All people are inherently equally capable regardless of racial categorization, the disparities we observe at due to barriers placed in front of disadvantaged groups.
Or
2. Some groups are more capable of others, either due to biological or cultural factors.
2 has played out throughout the history of European colonization in different forms, both as a “scientific” practice and through cultural chauvinism. Both are general regarded as white supremacy, because that’s a fairly appropriate label.
One place I do agree with you however is here: “The claim that white people don’t experience racism is objectively wrong”
The social justice side actually agrees with you and has just started an unhelpful fight over semantics. Whether you want to call is “racism” or “prejudice” it’s not like there is anything special about white people that makes it impossible to discrimination against them. That does differ, though, from structural level discrimination.
The second term of the social justice prescribed D(iversity)E(quity)I(nclusion) solution, equity, literally means redistribution of outcomes.
> The social justice side actually agrees with you and has just started an unhelpful fight over semantics. Whether you want to call is “racism” or “prejudice” it’s not like there is anything special about white people that makes it impossible to discrimination against them. That does differ, though, from structural level discrimination.
How are DEI programs, affirmative action and diversity quotas for hiring&promotion not structural level discrimination? These are policies and laws pushed by the government and corporations.
> The notion that DEI advocates have redefined racism to mean “inequitable outcomes” is a framing that has been constructed by conservatives and IDW types, but it is _not_ what DEI is about.
> DEI is about what _explains_ the inequitable outcomes.
There are more than 3 possible explanations. The most likely one is that your categories, race, are not well fitted to what you are trying to explain. For instance, Nigerians do incredibly well and are considered black and most of them came here not rich.
You are also comparing over timeframes that don't make sense. The america of today is not even comprised of the same populations, and the people that lived these injustices died a looong time ago. As recent as in 1950 89.3% were white with most of the remainder black. Today 60% white, 18.5% hispanic, 12.5% black, 5.8% Asian, 2.3% multirace, and 0.9% other.
Most wealth and status is also currently not gained through inheritance. Most get high status through education and wealth through work. This shows how bad it is that social justice activists push racial discrimination where status and wealth is currently gained through individual merit.
The children that integrated schools in the south are still very much alive, and aren’t even that old [1].
“Hispanic” wasn’t even a category in the census until 1970 (they were here, they just weren’t counted). [2] While there has been significant Asian and Latin American immigration in the interim, the stats you cite aren’t comparable due to differences in collection criteria.
> How are DEI programs, affirmative action and diversity quotas for hiring&promotion not structural level discrimination? These are policies and laws pushed by the government and corporations.
The government isn’t allowed to have racial quotas [3]. But I would cede that you make an important point here, that the proposed remedy mirrors the problem that is being brought up. I am not here to argue the virtues of such programs. There is a difference between identifying that a problem exists and agreeing with a proposed solution. My understanding is that you don’t agree that there is a problem, and that is the extent of my concern.
> Most wealth and status is also currently not gained through inheritance. Most get high status through education and wealth through work. This shows how bad it is that social justice activists push racial discrimination where status and wealth is currently gained.
This is a red herring, no one is arguing against education and work. Conservatives just want people to focus on those things in lieu of addressing racial discrimination. Also, treating inheritance as though it’s insignificant is a bit odd… 35 to 45 percent[4] may not be a majority, but it’s hugely significant.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Bridges?wprov=sfti1
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/03/03/census-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_Univ._of_Cal._v...
[4] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/01... "Inheritance Matters. An estimated 35 to 45 percent of wealth is inherited rather than self-made"
The supreme court ruling that ended school segregation in public education was in 1954. On the other hand the people classified as white as well as asian experience racial discrimination by DEI education and company initiatives right here right now.
> “Hispanic” wasn’t even a category in the census until 1970 (they were here, they just weren’t counted). [2] While there has been significant Asian and Latin American immigration in the interim, the stats you cite aren’t comparable due to differences in collection criteria.
This is as far as I can tell an admittance that you are making comparisons over timescales that does not make any sense.
> This is a red herring, no one is arguing against education and work. Conservatives just want people to focus on those things in lieu of addressing racial discrimination. Also, treating inheritance as though it’s insignificant is a bit odd… 35 to 45 percent[4] may not be a majority, but it’s hugely significant.
The social justice prescribed DEI solution argues for racial discrimination in access to education and promition&hiring. So the outcome-focused thinking of activists are pushing racial discrimination which is objectively not a way to reduce racism.
For the majority that get wealth through educational and work merit being racially discriminated against in those spheres cause harm. Even for people with inherited wealth, how many would still have any wealth if they weren't also successful at education and work?
As long as they have basic financial literacy around how to invest, education and work would both be unnecessary. It would be extremely easy to maintain their wealth.
> This is as far as I can tell an admittance that you are making comparisons over timescales that does not make any sense.
“Census data on race isn’t comparable over long time scale because of major methodological updates to data collection” => your statement is a huge logical leap.
> The supreme court ruling that ended school segregation in public education was in 1954. On the other hand the people classified as white as well as asian experience racial discrimination by DEI education and company initiatives right here right now.
And you are aware that school segregation did not, in fact, end in 1954, as I’m sure you read the article I posted on ruby bridges. It took decades to integrate schools, and in many ways they never were because of the way school district boundaries align with segregated housing.
DEI initiatives rarely advance strict racial quotas or thumb on the scale affirmative action policies. Indeed, the whole impetus for this discussion, basecamp, was an instance where people were bothered by specific behaviors they felt were discriminatory. As I’ve stated multiple times, I take no issue with you disagreeing with a specific set of policies pushed by DEI initiatives, but that is different from denying the existence of racial discrimination against BIPOC. The existence of policies that discriminate against one group does not preclude the existence of discrimination against another.
You are arguing that somehow implicit racism is stronger than explicit racism the social justice DEI solution furthers.
You also argue that on whole systemic racism through policy and habitual behavior benefit the whites that experience explicit systemic discrimination furthered by widespread DEI policies.
This is just not a very strong claim.
> As long as they have basic financial literacy around how to invest, education and work would both be unnecessary. It would be extremely easy to maintain their wealth.
The median pre-tax median inheritance is according to Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) $69,000 [1] (the average was $707,291, indicating a small percentage get a much higher inheritance). So 50% of people that inherit get $69k or less, which is not amount that sets you up to live off that asset.
Any anticipated inheritance is also commonly reduced by estate taxes, attorney’s fees, funeral expenses, probate costs, and paying off the deceased’s debts. Having to share the remaining money with siblings, grandchildren, charities, and any other individuals or organizations in a parent’s will could further reduce a child’s take. And a parent who has remarried might leave assets to a new spouse, diminishing or eliminating what children expected to receive.
> DEI initiatives rarely advance strict racial quotas or thumb on the scale affirmative action policies.
This is not accurate. DEI initiatives seeks to increase diversity in hiring by changing the hiring criteria to hire more of favored identities (inclusion) while promoting favored identities to achieve equal outcome (equity).
But DEI does not apply positively to black viewpoint opponents of social justice such as libertarians and conservatives. They are by social justice seen as not exhibiting an "authentic black lived experience". This activism is a terrible denial of individuality based upon race.
[1] https://www.newretirement.com/retirement/average-inheritance...
You are arguing that somehow implicit racism is stronger than explicit racism the social justice DEI solution furthers.”
An honest rewriting of my quoted text using your terminology would be something more like this: “It would be reasonable to say that the explicitly racist policies advocated by DEI as a remedy are not a proper solution to the problem, but that is different than claiming that implicit racism doesn’t exist”
And yet you’re here claiming that I argue the opposite. At this point you are just arguing in bad faith.
To restate, As clearly as is possible. If you want to assert “while structural racism exists, the policies prescriptions advanced by overzealous and self aggrandizing DEI groups cross the line” I’m happy to cede the debate.
> But DEI does not apply positively to black viewpoint opponents of social justice such as libertarians and conservatives. They are by social justice seen as not exhibiting an "authentic black lived experience". This activism is a terrible denial of individuality based upon race.
You can easily accept that they have a viewpoint while also noting that the vast majority of black people don't identify as libertarian nor as conservatives. Why do you think that a minority should be able to invalidate the majority’s opinion? Because it agrees with your viewpoint?
> The median pre-tax median inheritance is according to Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) $69,000 [1] (the average was $707,291, indicating a small percentage get a much higher inheritance). So 50% of people that inherit get $69k or less, which is not amount that sets you up to live off that asset.
The median inheritor doesn’t become wealthy through inheritance, sure, but they also don’t become wealthy through work & education either. Wealth is a heavily skewed distribution, so it makes little sense to talk about the median when 10% of the country owns something like 3/4th of the wealth. Assuming we are talking about someone who receives a non trivial amount of wealth through inheritance (ie enough for them to be actually wealthy, not 67k) then it is easy to maintain that wealth without work.
Systemic racism just means inequitable outcomes, implicit racism is an "invisible" enemy invented to justify an equity agenda not supported by explicit racism, so I do not see how one can embrace this without embracing DEI as a solution. If social justice used the colloquial definition of racism, which it doesn't, it would be ridiculous to claim that someone is inevitably and exclusively racist because they are white.
I am not saying we shouldn't iterate using the liberal system where corruption happens. However, a committee prescribing outcomes based upon an every-expanding set of politically motivated identity categories is way more prone to corruption because the power is unchecked. A core principle of the liberal system is to check power as it assumed people are and will be imperfect.
> You can easily accept that they have a viewpoint while also noting that the vast majority of black people don't identify as libertarian nor as conservatives. Why do you think that a minority should be able to invalidate the majority’s opinion? Because it agrees with your viewpoint?
Because telling someone that they don't have "an authentic black lived experience" if it doesn't fit an activist mold is both racist and harmful to people listening to each other to find better solutions. It is simply bad process to prescribe a solution while denying any negative feedback, but that is exactly what social justice and DEI does.
> The median inheritor doesn’t become wealthy through inheritance, sure, but they also don’t become wealthy through work & education either. Wealth is a heavily skewed distribution, so it makes little sense to talk about the median when 10% of the country owns something like 3/4th of the wealth. Assuming we are talking about someone who receives a non trivial amount of wealth through inheritance (ie enough for them to be actually wealthy, not 67k) then it is easy to maintain that wealth without work.
I do agree that concentration of wealth is an issue, covid in particular has transferred almost 4 trillion from the middle class to the oligarchs. That said, historically countries that adopted the equity agenda have not fared any better.
However, if only a percentage around 10% rely on inheritance for status&wealth while the rest rely on education and work then forcing equal outcomes through racist policies in education as well as hiring&promotion are gross miscarriages of justice.
I think you are right that that belief shapes how we interpret these issues. By racism as a structural problem, I assume you mean this:
> “people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race”
Society is not an actor. It is a collection of people, and the people are actors. Some of them are racist, and some are not.
I do not believe that every situation is permeated with structural racism that must be corrected, but I suspect that people who believe in structural racism tend to find it everywhere and use it to justify the changes they propose.
I don't assume that they had malicious intent. But I do think that they perceive situations through a distorted lens, which often leads to behavior that is harmful to the organizations where they work.
I think that Basecamp and Singer and most organizations and individuals deserve an assumption of innocence.
Racism has to be proven. Accusations must be backed up with evidence. And the burden of evidence is on the accusers. I think critical race theorists start with the assumption that racism is shaping the interaction.
It is not enough to say that structural racism exists and therefore we should believe that it shaped the behavior of people at Basecamp. You have to prove it case by case. Simply claiming structural racism does not justify enormous change.
Statistically, people of different races experience different outcomes in the US on average. But there is a huge standard deviation in those outcomes by race or gender; that is, any given individual may be doing relatively well or poorly relative to the average.
And I think that applying assertions about society and societal ills to individuals, their actions and specific situations is often misguided, because they may deviate wildly from the average.
But that is exactly what critical race theorists tend to do. They treat individuals as representatives of a larger social trend. A male represents the patriarchy. A Caucasian represents white supremacy.
But attacking an individual to remedy a larger statistical discrepancy is in itself a form of injustice. Especially when we diagnose the supposed cause of that discrepancy with vagueness, as a culmination of ways that society acts.
That is not enough to convince me of the claims being made against Singer and Basecamp, or of the rightness of the Basecamp employees in rebellion.
It would appear then, that we are at an impasse.
I think that is possible and that one could prove it statistically.
I do not think that, just because such behavior can be shown to exist on average, that is necessarily exists in specific situations. If you want to apply an anti-racist remedy in a specific situation, you should have to prove racism in that situation.
And I think that the remedies to specific situations will differ a great deal, depending on unique variables. That is, if a person proposes a remedy, they should show how it will fix the specific problem.
I do not agree with one-size-fits-all remedies that try to fix a social ill by turning a specific company on its head without factual evidence of racism in that company.
I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone was calling for singers job before nor during the meeting. All that happened was that a bunch of employees formed a committee that brought a bunch of issues to the fore. They took issue with singers behavior, and the company responded with “cease all of this discussion or take a buyout” and so they took the buyout.
All this amounted to the company backing up a senior employees behavior reflexively at the expense of lower level employees objections.
Maybe. Or maybe the company was already turned on its head due to the internal conversation. Such a radical reaction from the founders suggests to me that this was the case.
> I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone was calling for singers job before nor during the meeting.
Accusing someone of racism or white supremacy is effectively calling for them to resign or be fired.
> All that happened was that a bunch of employees formed a committee that brought a bunch of issues to the fore.
Right, but again, we don't know if those issues were valid or not. The "funny names" list is not nearly as damning as they seem to think. Given how much information has leaked to the media, I would assume that the strongest evidence they have of racism would already be public. And I have not seen strong evidence.
> All this amounted to the company backing up a senior employees behavior reflexively at the expense of lower level employees objections.
If "backing up a senior employee's behavior" means allowing him to disagree with others about whether his behavior is racist, especially in the absence of evidence that it is racist, then I think they were right to back him up.
Singer's resignation resulted from the show trial of accusations and media leaks, which is a well known playbook for advocates of social change.
I would love to talk sometime, if you’re open to it. Send me an email: krschacht at gmail
but it is anyway, usually
Relevant excerpt from It doesn't have to be Crazy at Work.
Yowchhh. Really really good find.
Social justice activism divides individuals by unchosen group identities into "oppressors" and "oppressed" which is in direct opposition to acknowledging a persons feelings as well as listening to their viewpoints. Social justice activism has due to this predictably lead to resentment and unnecessary conflict in the workplace.
You have a list of customer names that you mock? What kind of amateur, disrespectful operation are you running? Are you building a product or pledging a fraternity?
And how does any of that lead to talking about "White Supremacy". And how does voicing an opinion about such a subject seem like a good idea for the workplace regardless of if you think it exists or not?
For a company that has written a lot of books about how to build companies and cultures, this is...laughable.
Perhaps one step at a time, over the course of repeated conversations that keep dredging up more and more deep-seated resentments that have probably been festering for years and years, because of a longstanding social convention that we're not supposed to openly talk about these sorts of things at the workplace.
Or perhaps, if it's the kind of company where a list like that could continue to exist for so long, there was enough pressure built up that it was more like a levee breaking.
I don't know about "child" but there is a similar vibe here. This also comes through in blog posts and Twitter threads I've seen from some of the people involved. A certain assumption that their own account or opinion should automatically be accepted as default. Arrogance? Petulance? Entitlement? Somewhere in that space.
It shouldn't even be a surprise, really. Even if they were able to overlook political differences, DHH and JF were overwhelmingly likely to hire people who were like themselves in some ways. It's what founders and CEOs have always done, and has often been remarked upon since before they were born. "A fish rots from the head" is one of the less charitable forms. People's high self-image and approach to disagreement or confrontation seems to have been one of the (quite likely unconscious) selection criteria here. After that, a blowup of some sort was only a matter of time.
You may be underestimating the power of modern day PC.
I also think partly this is because being a remote company, these discussions, even with a Web Cam just dont convey the message much. Some of these message could have been in private with different colleague during coffee break or in pantry. So I felt it is also a failure or remote work. Remote doesn't work ALL the time, which is something DHH dont get. And VC are required for many businesses, which is something DHH dont get as well.
Another problem was that most of his political message, I guess you could also argue are glorified ads for Basecamp, attract the same people with similar political views. And many of them were sold into the vision, cult of whatever that might be as Basecamp. And the new policy was felt more like a betrayal of their belief. Hence the huge reaction and backlash that happened.
LOL, that's a hilarious way of putting it, but I think it's more about whether people keep learning and growing as they age or decide that they already know everything they need to.
If you stop learning and growing, you're going to be left behind by the people who don't.
When you grow older, you gain more experience, and if you're intelligent, probably gain some wisdom along the way. You either trust that inherently imperfect knowledge, or you throw it away and learn everything anew together with the younger generation.
We're mostly trained to treasure knowledge and experience, even if the errors accumulate and times change.
de·fund; prevent from continuing to receive funds
Courtesy of the dictionary. This is not hard. Stop entertaining people who redefine words.
It is very similar to people who say "I'm not racist, I don't think I'm superior to anyone and the dictionary definition of racism is to assume superiority based on race" (this is more or less a direct quote from Pauline Hanson, an Australian Senator who is wildly racist).
What I have found in discussions with people who I think are racist, but who deny it, is that they have an emphasis on personal agency and personal responsibility. So while they might be able to happily have black friends, they see, for example, disparaties in incarceration rates not as a social problem but as an aggregation of personal failures. If one believes that a particular race is, on average, more likely to commit the types of crime for which one should be incarcerated, and one sees incarceration as an "inferior" way of life, then the logical conclusion is that they are racist.
An interesting thing to note about analysing racism this way is that it can also uncover racist attitudes in the very minority populations who are being discriminated against.
Also "defund the police" is a shorthand that typically means "reduce direct law enforcement funding and instead fund other community engagement programs". Of course we need cops, but we don't necessarily need them all armed to the teeth in riot gear showing up for a drug bust (sub-question: do we really need drug busts at all?), and maybe they're not the best first responders in domestic disputes, and so on. Most people for whom "defund the police" is a catchcry recognise this, because there are very few true anarchists in society (and anarchy is kind of where "left meets right" in the political spectrum anyway, which is why libertarianism is such a dangerous and insidious ideology).
> If one believes that a particular race is, on average, more likely to commit the types of crime for which one should be incarcerated, and one sees incarceration as an "inferior" way of life, then the logical conclusion is that they are racist.
You can try to argue that crime rates show disproportional racial representation for a bunch of reasons. Claiming anyone who states the facts is racist is wrong.
Yes those are the "few anarchists" I was referring to. From what I have seen of people discussing the "defund the police" movement it's about a dramatic reform of law enforcement, including much less emphasis on armed police storming about the place.
> You can try to argue that crime rates show disproportional racial representation for a bunch of reasons. Claiming anyone who states the facts is racist is wrong.
I didn't claim anyone stating the facts is wrong, I made the claim that when people attribute a statistical anomaly like disparity in incarceration rates to an aggregation of personal failures rather than a systemic problem, they are logically being racist (even if they don't see it as such).
If you had told me this was written by some troll to make BLM look bad then I'd believe you. To be fair, there are some good things in that article too, it's not all bad; it contains some anecdotes worth hearing, but that doesn't follow that the conclusions are also good.
This is also the same person who cited Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong as inspirations, by the way.[2] Yes, really, that Mao. I genuinely thought this was inserted by a vandal on the Wikipedia article when I encountered it last week, but the source pans out.
I mean, people don't just get these "abolish the police" and "BLM is a Marxist organisation" out of thin air. Granted, there is a lot of bad-faith trollism from Tucker Carlson and similar people, but if your message is so confused, easily misunderstood, and your leadership says things in support of the most extreme interpretations then quite frankly, you have no one else to blame but yourself.
[1]: https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/04/abolition-and-reparatio...
[2]: https://time.com/5171270/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors...
I don't understand why people are so resistant, or even outright hostile, in making the social justice movement (including the sentiments BLM expresses) more effective. If you truly care about social justice then being as effective as possible should be the #1 priority, no?
I don't care much for BLM not because I don't care about their goals, but because I don't think it's very effective for a number of reasons. Yet every time I raise this it's either dismissed like your comment does, or met with a surprising amount of hostility. Aren't conversations on how to best affect these kind of changes super-duper important? It appears not, and it seems BLM has become the goal, rather than the vehicle to get at the goal.
It's best to think of any popular movement as directional - for sure there are individual people in the Defund movement calling for 100% abolition, and others calling for demilitarization, or redirecting of some funding - as of right now, they want the same thing as far as first steps go. If they're successful in redirecting some funding away from police, the non-abolish crowd will move away from the movement and they'll become increasingly irrelevant when it's 10 anarchists arguing for no police instead of massive protests.
Again, you're confusing an organization with the movement. The organization has only minor impact on the actual movement. It's like saying that a group named "Democracy for America" reflected what people in the US believed about Democracy.
> Aren't conversations on how to best affect these kind of changes super-duper important? It appears not, and it seems BLM has become the goal, rather than the vehicle to get at the goal.
I support BLM, but I'm not sure I support the goals of the BLM org. Mostly because I barely know them (I realize I could just go to their webpage and read them). I do know what most people I associate believe BLM means though.
Now this does mean there is a problem in that different people have different interpretations of it. But honestly this is always the case for any type of social movement. There's a base for the support, and then a bunch of splinter ideologies.
Define "racist"
"Reform the police" is much more universalist term that people across multiple political spectrums would have gotten behind (and it's still memorable).
I'm not sure why it wasn't used instead.
Policing organizations/unions/departments have refused to change, evolve, or improve their behavior.
Personally I'm a big fan of requiring a much, much higher standard of training than police have now. Especially when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. The best way to minimise the consequences is to ensure that we have maximised their skill potential with the forms of intervention which have the least risk of permanent consequences.
You can argue such a sentiment is racist if those people thought that blacks will not be able to lift themselves up from the situation they are in, on average. But if they do think personal agency could change it, then what is the racial issue here? They are just pointing the current situation in this specific time, not an inherent problem with the black race.
You could argue their solution of personal agency and responsibility is not going to work, but that is not a race question, it is a general social policy question how to lift people from a dire situation, which I agree, developing personal agency is difficult when you don't even know what you don't know.
In my eyes it is more of a class problem and those calls for personal agency will be directed to anybody who is in a bad situation, not necessarly to blacks. It is because it is very hard for people to imagine the lack of mental ability and skills some people have when they are not brought up in a certain culture or class for that matter.
I take it you still stick to the original definitions of "fun", "garbled", and "terrible", then? Good on you.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/defund
> : to withdraw funding from
and "withdraw" does not mean "remove completely"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white%20supremacy
> 1 : the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races
> 2: the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races
https://web.archive.org/web/20200901223507/https://www.merri...
> and "withdraw" does not mean "remove completely"
It certainly _can_ and usually _does_ mean remove completely. Examples:
- "I'm withdrawing my student from this school"
- "The peer review committee has decided to withdraw this erroneous paper from publication"
- "I would like to withdraw $100 from my checking account" (It means the _whole_ $100)
- "He is experiencing heroine withdrawal symptoms" (after not having _any_)
Obviously one can withdraw all of something, but I'm skeptical of it meaning "all" by default.
If you used "withdraw the money from my account", that would imply all of the money. Of course, any customer service person would still want to confirm that by asking for more information before handing your balance over...
"Defund the police" can sound extreme, or counterintuitive, or downright confusing. But it seems urgently important (to me) to understand why so many Americans feel so strongly that they use such intense language, propose such radical changes, and demand something that doesn't make sense to me.
Clearly, there's something I don't "get". It's infinitely more compelling to me to try to "get it" and understand others' viewpoints, and uninteresting to understand why the words they used don't match a conventional definition.
The onus is on both parties to communicate effectively and find language that removes ambiguity. Unfortunately, I think some degree of sophistry is occurring to use ambiguity as a motte and bailey.
Effective communication is nowhere near the same as using transparent / effortless language. "The medium is the message"—phrases like "defund the police" and "Black Lives Matter" arrest the attention in ways that "we should reconsider the financial resources allocated to law enforcement" and "I value the lives of Black Americans as equal to those of White Americans and, moreover, those Black lives have historically been undervalued and oppressed" simply do not (and I can't even make a claim that that's what those phrases mean—you'd have to ask someone, and try to understand what they meant).
The effectiveness of communication is nontrivial. There's a reason for the long history of poetry as a way to communicate emotions, a way that tends to transcend the effectiveness of plain language to convey intense emotion in an intuitive form; and that reason is decidedly not that artful use of language removes ambiguity.
Ambiguity highlights precisely the points at which we fail to understand one another, and point to the most critical opportunities to clarify what we mean to each other.
If I withdraw money from my bank account, I still usually have money in my bank account also. If we withdraw funding from a authoritative service that serves a public function but has also been leveraged oppressively, it doesn't mean there is no funding
That doesn’t mean that I can define words however I like. Since defund has a well and consistently used definition I think it’s going be hard for the connotation to change so that “defund police” means something other than defund police.
disingenuous (adj) giving a false appearance of simple frankness
obstinate (adj) pertinaciously adhering to an opinion
pertinacious (adj) marked by an unyieldingly persistent fixedness (as of opinion, purpose, action) that is often annoyingly perverse in fact or in appearance
It looks like you simply googled those words and copy-pasted the definitions. I can do that, too (using a more credible dictionary vis-a-vis American usage, to boot. Mine’s MW, yours is Oxford, which is very British; we’re discussing an American company):
white supremacy (n) the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races
defund (v) to withdraw funding from (as a government-funded program)
This isn’t a helpful approach. Prescriptivist appeals to the dictionary and dismissal of others’ viewpoints are not ways of listening to the perspectives of others or empathizing with different experiences, and seem to be actively preventing constructive discussion in this case.
Agreed. On the flip side, I think it’s just as unhelpful an approach to co-opt a generally understood word (or phrase) and then (unbeknownst to the majority of peers) expand its definition to capture even mainstream behavior that might be construed as undesirable even if not obviously unacceptable, and then beat the same peers in the head with it when they express confusion at the changed meaning of words (or phrases). It’s a cheap rhetorical trick, and gets us further away from collaboratively solving very real and important problems in a pluralistic society.
That said, I respectfully disagree that it’s “just as unhelpful.” Pedantry over definitions distracts from the underlying issues, while new and inventive and nonstandard usage of language can spur critical analysis and jolt us out of our familiar understanding.
Telling someone “defund isn’t used that way” shuts down the conversation. Demanding we “defund the police” makes me want to start / pursue / expand the conversation: what the heck do you mean by that?
Edit to add: my response sounds overly academic. Another way to put it could be: language is confusing, and it can be problematic if we make it more confusing. But, sometimes I need to get a bit more confused before I can see things in a new / different light, and language can be an effective tool to achieve that “good confusion”
I understand that that’s the intention behind this strategy, but in practice it actually comes off as a shock-and-awe guerrilla tactic to argumentation that alienates rather than invite collaboration. Again, if the goal is actually to get people to buy into new ideas, attacking them (which is implicitly what happens when you expansively redefine “white supremacy”) is just not a good strategy.
> Telling someone “defund isn’t used that way” shuts down the conversation.
Right, and it sounds like the goal is to maintain open conversation! Constantly demanding that people use your definitions and argue with you on the terms that you unilaterally set is an awful way to maintain open dialogue/conversation with people that might otherwise be open to changing their minds. Insisting that people simply must accept whatever new rules of engagement is en vogue just exacerbates polarization and mistrust.
So yes, it’s just as, if not more unhelpful.
That’s a good point, and I’m not sure I have a good answer to it! I believe rhetorical guerrilla warfare is an intentional and important tactic. My gut tells me part of the goal is precisely to make me and others like me feel uncomfortable: I generally have the freedom to not feel alienated, but that’s not a privilege afforded to vast swaths of our society who are historically disadvantaged. I can only imagine the alienation I would feel as a Black engineer—but as a White engineer, I feel right at home on my team of other White engineers, and alienation is something I can just choose to walk away from. Not so for others…
Still, I know that’s not a satisfying answer / response to your comment. You’re right that feeling alienated doesn’t make me more inclined to have open minded / collaborative discussions, in general. But given the structural imbalances at play, I emotionally feel that the graceful and “right” way for me to engage is by listening despite my discomfort, as a tool for learning the perspectives of others not just theoretically, but experientially.
:shrug: None of this is easy…but it’s important to me to pursue mutual care and understanding with as much good faith as I can muster, even when it’s uncomfortable for me.
Playing rhetorical tricks in an attempt to “make people uncomfortable” just muddies the water since everyone sees what’s going on. At best, nothing changes, and at worst this strategy just sets us back.
As long as we continue down the path of polarization and resentment, the further we stray from solving our problems as we remain in the status quo. In the status quo the biggest loser is the very person that stands to benefit the least from the status quo. From what you’ve told me, you’re probably not going to be the loser there.
Shared definitions is the bedrock of human communication, and absent that, we’re no better than chimps just grunting past each other.
Yep! It was a failure of all parties involved that the two competing definitions of racism weren't laid out on the table, when people started getting huffy.
> Shared definitions is the bedrock of human communication, and absent that, we’re no better than chimps just grunting past each other.
(laughs) Lay it on thick, why don't you?
I will say that from the transcripts (and from the way conversations have been going in this thread), the way this usually starts is that one party unilaterally sets the rules of engagement and more or less demands that others accept those terms, and when the others push back on those rules, we all take a step back and admit “failure of all parties”.
It would be a lot easier for us to collaborate on these problems if we can be honest with ourselves about who the aggressor is, and who’s caught on the defense in these kinds of heated exchanges in workplace debates.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it's clear from your comment history that you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for. (Actually a lot of the time we don't know, or care, what they're battling for. We care about HN not becoming a flamewar hell site.) If you would please stop doing that and use HN in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044182.
Those with historically unassailable, unnamed, and most sensitively, unearned, prerogatives, become understandably if unfortunately upset when this state of affairs is questioned.
While they retain a platform and resources to do so, they lash out.
The details will vary; the attempts at spin and chaff will vary; the root issues are no mystery.
We're in a moment of cultural shift.
Those who perceive themselves rightly as historical "winners" are going to fight "loss" of status, control, hegemony, pick a word.
All the more so, to the extent that they are prone to understanding the world in terms of zero-sum games.
(As others have noted, the Basecamp trashfire has nothing to do with "politics," that's one transparent attempt at spin.)
I've shared and laughed at funny names in the past, as recently as last year. I can't imagine an official or permanent list such as the one pointed out here.
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It's really fucking hard to talk about stuff like this online or big groups. I would encourage people and companies to have small, offline discussions and start with humility and empathy as the guiding principles.
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I've typed and deleted all of this three times. Anything I say feels like not enough. People are people.
However, it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned. Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd. I imagine myself working at some of my earlier minimum wage jobs in college and putting forth such a requirement to my managers then. It's a non-sequitur.
When I talk to my family and non-tech non-coasts non-city friends about the sort of political polarization I encounter at my high-tech Seattle job, they often think I'm messing with them, that I'm being facetious or exaggerating. Unfortunately, I'm not.
It's all so tiresome. The increasing politicization of everything, and tech being at the center of it, made me realize I have no interest anymore in climbing the corporate ladder. I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.
It's not a random employee though. It's someone who is part of the Senior Leadership Team.
If you deny that it exists then how can you be trusted to do something if an issue does comes up ?
If I’m trying to count to 100 and someone says “Prepend, please say that white supremacy exists.” And I respond “I’m busy counting to 100 and will not comply with your wishes.” That doesn’t mean I’m denying that white supremacy exists.
It’s odd you would interpret it that way as it’s illogical.
If you do not acknowledge white supremacy exists and needs to be eliminated then you can't expect people to trust you on this issue.
And trust is a critical part of being a leader.
I’m not arguing semantics as my point is that there are many things more important than acknowledging white supremacy exists. This may not be true for others as it seems it’s super important for some.
But if I’m in the business of counting to 100 (or anything) I can be quite successful without including taking about eliminating white supremacy.
Note, I think that systematic racial inequity is bad and must be eliminated. But I don’t think the most effective way to do that is by talking about it all the time. And I think that I can not have any portion of my workday talking about it. This doesn’t mean I am for white supremacy.
I think, at it’s most basic, I don’t think silence is the same as endorsement. The world isn’t black and white (no pun intended) and everyone isn’t forced to choose sides. And it’s certainly not important to state one’s position over and over and over.
It’s hard to know, but I have one data point in my own self in that I really don’t talk much about anything and certainly don’t endorse white supremacy and I actively live my life fighting inequity. Someone saying that I endorse something because I don’t speak about it is incorrect as I know myself better than others do.
Following this logic leads to absurdity. Should people spend their days speaking for or against everything? What about people’s right to privacy?
I mean there’s so many example of how silence=support is illogical, I’m not sure how people can hold this opinion. This assumes that there’s a single set of priorities and white supremacy is near the top for everyone.
It’s also fairly odd in that it assumes that the whole world is in America so that even people in remote countries must make statements against white supremacy lest they endorse it. That’s just silly.
On any topic, only a few thousand or perhaps millions express a position. Does that mean everyone else is against or for? Does silence always equal endorsement? Does it mean opposition?
You haven’t stopped this conversation to call out how you recognize murder is evil and are against it. Does that mean you endorse murder? Isn’t murder important enough to speak out against? I certainly think murder is terrible and am shocked that someone would endorse murder through their silence.
Etc etc etc, there’s a million of these. Not everything has to be a conflict and not everyone owes me an answer. Sometimes I just don’t know and don’t get to know. I should only assume when necessary and using some evidence to support my assumption
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Argumen...
My choice not to dignify that question with a response is not an indication that I endorse white supremacists any more than my choice not to dignify a question like "do you believe the earth is round" indicates my belief that the planet is flat.
White supremacy is still very real in America and throughout the rest of the world. The idea that you’d brush off someone asking about white supremacy in the same way as a flat earth denier is absurd, and says more about your own position of priviledge.
Do you really deny that you have privilege? You’re both white and male, aren’t you? The way you talk actually says a lot more about you than you’re aware of.
Have a pleasant evening.
- What have you done to fight it? - Have you donated to XYZ org? - How much? Why not more? Surely you could afford it? - How much time have spent volunteering for causes that fight it? - How much? Why not more? Surely you could afford it?
If you anticipated this line of questioning would follow, where the person asking the question's intent is to test you, and shame you if you were to fail it, would you still engage with that question?
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy
I get that it's super easy to just claim white supremacy is everywhere, but implicitly the claim is that someone put it there and is perpetuating it. At a company of 58 people, you're pointing at a very small group of people as the ones responsible for all of this supposed white supremacy.
Unless everyone swallows the Kool-Aid and apologizes for being so racist, someone in leadership will eventually have to say, "Actually, this isn't a white supremacist company." Otherwise you've essentially surrendered your company to the "woke" mob.
Due to rising costs, the company decided to outsource some production. The end product was just as good in quality and much cheaper, even after shipping and import taxes.
A few employees were concerned about outsourcing to that specific country and started to discuss and petition the senior executives.
The CEO clamped down hard and said it was a business decision and if anyone didn't like it, they could leave. No politics.
In the end, those employees are still here, but the quality of their work has definitely suffered.
Alternatively, if you can't feasibly mediate, because it's basically all your employees airing grievances at you, then you screwed your job up long ago, and it's time to cop to that. The longer you put off eating crow, the more crow you're eventually going to have to eat.
What you’re describing is “appeasement.” Presume they’re operating in good faith and that maybe they’re kind of right. So you cut a compromise, and sure enough, the white supremacy is still there! And what do they recommend? More appeasement.
I agree it was a management problem, but the problem is it wasn’t identified and nipped in the bud sooner.
Why? It is a tool to utilize confusion to remove the targets moral authority. Both yes and no are bad answers that make you loose moral authority, which is the point of the power tool.
Never trust anyone that uses such a tool, as it shows that the activist attacker is willing to smear individuals they disagree with using deceptive language in order to reduce the unlucky targets moral standing. Is this someone that is worthy of trust?
If it’s about my comment on trust: You are welcome to trust someone that use these power tactics based upon lies to undermine the moral authority of viewpoint opponents, I just believe there are so many people of better character out there to build a relationship with.
Social justice tactics when it boils down to it are effective, but not very creative. Domain specific language is coopted and it’s definitions changed to mean what’s useful for activism. Goal is to redirect as much as possible of an organizations resources and attention towards the ideology instead of whatever it used to do.
With your assertion in mind that there is no issues with the activist technique. Do you denounce pedofilia? Do you denounce defrauding elderly relatives? See how this activist technique works, no answer is good and the question is directed at you as a potential complicit person, and using it is in my opinion a sure sign of a worse character than what I’d like to engage with.
I then called your hair a bird.
Refer to the comment I replied to where you argue "No one was calling anyone a white supremecist", and then justified this conclusion by stating the social justice redefinition of the colloquial term:
> No one was calling anyone a white supremecist in the conversation. They were likely talking about white supremacy as a cultural and political force in the context of how the policy could perpetrate it.
To your other statement:
> all I've done is point out that you constructed an arbitrary binary specifically to decry the creation of arbitrary binaries.
There are many different types of individual viewpoints and behaviors, so a critique of or an unwillingness to accept a type of behavior normally means that you have tons of others you accept. Disagreeing being a binary choice is a social justice dogma that model the world very badly.
* Accept the claim that the company is and has been supporting white supremacy, de facto surrendering decisions on anything an employee suggests might support white supremacy
* Disagree with the claim
The redefinition of white supremacy (as you’ve defined it) is a bad faith rhetorical tool designed to create these kind of situations. Leaders are under no obligation to appease employees acting in bad faith.
First, you're creating such a stark false dichotomy that it's hard not to wonder if it's somehow deliberate.
Second, saying that white supremacy is present in the company is not the same thing as saying that the company is run by white supremacists. The term functions very differently in the noun sense than it does in the adjective sense.
Perhaps you might enlighten us as to why this is a false dichotomy, and what other options there are.
> Second
You cannot run a company that perpetuates white supremacy without implicitly supporting that white supremacy, whether you know it or not. I've already been clearly told that malice and intent are not required.
Or are you genuinely going to make the case that "someone who supports white supremacy" is not interchangeable with "white supremacist?" I'm not interested in debating your personal redefinitions of terms.
Since we've already touched on the subject of "bad faith rhetorical tools," getting on other people's cases for acknowledging that the English language is soaked in polysemy isn't exactly an encouraging sign. It's difficult to have an enjoyable conversation with someone who's brandishing a cape.
> The term functions very differently in the noun sense than it does in the adjective sense.
The terms don’t in the dictionary, so there’s no way to continue the discussion without debating what this commenter thinks these terms mean.
This isn’t my first rodeo, and we can all see what’s happening here.
Again this is all you projecting thoughts onto other people.
If I called you a pedophile, I imagine you wouldn't be super expectant of a productive conversation about my unique definition of the word or how I think it applies to you. You wouldn't care what I thought, because if I cared what you thought, I wouldn't have smeared you as a pedophile.
You're still mentally skipping the idea of systemic white supremacy and jumping straight from white supremacy to you are a nazi. But that jump comparison only works for white supremacist. There isn't a comparable systemic thing for pedophilia. We don't discuss systemic pedophilia and how society broadly favors pedophiles in the same way that we do talk about systemic favoritism of white people and culture (and even if you personally disagree that society does favor white people and culture, the conversation does happen). When the other person says white supremacy, this is what they mean: cultural systems and norms that favor white people and things associated with white people, often to the detriment of other cultures and peoples.
So again, you're presupposing someone is smearing you, when they've once again never claimed to have done that and further more actively claimed the opposite. And please note that now four different people have pointed out that no, this wasn't calling anyone a white supremacist. So perhaps it is simply you who is the one using a custom definition here.
Part of this seems to be that you keep insisting on making things about individuals, and not the company and systems itself. Consistently you've changed "the company's actions maintain white supremacy" to "the leaders of the company are white supremacists". That's two jumps: company and its actions to the leaders and then an ascription of intent. People can do things by mistake. Groups can do things unintentionally. You're assuming that everyone is presupposing fault and intent, and using that to ascribe nefarious motives to people who at no point appeared to ascribe fault or intent.
It's also totally unclear how
> * Accept the claim that the company is and has been supporting white supremacy, de facto surrendering decisions on anything an employee suggests might support white supremacy
makes sense. This is akin to saying "yes, we've made mistakes before". I don't see how that "surrenders decisions", I mean unless you mean that they're going to say this about certain decision but still assume they made the right decision (or maybe they did, but then they need to justify this).
I wouldn't have "denounced" white supremacy either. If these are the base conditions under which you're prepared to talk to me then quite frankly, fuck you. There is nothing to gain for me, and you're clearly not prepared to take anything I say in good faith. Okay, I might have in a leadership role to keep the peace as a matter of professionalism, but I'd also have started looking for a new job as this is not a healthy atmosphere. I don't want to work with people who think I'm secretly a white supremacist.
The problem is that I've seen many things being labelled as "white supremacy" that seem ... a bit of a stretch. For example people have argued that Alien (the film) is an example of white supremacy as the alien represents a stereotypical black women; "Black women have been portrayed in contemporary white social and political culture as super-fertile and indestructible breeders whose sexual reproduction must be controlled."[1]
When I first read that, it took me quite a while to realize this was even referring to the alien itself, rather than some character that got infected. It seems it purely based on the fact that the alien is black.
There are many, many examples of this, especially in the last year people have been going way to far in re-analysing everything through the lens of race, often with some very harsh words like "white supremacy". Sometimes this is a good thing, but often I find it's not. Either these are general problems that affect everyone (just black folks more, but that doesn't mean the core problem is racism), or it's outright nonsense like the above.
Now, I don't know what argument that person made exactly in support of "White supremacy existing at Basecamp", but if you make such a strong claim – which is essentially calling your leadership/coworkers white supremacists – then you better have some good arguments. I'm skeptical they existed; they're certainly not present in this article beyond wishy-washy "creating a space where people do not feel welcome".
And considering that this discussion left people "crying and screaming at the screen" it seems rather easy to make some people feel "not welcome".
The entire thing stinks; perhaps the leadership could have handled things a bit better here and there, but if you're not willing to take a somewhat nuanced disagreement in good faith then there's nothing you can do except nod and smile on every sort of nonsense they bring up, and anything else will upset people.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-and-predato...
The US is the least racist nation in the world according to Pew surveys.
What we have an abundance in the US is people who, if racism disappeared tomorrow, would be out of work and have to find a new career. These same people are the ones who act as if the election, to 2 terms, of a black president translates to the US making no progress on race since the 60's.
I grew up in a mostly black county in Virginia. I know what demagoguery looks like, and witnessed it with the GOP for decades. The Democratic party has embraced it, in a big way, since Hillary's loss. It works to win elections, but at the cost of elevating racial reductionism in POC. And the more POC embrace racial reductionism, the more moderate whites will do the same, creating more white supremacists. I've already witnessed colleagues who are moderate getting frustrated in meeting where they are demonized, and next thing you know they are googling and listening/reading conservative authors who mirror their frustration and amplify it.
Singer didn't deny that white supremacy "exists". He simply stated, in my opinion correctly, that it's not embedded in American institutions. Because it's not, as evidenced by the fact that we actively import (to an extent unsurpassed by the vast majority of nations in the world) non-white immigrants to the tune of over a million a year.
My next door neighbor is an Indian immigrant family. My neighbor across the street is from Vietnam. Both are naturalized citizens, and this ethos is going to try to say that the institution that naturalized them is white supremacist. It's patently absurd and irrational, and appeals to gullible college students and losers who desperately want to externalize blame for their failures.
The founders effectively took everyone's voice away. I think that's a very consistent way to get people to leave - especially people who for whom having a voice is more important than working at basecamp
Obviously, you ideally want your job to be politically aligned with you so that your labor doesn't conflict with your beliefs. But today it seems like many feel so disconnected and disenfranchised from any communities outside of work they they put all their eggs in that basket, and that ultimately never goes well.
Setting aside the merits of all the underlying arguments, the founders were clearly only talking about their "voice" within the context of their employment at basecamp, not their ability to have a voice in all other possible contexts. And thus the following is a non sequitur:
> having a voice is more important than working at basecamp
Being an employee at basecamp is a necessary prerequisite for having a voice as an employee at basecamp.
I have trouble imagining how labor could ever lack a political dimension, and the distinction that presents itself to me between the past supposedly 'less politicized' workplaces, is that workers (or at least minoritized workers) were simply less safe to discuss politics and justice in this context that dominates their life and survival.
That's completely understating the entirety of what happened; the culmination of which seemed to be frivolous HR complaints. Has anyone disputed the details of the fuller context available through David's blogs and other sources?
> no one should be able to discuss anything "political" at work anymore
Can't they though? Here is what Jason had to say:
> 1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account...People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can't happen where the work happens anymore.
I totally get it. Toxic people tend to clump. And they eventually aim their toxicity at each other. You don't want them in the workplace or really, in your life at all.
> Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd.
Not only is it absurd, the whole demand to say such a thing was a Kafka trap to begin with.
> I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.
It's not a liability, at least not in the long term. The time when being 'woke' is beneficial to advancement will come to an end. Because if the fervor one has for politics is what a company values, then they'll get increasing fervor until the place is too toxic to be productive.
Your inability to generate a constant stream of passion for your opinions and hate for contrary opinions is a sign that you are normal. That you are reasonable. And that you are dependable. It's nothing at all to apologize for.
There will always be companies that have employees with different political, religious, and social opinions who will find common ground in their desire to build cool shit and provide value. Go find one of those places and be happy.
Finally! I have been pointing this out as being mostly a tech circle thing. But almost every time I get downvoted for it.
The question here is, why Tech? What is specific about Tech as an industry, and that is not just in US, it is also spreading in UK, ( or mostly English speaking countries ). I assume it has something to do with Social Media. But then other industry also have access to social media usage as well.