One of my favorite moments of 2020 was when coinbase stood up against the madness of people using the company as a vehicle to promote their irrelevant politics. Politics has its place but just gets in the way of doing work in the workplace. The only politics that should be promoted in the workplace is the politics that helps the company accomplish its specific goals. I predict that market forces will cause more startups to follow suit.
One of the things that made me quit my last job was the director frequently talking politics before meetings while waiting for everyone to join.
There's no winning. Agree and risk setting yourself at odds against your peers and future managers, or disagree and put yourself at odds with the person who holds the purse for your team.
Even worse, complain to HR, and risk politically disagreeing with them.
I stuck with that job long enough to find something better, and almost regret staying with it as long as I did.
Considering the hostility that can be shown to those of the opposite tribe, especially in tech companies, are you surprised that op wouldn't challenge the higher in position director on such basis?
Plenty of other commenters here would argue that doing so is really a political position (defending status quo), which would not at all be what I wanted to convey
It formed a hostile work environment, but not in a way that I wad legally protected from
The discussion wasn't simple honest debate or smalltalk, it was very much "did you see how team A person put down team B person last weekend? She was awesome!"
I should also make clear, this person wasn't my boss, he was director of the department- my boss's boss. He also had approximately 1 to 2 hours overlap in work schedule, as he lived practically on the other side of the globe (we had a world-wide team).
I understand, it is boss(or super boss in the case) responsibility to be able to encourage feedback and open conversation. There is big difference between making small talk and using that time to be on the soap box , no boss should need feedback for that line.
It is just that as a manager, I have been surprised how people think I would take offence on something and not mention it for a long time. I always considered it my responsibility to encourage my team even if they are 3-4 levels down to be able openly talk with me and tell me what I am doing wrong and how can i help them do their jobs better, if they are not able to do that, it is on me.
That is fair. Unfortunately, politics, like religion, can be deeply personal, and it is very difficult to predict how someone will react.
If the company had a proper feedback mechanism- whereby I could have left feedback for him anonymously (so that only his boss would see my name) I might have felt more comfortable bringing it up.
The other reason I totally agree with this is because there is always the unwritten rule that what a company can support politically is pretty much always in service to its bottom line. I mean, just look at Google, whose employees are known for being especially politically active. Except, that is, when it comes to the negative societal effect of large monopolies (there was a recent HN discussion about this). People at Google know what pays their (very large) salaries.
We don't get into politics until we need an emergency building permit approval at which point we will make a donation to the mayor's campaign even if he is a big Trump supporter and says things directly opposite of all the diversity meetings we have been going to over the past year.
What’s interesting about that case is that >5% of employees quit.
So these were people that coinbase decided, out of all available applicants—and as a well-known, hugely profitable company that is the only “in any way mainstream” success story of cryptocurrency-based businesses, there are a fair number of them—thought were the right fit. (That’s excluding the people who were given offers and didn’t accept, of course.)
And then greater than one in twenty employees (that’s a lot) heard what he said and were like, nope, this is not someone I want to follow.
Is that a success? Maybe! I can’t think of a time when we’ve seen that level of voluntary departure from a company and thought, “ah yes, this is good.” Or when we’ve seen something like that and thought, “ah yes, this is what leadership looks like.”
Maybe he’s right! I don’t know. We’ll see.
But when I look at America, with its staggering income inequality and tremendous corporate cash investments into political elections, I don’t personally think, “wow there sure is too much social accountability at companies.”
You know?
I don’t look at Facebook and think, “they should really just focus on being a data mining advertising business. This thing about fomenting extremism is distracting us from them as a corporate enterprise in a capitalist system.”
People leave jobs for lots of reasons. Coinbase was offering a very generous exit package for anyone leaving at the time. I am sure some split for reasons unrelated to leadership or these political policies.
The kicker here is that actual politics is prohibited by law. Companies can't be endorsing candidates or providing in-kind contributions without getting into trouble with the FEC.
So this is all about performative poses in the workplace, on the topic of politics, rather than being about actual politics.
Companies get involved with politics all the time, and policy in the US seems to be far more about keeping corporations and the shareholder class happy than keeping voters happy.
So it's more that companies can't do certain limited things, but companies - and CEOs particularly - can do plenty of others.
Sure, in terms of lobbying, contributing to PACs, etc. But that's very rarely aligned with what the social justice activists want.
What they get, instead, is a performative pacifier. Which IMO makes the problem worse as they realize how unsatisfying it is and demand more and more strenuous performance.
There is something to what you're saying, but politics isn't only electoral. The two poles of attraction are pro-labor and pro-capital, so if startups do real politics in the workplace, it won't be to the benefit of anyone that isn't in management.
If the workplace did not have its own issues I would agree. But, since, to take one example, sexism is a known problem in tech - and throughout corporate America and society, to be fair - in order to not have a sexist workplace, one would need to be proactive.
Broadly speaking. Point being, it's easy to not want "politics" in the workplace when the workplace works well for you. If you're someone whom the workplace doesn't work well for, like a person of color, a pregnant woman, new mother, or new father, for that matter, well, then it's a different story.
If you yourself believe that sexism/systemic racism aren't issues that show up (even inadvertently or despite the best intentions of individuals) in the workplace, well, then that's a different conversation entirely.
I think this is different from someone in a position of power promoting a particular candidate in the workplace. That is more complex and problematic. The 2020 election was obviously an extreme example, and, tbh, with things like global warming, I think we'll be seeing more politics like that in the workplace, not less.
Which, to me, means it's not an easy or one-size-fits all solution, but rather, a challenge which requires each of us to exercise care and our own judgement.
For example, personally, I would have liked to see Hacker News take even a small explicit step of endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement (such as putting 'Black lives matter' on the top of the homepage), seeing as how it's one of the major civil rights issues of our present moment. I can also understand their concerns around doing so, even though I disagree with them.
IMHO it's too easy for those of us doing well and making money to forget that the institutions we work for have a social impact and are a part of society.
Where I work the director has a monthly lunch with female employees so they can talk about their careers and how to advance and get promoted. I don't know, due to lack of experience, but I assume this is beneficial to one's career. Presumably benefiting careers is why they're doing it.
And yet, it feels like sexism to me. Women get an explicit benefit that men don't. Women are also explicitly privileged in the hiring process and higher ups are rewarded based on the number of women they employ, hire, and promote. This isn't a conspiracy theory but an explicitly articulated and documented process. Even before that, in college, we had events for women who code, women in STEM, career opportunities for women, etc.
I get that these things are all because women are underrepresented in tech and surely there are challenges for women and sexism against women. However, the examples above still feel like sexism to me. I am not all men, so the fact that men have better representation in upper levels is meaningless to me as an individual. The fact that my female peers have a monthly meeting with higher-ups to discuss how they get promoted and I don't get that isn't as meaningless.
On top of all that, I also know that if I were to ever suggest this was sexism or wrong in any way using my real name or at work, I'd fully expect to be fired and reviled by my coworkers as a deplorable sexist.
My point in writing all this is just to say that I would much prefer my company stay dispassionate and neutral and try to treat everyone fairly. I don't really support the company taking up political, social, or ideological agendas and using them to make decisions about what happens at work.
I feel like this is genuine take. I don’t know your age or anything other that what you wrote, so I’ll relate my experience.
I saw many of these same initiatives beginning as I was moving through high school and college. Being young and generally feeling like I treated people fairly, I assumed that most of the world treated others the same. Sexism seemed antiquated.
Fast forward a couple of decades and the women in my life still get second-guessed, mansplained, faced lowered expectations, and/or past over for promotions.
Some of it is blatant sexism. Some of it is sexism-light, where not being part of the boys’ club leaves them excluded from the power-clique. They still have a markedly different professional experience than I do, because they are women.
Is there a better way to handle this than what you described? Maybe. But I don’t think the need for such support mechanisms has expired yet.
The unfairness of the system you describe, also happens to other men who don't get promoted or don't have time for side projects, or comment on HN, and aren't in the same clique, etc. Maybe we should target the core problem, instead of making it about gender.
>the women in my life still get second-guessed, mansplained, faced lowered expectations, and/or past over for promotions.
My wife works for a non-profit. Her supervisor (a woman) was up for a promotion. She has worked at the place for 5 years. A guy who was newly hired 2 years back was also up for the promotion but he had more experience for the role (he had worked at a bigger firm and had done work at higher levels before, it's a legal nonprofit).
These were the only two up for the role. It's between work experience and time with the organization. Whichever you value more will probably determine who you choose. The big boss (a woman) ended up choosing the man over the woman for the job.
The woman was qualified. No doubt. For my wife and her supervisor, this was another example of sexism, women getting passed over for promotions again. But for the big boss (a woman) or for someone else on the outside, it's not so clear. Her leg up was her experience in the org. His leg up was his experience from other orgs.
When looking at a situation like this, how can you prove this is sexism? For someone it will be proof positive of sexism. For another it won't be.
Explicit, institutional sexism towards males is easy to spot out. Towards women, it takes this form, where you can't honestly say you 100% know it's sexism.
Over smaller sample size of 1 jumping to conclusions is not in good faith.
if the superboss has done this consistently in the past, then your wife's supervisor has grounds[1]. However with a sample size of 1 , it could be hundred factors and it is unfair to accuse anyone .
[1] Even when is there larger sample it is nuanced and tricky to really say, unless the superboss explicitly favours women there are inherent biases in the system against them, for example amount of mandatory maternity leave u.s. offers is pitiful, there are lesser women in STEM etc, the super boss selection criteria may be biased because of underlying biases not necessarily her own. Doesn't mean she should get a free pass, It should be investigated/reviewed before jumping to the conclusion of labelling someone sexist.
It all suddenly makes more sense if you allow a forbidden assumption that women are statistically less likely to flip out and start a competing company, instead of just being a cog in the machine. Or to feel superior to their boss, and do some political maneuvering to take over his position.
It also artificially limits the demand for men (lowering the salary costs) and normalizes dual-income families where 2 people have to work full-time to afford the same quality of life that the previous generation could get from a single salary.
The culture war is just a distraction, a divide-and-conquer strategy by the wealthy elites (who are isolated enough in their personal lives to be able to avoid all this noise) playing the masses to hate each other instead of hating and attacking the elites.
The best strategy is not to play, blend in and try to reach elite level yourself.
Sadly, not going to work. Assume work hard and reach some level of prosperity, enough to have a big house, and afford kids. You pass your values and knowledge to them, try to raise them according your understanding of what's best.
The very next moment the social justice kicks in. Your kids are labelled privileged. They will be demoralized at school and told to hate themselves. They will be penalized when trying to apply to top academic institutions, denied promotions at work, and constantly guilt-tripped.
Instead these positions will be split between those who get them via connections, and the "disadvantaged" people who will pose a much lower political threat to the "connected" group.
So unless you are a part of the hereditary elites, whatever wealth you have created, gets erased in the next generation.
It's better to see this as a conscious attempt to correct sexism than as sexism itself. It's a blunt instrument, to address a blunt injustice that occurs at all levels of society. Just because you aren't all men, doesn't mean you haven't had advantages that women are denied.
It's just that these advantages are normalized in the system, so they aren't as apparent as the corrective measures. It's really easy to miss them, just like, for example if you play a shooter on an easy mode first, you don't necessarily know how it would be harder.
That said, you want to talk to your director or learn about your career? Email them and ask them about it.
The problem I have with this, is the examples I gave of sexism are institutional, explicit, codified programs. "We will reward hiring and promoting women." "Women get an advantage in the hiring and interview process." "This career development process is explicitly for women." I could go on.
Girls aren't obviously disadvantaged in school. Girls outperform boys in every subject, science and math included, and have for decades[1]. Women are admitted more to colleges and graduate more[2]. Then there are structural programs at major companies to advantage women in hiring and career growth, as I mentioned.
It is true that women face the subtle kinds of discrimination referenced elsewhere. I'm not denying that. I'm saying that instituting programs which relatively disadvantage my career and opportunities due to my gender strikes me as unfair. I don't get a benefit because the executive leadership team is mostly men. They don't share the money and power with me because we are all men - so why am I disadvantaged because other men have achieved success?
Ah that's because the bias against women isn't codified or a program, it's systemic, and therefore can be found mainly from it's effects. They aren't obvious because bias isn't necessarily obvious.
For example, here's a study where candidates with the same cv differ only by name.
I gotta run, so I don't have time to cite it, but women, controlling for job qualifications and profession, earn 98% for every dollar a man earns. That may not seem like much, but the effect is enhanced by hiring and promotion differences and other effects of bias.
As to your question of not getting the benefit, how do you know that gender bias didn't help you get hired or affect your pay? Are you so sure that if you were a woman, you would have been hired, paid, and promoted just like you were now?
Regardless, policies are based on affecting the most good for the most people, not on helping you.
I disagree with the characterization of sexism against women as "systemic". That seems like exactly the wrong word to use. Systemic sexism would imply there is an organized system to disadvantage women. I think the organized system - going from the public education system (largely administrated by women) which favors girls (better grades, less punishment, better graduation rate for girls), to college (where girls are a majority of students and graduates) to employment (where there are organized systems to benefit women in terms of hiring and promotion) exhibits a preference based on gender for women rather than against women.
The kind of sexism that women encounter is not an organized system of oppression (e.g. being directed to hire fewer women) but rather it is the latent sexism of individuals not acting in an organized fashion. Individuals not taking a woman seriously, or being harassing, or not wanting to hire women etc. "Systemic" does not seem like an apt word for this kind of sexism.
Regarding your question over how I know I don't benefit from gender bias - clearly I can't know. Just like my female colleagues can't know if they benefit from gender bias. Maybe if I were a woman I would've got better grades in school, gone to a better college, retained my interest in programming, and been preferentially hired in an even better role. It's impossible to know.
1. A legal inequality from 100 years ago. My comments are about the US specifically, no doubt systemic sexism exists in other countries.
2. From your wikipedia link, one of the key arguments against the amendment was that it would imply women could be drafted - "Political scientist Jane Mansbridge in her history of the ERA argues that the draft issue was the single most powerful argument used by Schlafly and the other opponents to defeat ERA".
If you want to show a persuasive (to me) example of systemic sexism, I think you should provide an example that is current and that systemically disadvantages women. If the lack of an ERA does disadvantage women, please explain how.
If you are unwilling to understand the significance of it taking until 1920 for women to receive the right to vote, and the variety of reasons for resistance to the ERA, then, I don't know what to say.
If you haven't, talk with the women in your life you are friends with about sexism and discrimination in the work place.
I think it's a pretty low bar to ask for an example of a current systemic disadvantage that women have. I can point to multiple systemic disadvantages that men have right now - but your examples are from 100 years ago or are very vague. If the systemic oppression of women in the US is so vast as to necessitate laws that advantage or disadvantage individuals based on their sex, then I think it should also be pretty easy to point to.
As far as talking with women about the sexism they've experienced - I've never denied women experience sexism. I've explicitly acknowledged that multiple times. My point is that the sexism they experience is not an organized system of oppression (i.e. it is not "systemic"). There are multiple, explicit, and codified systems that disadvantage men and I have pointed to several of them.
No, it’s better to see this as what it literally is, and to recognize that it causes the same kinds of problems as what you’re trying to fix, as well as new ones.
This is classical dilema between affirmative action and meritocracy.
The argument for affirmative action goes that any special treatment only counters the biases and limitations you don't face and they do.
The argument against affirmative action is that it is very hard to remove preferential treatment once it is in place even if it no longer required. The other argument is that such affirmative action does not efficiently target the truly deserving or the underlying cause.
Dependent probability is never factored in, while it is true the number of women who get into STEM or programing is low, the biases in companies is considerably less once they are in. Over extending benefits in the workplace is not perhapa as important as getting education fixed in schools and colleges.
> The argument against affirmative action is that it is very hard to remove preferential treatment once it is in place even if it no longer required.
Once you educate yourself with fact-based historical information to understand how unfair the system has been, this actually is an argument in favor of affirmative action.
Point being that until very recently the biases has been extreme, so that despite positive changes in both culture and law, equality will not happen over night (as you said, things persist), and thus affirmative action is important even after the most pernicious source of discrimination has been removed.
Affirmative action is complex, no question, but your particular point is more of an argument for it than one against it.
I have no opinion what is the right approach, I merely presented both sides of the argument.
To elaborate on the why not:
The problem is rarely the intent of affirmative action .it is in the execution, same problems with big / small government , and the idea behind UBI or give cash instead of subsidy is sometimes bettee.
I grew up in a country where affirmative action is codified in the law and about 50 % of job openings, promotions university seats are reserved and has been for the last 70 years. Was it and still is there need for it ? Yes absolutely,
however the efficiency of allocation is a challenge , some groups who needed it 70 years back don't really need it anymore , however it is political suicide to even propose a reduction or a reallocation to reflect today's problems.
It doesn't mean we should not do anything, however to ignore the misalignment of incentives inefficiency of allocation and stickyness of any action is not good either.
That is absolutely sexism. It deeply bothers me that some people think tech must be exactly 50% male/female, and anything else is inherent sexism. It's anti-scientific to deny the possibility that biological gender can influence desired career paths.
If there are provable differences that effect performance, by all means cite them. But it's more likely that unseen bias affects hiring and promotions.
Girls and boys mathematical abilities are equivalent.
I don't have anything to say that directly relates to the evidences you have provided. But I'd take anything coming out of social science with a grain of salt, given that the amount politicization and acitvism going on. People have real incentives to hide evidences, design flawed experiments or conjure up misleading narratives. One of the most prominent doctrines provided social science is now being proven sham and has done great damage to the society https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/self-esteem-grit-do-they-real...
I think you are confusing the idea of individual people's incentives with the community as a whole.
Just as in our society individuals may have an incentive to do nefarious deeds like robbery or murder, but society as a whole has an incentive to stop it, so it is with science.
And having checked your link, A) the person's theory was overhyped and B) a meta analysis brought it back to earth. Which is evidence that the process of scientific inquiry works.
That's why we know that climate change exists, despite deniers, and that vaccines don't cause autism, despite anti vaxxers having been inspired by a now retracted paper that said it did.
Parent said "influence desired career paths", which is not the same as differences in performance. People choose a career path for many reasons besides ability, such as individual personality, ability in alternative jobs (note the quote in your first link which points out that "girls outperform their male counterparts on achievement tests in stereotypically feminine subject areas"), or even their experience being bullied in high school with regard to the job.
Furthermore, if you want to come to valid statistical conclusions about whether a discrepancy is due to a particular cause (and can't just do a RCT), it's not enough to just ignore plausible confounders until they are "provable". You need to systematically control for all possible confounders.
> What we found is that de-identifying applications at the shortlisting stage does not appear to assist in promoting diversity within the Australian Public Service (APS) in hiring. Overall, APS officers discriminated in favour of female and minority candidates. The practical impact is that, if implemented, de-identification may frustrate diversity efforts.
As a single data point, this is interesting: "GitHub's ElectronConf postponed because all the talks (selected through an unbiased, blind review process) were to be given by men."[0]
What's interesting, I suppose, is not that the selected speakers were all men (which could have happened by random chance), but the reaction by the conference organisers to that fact.
> Girls and boys mathematical abilities are equivalent.
I have to laugh my ass off. In reality, boys get 800 on the math SAT at over twice the rate that girls do. That article addressing this by stating "the SAT is hardly a random sample of all students" is complete nonsense.
The idea that smart males and females are produced at the same rate is ludicrous on its face, because female brains are made with the information from two X chromosomes and males with just the one.
> It's anti-scientific to deny the possibility that biological gender can influence desired career paths.
IMHO what is actually being claimed, and which there is academic consensus based on facts around, is that sexism has been such a pervasive cultural force, to such a degree that it's difficult to parse nature versus nurture.
Plus science is still working on nature vs nature - it's complex.
So. Simpler to start with the known, empirically verified problem in front of our eyes.
Well said. I think these D&I (wait, DEI now) practices are highly questionable and I'm really wondering when companies will get sued for discrimination.
> I get that these things are all because women are underrepresented in tech and surely there are challenges for women and sexism against women. However, the examples above still feel like sexism to me.
These two sentences contradict each other.
You also say "I am not all men", but, sadly, the issue with systemic biases (racism, sexism, etc), is that it's not about individuals.
You seem smart enough to be able to theorize about ways in which, as a man, you may have unknowningly benefited from systemic biases over the course of your education / career.
For one thing you don't have to worry about being sexually harassed or raped by a friend/coworker - the numbers are pretty bad.
We're supposed to be rational, work with numbers, etc - so even if we can't prove the effect of a systemic bias on an individual, our knowledge of the data and basic statistics should lead us to be able to make reasonable inferences about general cases, etc.
I guess what I'm saying is, be the bigger man, in both ways in which that phrase can be read. It's not all about you.
You seem to be arguing for laws that treat people differently based on their immutable characteristics - i.e. gender. I think that's wrong and people should be treated equally. It's true that most of upper management is male - but that fact only incurs a cost on me, not a benefit. The cost is: The upper management is incentivized to promote women (i.e. not me) to balance out their existing maleness.
I could be the "bigger man" by ignoring structural disadvantages against me and people like me, and in real life, of course I do ignore these disadvantages. The reason I ignore them is not because I think it makes me a bigger man, but because if I spoke out against them I would be fired and ostracized. People would hate me for raising or sharing these opinions.
For your point about sexual harassment and rape - this is not something specific to the tech industry and not something that is fixed by deciding to prefer women over men in hiring decisions. Is the idea that, because women are more likely to be sexually harassed or raped, outside of prison, they should get the compensatory prize of these career benefits I've described? That just seems like a non-sequitur to me.
> You seem to be arguing for laws that treat people differently based on their immutable characteristics - i.e. gender. I think that's wrong and people should be treated equally.
That's not what I am arguing. What I am saying is, if people were currently being treated equally then we would not have to have this conversation. The truth is that they are not.
I mean come on, have you ever heard of the Bedchel test?
"It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added."
You have to exercise a lot of mental energy to not see all the ways in which there is systemic sexism in our society and workplace.
You also have to decide that all these women must be, making this shit up?
You also have to be pretty ignorant, either deliberately or through circumstance having placed you in an unhealthy media environment. These days there are a lot of fact-based, data-supported history books, studies, etc, talking about systemic sexism both past and present.
To sum up, however good your tech knowledge may be, your knowledge - current, best-practices knowledge, so to speak, of history is weak. Or, you don't want to acknowledge the truth.
If you're not arguing for policies that treat people differently based on their gender, then we would be in agreement. Individuals should be treated as individuals and not as members of a monolithic group based on their immutable characteristics. i.e. I should not be penalized for being a man, a Chinese person should not be penalized for being Chinese, a blind person should not be penalized for being blind, etc.
This doesn't seem to be what you're advocating though. You're defending policies that explicitly favor people based on their immutable characteristics. I understand you think it balances historical inequality, but I disagree with that.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes data on job occupation and demographics of the workers[1]. You can see that many occupations are at approximate gender parity (i.e. ~50% women) and some occupations are majority women while other occupations are majority men.
Let's consider four occupations from this list written as Occupation title, percent women. Computer programmers, 20. Insurance underwriters, 51. Human resource managers, 75. Pre-school teachers, 98.7. Why are women only 20% of computer programmers? Is it because 100 years ago women weren't allowed to vote and because today women have relatively few lines of dialogue with one another in popular films? Well, why do those factors uniquely affect female computer programmers and not other career disciplines? I don't think I would have expected that prior to looking at the data.
If relatively few women are computer programmers because of systemic sexism, is there less systemic sexism among insurance underwriters? And how would you know that apart from looking at these percentages? As male as the profession of computer programming is, human resources managers are even more female - is that because of a prejudice against men? And that's not to mention the apparently staggering bias against male preschool teachers.
In other words, if the only way you can tell that computer programmers are systemically sexist and insurance underwriters are not is because of the portion of women in those respective fields, it seems like that same logic would also lead to there being massive system sexism against male human resources managers and teachers.
An alternate hypothesis, which I do believe in, is that men and women tend to have different interests. Women, for reasons that are an ineffable mystery, like to be around children as an example. That's why they are over represented among teachers, especially teachers of younger and younger children. I think it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that women, in aggregate, are less likely to be interested in computer programming, and this lack of interest is what leads there to be relatively few female programmers, not the Bechdel test or the history of women's suffrage.
Your post actually exemplifies why this is so fraught. The first part of your post is hard to criticize—every workplace has to think about how they’re accommodating and trying to foster quality amongst employees with different backgrounds. Companies should be talking about how their promotion practices affect working mothers, etc.
But your example of HN endorsing “Black Lives Matter” is different. Taken literally it’s a straightforward slogan, but it’s also the name of a specific political organization with a broad political agenda: https://thepostmillennial.com/exposed-blm-quietly-scrubs-ant.... It’s not just an articulation of a single problem. It identifies the problem as being a symptom of an entire system, and advocates radical changes to our whole society to solve that problem and others.
What part of the various political ideologies that could be deemed to fall within the umbrella of “BLM” are you asking HN to endorse? And what aspects of the platform do you think others will perceive HN as endorsing?
This is not a criticism of BLM—I go to a church that has a BLM banner and I understand what’s being conveyed and not conveyed in that context. But demanding this sort of expression of ideological alignment from organizations that aren’t ideological and activist to begin with is very problematic.
Doesn't this whole comment depend on me believing that organizations like the Go Programming Language are endorsing Marxism when they post "Black Lives Matter" banners? For that matter, all of my very-well-off Oak Park neighbors? Obviously, they are not doing that. Where does that leave your argument?
The link you shared - from the Post-Millenial - is troubling.
First, when reading it, to me, the language from the BLM site the article discussed did not line up w/what the article was accusing it of.
Second, the very beginning of the Wikipedia page about The Post-Millenial says this (and cites decent-looking sources for each point):
"The Post Millennial is a conservative Canadian online news magazine started in 2017. It publishes national and local news and has a large amount of opinion content. It has been criticized for releasing misinformation and articles written by fake personas,[1] for having unknowingly employed an editor with ties to white supremacist-platforming and pro-Kremlin media outlets,[2] and for opaque funding and political connections.[3][4]"
Simply put, Black Lives Matter, or BLM, is fundamentally about racist police violence and systemic racism in the justice system. That's at the core of it.
IMHO most critiques such as the one you raise seem to mainly be an attempt to obfuscate that simple fact.
You looked up the Wikipedia for post millennial, but couldn’t be bothered to double check archive.org to confirm the language referenced in the article was in fact on the BLM site until it was recently removed? See: https://web.archive.org/web/20190118185735/https://blacklive...
'We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.'
So what? There are tons of cultures in which child raising is communal. Including various parts of Western cultures at various times.
They're not saying "nuclear families suck." They're saying, "nuclear families are one approach among many which humanity uses to raise children, and it's not necessarily always the best."
'Disrupt' doesn't mean 'Destroy'.
They also said 'to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.' Meaning, IMHO, 'folks should make their own choices for their own families.'
Considering how incredibly destructive slavery was to any form of family institution (father sold or killed, mother sold, child not, etc), and how that has echoed down to the present day in the black community, I can understand why black folks would want to have that discussion.
Which is not just a discussion being had by black people, either.
I agree with the phrase "black lives matter". But I absolutely do not support the political group "BLM", which stands for a number of liberal ideas that have nothing to do with black people. For example their "what we believe page" states: "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable."
Frankly I think this idea has awful implications that BLM does not grasp.
If the issue directly hinders the company’s goals as determined by the leadership then it should be addressed, that could include sexism. Main point is that the issue has to be relevant to the company’s goals as determined by the leadership.
For sure. But right now we're in an era of change. Should addressing the existential threat of climate change be a goal for every company, or not? That's one example.
The Expensify CEO believed that democracy itself was on the line in the 2020 election, and that supporting democracy was relevant to the company's goal.
We can disagree with him but I respect him for exercising his judgement about the situation.
EDIT: I'd like to add, IMHO, workers should have more control over their own labor and see more of the profits of their labor, so, actually I'd like to see companies evolve to become less hierarchial institutions and thus decide priorities in a more democratic / consensus-based fashion.
I don't know how we'd do this. But I know we collectively are smart enough to figure out how to get closer than we are now : ).
I agree 100% politics should be a part of any company. I’d like to see time set aside to educate employees about their 2nd amendment rights and maybe the company can do a dollar for dollar match on NRA donations?
Oh wait, you meant you want to see your politics supported in the workplace. Not politics in general.
Google, which is not known as a bastion of right-wing thought, will indeed match dollar-for-dollar donations to the NRA. Up to a threshold, just like it does for any other charity.
The NRA Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that raises and donates money to outdoors groups and others such as ROTC programs, 4-H and Boy Scouts.
The NRA Foundation is a separate organization from the NRA. Obviously a related one, but the distinction is important because 501(c)(3) organizations can’t do political campaigning.
> Such talk has scared many young people. Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, a young Clinton volunteer named Zach was upset the Democrats failed to beat Trump. According to cbsnews.com, at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, Zach yelled at a senior official: “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”
> Do scientists agree with Zach? The federal government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment was released last November. Hundreds of scientists from 13 government agencies compiled the 1,500-page report. It finds no existential threat from climate change. Zach is likely to have a long life.
Fires, hurricanes, extreme heat, and drought are made more frequent & severe by climate change, and they certainly kill people. Climate change also disrupts food systems and will cause civil war and mass migrations. Millions will need to migrate just from coastal flooding, which I'd imagine will cause plenty of geopolitical strife and ultimately lead to many deaths.
"Existential threat" in my mind means humanity itself is threatened. The species will likely survive but millions if not billions will die due to climate change.
Current projections of the effect of an RCP 8.5 scenario (a “do nothing” approach) suggest severe impacts to the Florida and gulf coasts, creating significant migrations inland. But the projected GDP hit will be an estimated 5%—i.e. losing a few years of growth.
It will be bad and disruptive and many people will die. But based on what we know about the “science” it’s not going to be “existential.” For example the wildfires on the west coast killed 35-40 people. We could have a dozen of those a year and it wouldn’t threaten the existence of humanity or really even civilization as we know it.
“Existential threat” could also mean “something that threatens life as we know it.” Sea level rising above the entire country of Bangladesh certainly qualifies in my books.
Aside: Arguing the exact technical meaning of a term thrown around is kind of a bad faith argument. Maybe we don’t put the same meaning to the same term, which is entirely likely given that HN is an international community.
“Existential threat” means a threat that threatens the existence of something (civilization, humanity, etc). It doesn’t just mean “really bad.” If you have a different meaning, you’re using the term wrong.
And there is nothing “bad faith” about the argument. An “existential threat” warrants a different response than lesser threats. So establishing whether or not climate change is really an “existential threat” is really important to the debate.
Climate change isn’t “existential” even for Bangladesh. A third of the Netherlands is already under sea level. Technology compensates. Experts project that climate change could render 17% of Bangladesh under sea level in 40 years. 90% of Rotterdam is under sea level. The city was originally built using technology substantially more primitive than what Bangladesh might have in 40 years (when it is projected to be a middle-income country with a $3 trillion economy).
Most proposed anti-climate-change policies also threaten “life as we know it”. That’s literally the reason why e.g. the French were massively protesting gas tax hikes.
The HN banner idea would only antagonize the HN folks. In my childhood, parents made me eat tomatoes, because, you know, it's healthy. Since then I despise tomatoes, even though at a rational level I understand that my parents were right.
The techies types are knowledge first people. If you want to win their support, appeal to knowledge, make a rational case, but avoid trying to fool them, as the moment they notice a logical inconsistence in your ideas, they'll dismiss them entirely.
Most activism appeals to emotions, to feelings, because it matters a lot to most people. But techies put dry knowledge first and so needs to change your tactic.
Nevertheless, I'm upvoting your comment because I believe it presents an important viewpoint.
The any number of flame wars that techies have (like editor X vs Y, operating system A vs B) should put to rest any assertions of us privileging knowledge over emotions.
The subset of techies you are talking about like to think that about themselves like that. They're as emotional and biased as the rest of us mortals, proof of that for example is characterizing the comment as irrational just because it doesn't "feel" rational to you, other comments talking about feminist re-educations camps or how climate change isn't that big of a deal.
I'm not trying to be antagonistic but one should be careful of thinking that they are inherently a more rational person.
They're biased, but in a different way. Most people are steered by wrong feelings: they feel strongly about something, although don't quite understand it, and act on those feelings. Techies are less suspectible to feelings (they are deaf in some sense), but they often get trapped in mental illusions, i.e. elaborate mental structures and ideas that incorrectly describe the world.
This is also why techies dont make it far in power structures: they don't get that emotional aspect of human relationships.
What if you support the concept that black lives matter but do not support the actions of the organization Black Lives Matter (which is not just about racial equality).
Your posts take what may sound like a benign or reasonable position (civil rights are good, right?) and uses that as a means to assert that supporting BLM is the same thing. For some it is, for some it isn’t. And for some it’s green grocerism or a Kafkatrap.
Police brutality against Black people is a civil rights issue. BLM is a group of affiliated political organizations, and a slogan coined and popularized by those same organizations. Those organizations view the policing issue as just one symptom of a larger societal problem and advocates particular solutions not only to that problem, but to other problems that are, within their intellectual framework, related.
It’s the difference between “child malnutrition” and activist organizations that have particular explanations for and proposed solutions to that problem.
> Police brutality against Black people is a civil rights issue. BLM is a group of affiliated political organizations, and a slogan coined and popularized by those same organizations.
That's historically false. The slogan was popularized before the key organizations existed; the organizations were, in part, a response to the criticism that the movement united by the slogan lacked a clear and coherent agenda.
> Outraged and saddened after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Florida man who killed a Black teenager in 2012, Oakland, California resident Alicia Garza posts a message on Facebook on July 13, 2013. Her post contains the phrase "Black lives matter," which soon becomes a rallying cry and a movement throughout the United States and around the world.
> In 2013, three female Black organizers — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — created a Black-centered political will and movement building project called Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter began with a social media hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin back in 2012.
> According to the Black Lives Matter website they were "founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.
> My understanding is that Alicia Garza and the other founders of the BLM organization coined the phrase itself
Yes, they created the slogan and hashtag in 2012 and the Foundation in 2013, and the Movement for Black Lives was founded in 2014. (Much of this is express in the excerpts you cite.) The organizations did not exist until well after the slogan was popularized, and the various organizations within the movement (even the big two) mentioned are not without disputes over both policy recommendations and priority between them; the slogan isn’t a sales technique for the programs of one organization or the other, the organizations are working to try to establish how to make the slogan concrete.
How is that responsive to my point? The folks who created the slogan built a political organization around it, and that organization has a specific political platform. Put differently, it’s not like the slogan was some pre-existing neutral concept that happens to be used by these organizations. There is a direct relation between the slogan and these organizations.
Demanding that people repeat and affirm the slogan, therefore, seems risks demanding they endorse the organizations.
At Northwestern, there were demands for former Dean Yuracko to recite the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. She released messages condemning the “horrific racial injustices faced by African-Americans on a regular basis” and developing an action plan for the school. But she was condemned for “not explicitly stating, ‘Black Lives Matter.’” (https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2020/7/9/21310596/nor...). And she was ultimately removed from her job.
I don’t know Dean Yuracko’s inner thoughts. But I suspect she has fairly progressive views given the nature of her research (gender equity) and that she believes “black lives matter” as a literal factual statement. But being pressured to repeat that statement, as the slogan, and the name of an organization with some fairly radical ideas, is a differently thing entirely. In America, we don’t go around forcing people to express solidarity with a political movement, no matter how meritorious the movement.
I think we're likely talking past each other. I agree that there is immense social pressure for individuals to endorse the slogan "Black Lives Matter".
What I dispute is the proposition that any reasonable person assumes such an endorsement also constitutes an endorsement of the Marxist beliefs of "BLM, Inc.", a name I'm introducing to capture the organization you're referring to.
I agree that BLM, Inc. is so hospitable to radical socialism that we might as well refer to it as a radical socialist organization.
I strongly disagree that such tendencies also apply to the slogan "Black Lives Matter"; BLM, Inc. has lost its hold on the slogan, and no longer owns it. That's what happens when a slogan succeeds so wildly it's on every bumper sticker and lawn in Oak Park.
(I think this is more or less what the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education has to say about BLM as well).
This is precisely what I’m talking about. You’re continuing to assert that if you support civil rights you must support BLM. Others have pointed out why this comes from a faulty assumption.
People make these claims about HN based on their own political passions, which lead to false feelings of generality. If you had the opposite politics, you'd notice opposite things and derive opposite conclusions [1]. Plenty of people do:
"if you say anything that doesn't align with the mainstream liberal consensus you'll be flagged and a mod will reprimand you for flaimbait" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353254
"anything critical of the Democratic party is instantly flagged [...] And the moderators don't give a fuck either because they're also in the main HN demographic of SV white liberal trash" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24990311
Sure, not everyone agrees on where HN leans politically. There is no all-encompassing autoritative data, and plenty of room for interpretation and debate. Everyone is entitled to their opinion on the topic and I have mine.
See my user name. I was being polite, what I was thinking was, imagine how fucking far left you have to be to think hackernews is right wing. ;) You’re right, it’s a matter of perspective and bubble.
> Their rethorical device for holding the moral high ground is to frame their political views as neutral and apolitical, while framing views they disagree with as divisive and “political”.
This I wish more people called out. There is a lot of going on this post. There is a lot of, whats called on reddit "enlightened centrism", they definitely come out in full force here to attempt to be clever. This fake argument needs a name and a better description.
Thread ancestor was hedging carefully with the word 'irrelevant'. I'm not drawing any instances to mind where someone argued that sexism was irrelevant to the workplace, only people arguing that the current crop of policies are unfair or counterproductive. Damore springs to mind, he had a section titled "Non discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap" and so it would be difficult to argue that he thought inaction was the goal.
What is politics is in itself political, but I expect there will be a fair majority of people who want corporations to focus on carrying out basic tasks effectively rather than devoting resources to experimental (or divisive) social reform. The risks of corruption and bad outcomes are real.
