10 ms·

As a European, I keep getting baffled about how out of hand these things seem to be in the USA. I live in the Netherlands, a very open-minded country with same

As a European, I keep getting baffled about how out of hand these things seem to be in the USA. I live in the Netherlands, a very open-minded country with same-sex marriage, equal rights and were women seem to me to be even slightly more dominant over men (but this is just my perception). All this without safe spaces, forced quotas at conferences, codes of conduct and people that police every word you say. There are laws against harassment of course, and that's enough. Of course, it's not perfect, but there are rarely if ever any big incidents due to discrimination (to my knowledge). Looking at the USA instead I see people getting offended pretty much for anything. As a consequence discussion gets neutered to the point where everybody is afraid to express even small controversial ideas or make the next "dongle" joke for the fear of repercussions. I have also seen a lot of videos of people getting beaten in the streets for holding up signs with which "offended" people did not agree. Is that freedom of speech? We had such things in our history in the "old continent" and they were definitely not called this way. This is one of the big reasons that always kept me away from the USA, even for short trips at conferences. Here in Europe to me it feels much safer and open minded, with all the flaws and imperfections that there might be.

Baeocystin 9y ago
Come now. What would you say to an academic who didn't want to go to the whole of Europe, just because he saw some scary news about something that happened in Prague once? The US is a huge, multifaceted place, and like anywhere so large, you will find things both awful and wonderful. But life is a lot less chaotic than the news agencies claim. And the histrionic folks, while loud, are a lot fewer in number than the amount of airtime their doings get would have you believe. tl;dr- Come on over, the water's fine. You'll probably make some friends. Everybody wins.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I second the line of thinking, but please rein in the TSA a bit. That's literally the only thing I'm scared about going to US. All the other things seem like a purely local phenomena that shouldn't be generalized to the whole 300M country. But I am scared I'll get into trouble on the border because of my HN and Facebook posts (e.g. against US drone strikes).
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    Very unlikely that they would care. Frankly, they don't have the resources to care about people (including myself) who protest and don't like drone strikes. The TSA is annoying but the worst part is just long lines.
  - corey_moncure 9y ago
    As we know from history, and as was confirmed during the debacle over "naked scanners", TSA and such institutions will never, ever yield an inch. At best we can hope for a side step.
  - Baeocystin 9y ago
    Yeah, there's no way I'm going to defend the TSA's methodologies. They a pain to deal with. The good thing I'll say is that somewhere around 57 million people visited the US last year. 99.9%+ had no trouble other than long lines and the general frustration that comes with long distance travel. So your fears, while completely understandable, are also very, very unlikely to cause any actual trouble.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Ok, thanks for the numbers. That feels much better than what I was lead to believe happens at the borders all the time.
      - naasking 9y ago
        0.01% of 57 million people still means 5,700 people were harassed, largely unnecessarily.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - an27 9y ago
      That doesn't really do it for me. Isn't the level of government mistrust and "dissent in speach" you regularly encounter on HN, extremely high on HN compared to the average US visitor? Like, at levels only seen in 1 out of every 100,000 visitors, making it quite likely you'll be one of the 0.1-% percent if you hold these extreme viewpoints?
- DeusExMachina 9y ago
  That is probably the reality over there. But the perception from Here is definitely different.
- bitJericho 9y ago
  That's what every American says.
  - Baeocystin 9y ago
    I didn't live here until I was a teen, and I spent my childhood in Southeast Asia. I've also lived for years at a time in a half-dozen other countries around the world. So far, there's no other country I would rather live in than the USA. YMMV, and I respect that. But please also consider that I am speaking from relevant experience.
abtinf 9y ago
> All this without ... people that police every word you say. Is that a joke? There are literally laws, with actual prosecutions, in the Netherlands designed to police every word you say.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  [citation needed]
  - severine 9y ago
    Not OP, not endorsing their opinion, just linking for info: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2016/netherlands https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2016/netherlan...
  - abtinf 9y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#Netherlands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#Netherlands http://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/world/europe/sylvana-simons-netherlands-hate-speech.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/world/europe/sylvana-si... http://www.armradio.am/en/2017/03/17/chairman-of-turkish-azerbaijani-union-in-the-netherlands-sentenced-for-hate-speech-against-armenians/ http://www.armradio.am/en/2017/03/17/chairman-of-turkish-aze... http://www.economist.com/news/international/21640748-netherlands-restrictions-free-speech-allow-provocateurs-pose-martyrs-illiberal http://www.economist.com/news/international/21640748-netherl...
  - smsm42 9y ago
    Just recently in Zurich somebody was sentenced to a fine for "like" on Facebook: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/man-guilty-libel-over-facebook-likes-swiss-court-150033542.html https://sg.news.yahoo.com/man-guilty-libel-over-facebook-lik...
Tehnix 9y ago
I definitely agree with this view, and it's perhaps also why I really can't understand choices like these, to cancel an event, because of the genders of the people speaking? Why does that even matter? If what another commenter mentioned[0][1], that they did blind-reviews of the papers, then this is actually quite appalling to me and sends the reverse signal that we don't really care about your paper, as long as you fill up our quota. I also deeply believe that this is inherently the wrong way to fix this kind of problem. It's like treating symptoms instead of actually treating the underlying disease. If the papers accepted were all male, then why not ask "why was it only papers from men that were qualified enough?" or "why did only men submit papers for our event?". If the former is true than we need effort into investigating why more women aren't writing these papers (be it quality or just plain quantity), and if the latter then look into the marketing/awareness on the paper submitting process. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480918 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481098 EDIT: Included links to the comments that mentioned the blind-reviews. -- Semi-related: While I haven't seen it, I saw an interview with Jordan Peele about the movie "Get Out". He mentions that he wanted to tackle the fact that while Obama definitely helped the US move to less racist tones, it was never really solved, it is just there hiding under the skin with super-awareness to not be racist, which arguably is not the desired effect - there shouldn't be awareness at all about race period. I feel like this effect is somewhat similar to what is happening here, and the fact that the US is not able to hold any reasonable discussion at all on these topics doesn't make me optimistic on their capability to handle these issues. I feel like PC culture is causing way more harm than good. </rant>
- ygaf 9y ago
  They've realised now (or maybe still don't realise) a blind review of papers isn't what they wanted.
- rayiner 9y ago
  PC culture is a frustrated reaction to how fucked up America is with regard to race. Look at the income/health statistics between blacks and whites, or go live in an inner-city. It's mind blowing. It's a problem we created as a society and we're not doing anything to fix it. So we've resorted to counting the number of different color people at coding conferences.
selllikesybok 9y ago
>>>I live in the Netherlands, a very open-minded country with same-sex marriage, equal rights and were women seem to me to be even slightly more dominant over men (but this is just my perception). I can't comment on the present social climate or attitudes in NL generally, but the history seems pretty similar. Sufferage at about the same time, anyway. Anyway, think about who is offending and being offended. No is being beaten in the streets for saying, "Actually, I think Bill Maher is the height of comedy." Also, holding a sign that, explicitly or implicitly says, "I am inherently superior to you, and I fervently hope you will all die and come to ruin, what are you going to do about that, huh, <expletive>?" seems unlikely to be well received anywhere in the world.
rayiner 9y ago
The U.S. faces challenges the Netherlands does not. Take race for example. One out of every eight Americans are here because their ancestors were slaves. That's not the distant past. Heck, many people today are fighting for the right to commemorate the pro-slavery side of that story. More recently, if Bill Gates had been born in the south, he likely would have gone to a racially-segregated school. And the effects of that are felt today. Black households, for example, have a median income of just 60% as much as white households. How does this affect a coding conference you ask? Because it affects everything. You don't do something like that as a society and expect that the consequences will disappear just a few generations after you stopped doing it.[1] So yes, everyone in the U.S. is really sensitive, with good reason. Frankly it's a miracle that safe spaces and sensitivity training are the worst atonement we have to deal with. People in many regions of the world are fighting decades' long bloody wars over less egregious circumstances. [1] In college I used to be anti-PC. Then when I was living in Atlanta, I walked across one of the streets that historically served as a dividing line for segregation: http://socialshutter.blogspot.com/2012/10/when-street-names-change-on-other-side.html?m=1 http://socialshutter.blogspot.com/2012/10/when-street-names-.... I went from my trendy white midtown neighborhood to a predominantly black very low income neighborhood. For me, it was a major "holy fuck everything is fucked up" moment.
- pdimitar 9y ago
  With the risk of being downvoted, let me cite George Carlin regarding the "sensitivity training": "Hey, if you need a special training to realize you can't shove large cumbersome objects up somebody's ass, then maybe you're too fucked up to be in the police force in the first place. ... Let's try something else -- intelligence and decency. You never can tell, it might just work, it certainly has never been tried before." I feel that in such areas USA just refuses to acknowledge the existence of a very, very basic common sense.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Okay, so what do you do when people don't have intelligence and decency?
MicroBerto 9y ago
It's social engineering meant to divide and weaken us, and a large portion of the country has fallen for it. Especially in Academia. We are becoming crippled by our own will. It's sad to watch and the pendulum response was the 2016 election.
- bmpafa 9y ago
  My problem with claims like these is that they imply intent, which implies a coherent (and nefarious) effort behind large social trends. Who precisely is it that's doing this?
  - rufus_2 9y ago
    My first guess would be those involved in the trillion dollar diversity and inclusion industry. How many departments of government, academia, and business are there today which depend on a continued societal belief in postmodernism's collectivist explanation of oppression and victimhood? If humanity achieved the goal of absolute equality, would those currently employed in the diversity and inclusion industry simply find new careers or would they continue to find new ways to segment humanity into oppressors and victims in order to retain the power and salary they are accustomed to?
    - bmpafa 9y ago
      This is as specious as "well of course vaccines don't work--pharma doesn't make money if you don't get sick!" By this logic, any profession built on solving a problem can't be trusted. Car broken? Don't take it to a mechanic--they'll just make sure it breaks again! Free-market competition (even the regulated kind) solves this conflict of interests. "Trillion dollar diversity and inclusion industry?" That's ~1/18th of the entire US GDP--which firms, etc., do you include in this sector of the economy? I can't think of a single example. This is why it's hard to reason through these topics. Either I'm told it's verboten to even discuss the implementation details of equal-opportunity initiatives, or I'm told it's some vast global conspiracy master-minded by Pam in HR who, having apparently learned the secrets to controlling the national discourse, can find no better application for that secret than keeping her job in HR.
nobi 9y ago
"a very open-minded country" cough Geert Wilders is the most popular politician in the Netherlands cough
- snovv_crash 9y ago
  He's also the most unpopular politician. What's your point?
  - nobi 9y ago
    That the Netherlands isn't as tolerant and open-minded as it seems to have fooled the rest of the world into thinking so. The man walks around calling Moroccans scum, even in Brexit Britain this would _never_ be tolerated.
owenversteeg 9y ago
So I'm a Dutch-American dual citizen that has lived in both countries. I guess I was born to answer this question :) A big hint to the difference is that my Black American friends spell it capital-B Black. Almost all of them live in, or are from, majority black neighborhoods. The majority listen to different music, and even have different diets compared to my white friends. They speak differently and have different names and are a distinct group of people. This isn't me making this up either; this is paraphrased from a Facebook post by an American Black friend of mine. There are large parts of the country where they can't rely on help from the police, and a significant portion of the country will actively hate them if they marry a non-Black person. I do have some black American friends that aren't like this. They spell it lowercase-b black, they live in mostly white neighborhoods, and aside from the color of their skin they are indistinguishable from another white person in that neighborhood. But those are a minority. The majority of Black Americans are capital-B Black, and they have much different lives because of it. In the Netherlands however, there are no large Black neighborhoods. (There are "black neighborhoods" to some degree, but orders of magnitude smaller.) None of my black Dutch friends would "capitalize the B" so to speak. The average black Dutch person has a pretty similar life to the average white Dutch person: there wouldn't be much of a difference in where they live, their diets, or their schools. A black Dutch person won't have to worry that the police won't help them. That can help you understand the race tensions in the US. To a somewhat lesser degree it can help you understand our LGBTQ+ and gender tensions. Sure, there aren't "female neighborhoods", but there are LBGTQ+ neighborhoods, and both women and non-straight people face discrimination. The Dutch women I'm friends with have pretty gender-mixed friends, while I'm usually the only male friend of the American women I've been friends with. The same for LGBTQ+ people - they tend to mostly make friends among themselves in the US, while my queer Dutch friends are mostly friends with straight people. Basically, in the Netherlands everyone is the same, but in the US people form groups. A big reason for that is that the American groups formed out of necessity. If you were going to be killed for being gay, well it makes sense to have mostly gay friends. If you're going to be lynched because you're Black, well it makes sense to make friends with other Black people. The Netherlands experienced racial tensions to a much lesser degree, so these groups never formed.
mnm1 9y ago
The US is currently deep in a dark age. With a country this big, it may not be obvious as everything is mostly operating as it was in the past, only slowly failing over time. If you look closely, however, you can see that we have pretty much given up on education, science, and the pursuit of truth. Actually, you don't have to look very close anymore at all; it's beyond obvious. We make a big deal out of people graduating high school, a feat that I have no doubt certain non-human primates are qualified for at this point given how much we've dumbed down our education. We have no problem churning out uneducated fools, so why would we expect these fools to be knowledgable when softer topics like "diversity" are so much easier to tweet about? I'm not saying diversity is not a worthy pursuit, far from it, but the way these people are pursing it is indeed foolish and dumb. It's a step above anti-vaxers and climate change deniers, but now we're just splitting hairs on what constitutes stupid.
smoyer 9y ago
I agree 100%. If I'm paying for a conference I want the best speakers and content - if you can deliver that with diversity I'm all for it. If you're number one priority is diversity and it means your content and speakers are sub-par, I'm going to stop coming. I think the more important issue is to make sure you selection committee is not biased. While it might be nice to have a selection committee made up with the front-page names in the start-up industry, you'd probably be better off skipping those that act more like fraternities.
Manchit 9y ago
How do we define the word "diversity" for a tech conference? Shouldn't it about the diversity of idea?
thekevan 9y ago
As an American, I keep getting baffeled how opinions like GH's in this are so prevalent on the internet but rarely seem to occur in the real world. Please don't judge us on the acts of a few. Gender equality in IT is a realistic important issue, but this is just taking it to a crazy level.
TylerH 9y ago
The issue is that here in the US we have an entitlement problem. Everyone feels entitled to everything. Even poor people feel like temporarily inconvenienced rich people, as the famous saying sort-of goes. We are also still obsessed with might making right, even at an individual level. America means guns and freedom and kicking everyone else's ass. It doesn't help that recentlyish our politicians feed this narrative by creating the worst us-vs-them chasm our nation has ever seen. I think this is problematic, but I also think it's inherent in a society that truly wants to allow freedom of expression. Why do we still have the KKK in America? Why do we let things like Breitbart exist? In Germany they have restrictions on Nazi-related things and discussions, and they seem to have turned out pretty well. We need to hold the right people accountable when bad things happen, and pretty much up and down the whole chain, that doesn't happen, because freedom. Hell, we even have judges who have allowed "affluenza" to be used as a legal defense for things as heinous as rape.
Myrmornis 9y ago
Yeah it is out of control in America. Perhaps it's partly that young middle-class people are less wordly (less experience of other cultures) and thus more inclined to juvenile, over-the-top views. Perhaps it's a pendulum swinging a bit too far currently; it's a pretty huge change to have the degree of support for a socialist presidential candidate that we saw with Bernie Saunders. > This is one of the big reasons that always kept me away from the USA, even for short trips at conferences. That's just silly. The first bit of your post was good, but now you sound like someone who really needs to take themselves less seriously. You don't have to avoid going to a continent because you don't like the tone of their culture wars currently. There are plenty of people who think all sorts of shit there, and if you really can't find any people who live up to your European standards then how about going for the natural world etc? (European speaking here)

Baeocystin 9y ago

Come now. What would you say to an academic who didn't want to go to the whole of Europe, just because he saw some scary news about something that happened in Prague once? The US is a huge, multifaceted place, and like anywhere so large, you will find things both awful and wonderful. But life is a lot less chaotic than the news agencies claim. And the histrionic folks, while loud, are a lot fewer in number than the amount of airtime their doings get would have you believe. tl;dr- Come on over, the water's fine. You'll probably make some friends. Everybody wins.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
I second the line of thinking, but please rein in the TSA a bit. That's literally the only thing I'm scared about going to US. All the other things seem like a purely local phenomena that shouldn't be generalized to the whole 300M country. But I am scared I'll get into trouble on the border because of my HN and Facebook posts (e.g. against US drone strikes).
- muninn_ 9y ago
  Very unlikely that they would care. Frankly, they don't have the resources to care about people (including myself) who protest and don't like drone strikes. The TSA is annoying but the worst part is just long lines.
- corey_moncure 9y ago
  As we know from history, and as was confirmed during the debacle over "naked scanners", TSA and such institutions will never, ever yield an inch. At best we can hope for a side step.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  Yeah, there's no way I'm going to defend the TSA's methodologies. They a pain to deal with. The good thing I'll say is that somewhere around 57 million people visited the US last year. 99.9%+ had no trouble other than long lines and the general frustration that comes with long distance travel. So your fears, while completely understandable, are also very, very unlikely to cause any actual trouble.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Ok, thanks for the numbers. That feels much better than what I was lead to believe happens at the borders all the time.
    - naasking 9y ago
      0.01% of 57 million people still means 5,700 people were harassed, largely unnecessarily.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - an27 9y ago
    That doesn't really do it for me. Isn't the level of government mistrust and "dissent in speach" you regularly encounter on HN, extremely high on HN compared to the average US visitor? Like, at levels only seen in 1 out of every 100,000 visitors, making it quite likely you'll be one of the 0.1-% percent if you hold these extreme viewpoints?
DeusExMachina 9y ago
That is probably the reality over there. But the perception from Here is definitely different.
bitJericho 9y ago
That's what every American says.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  I didn't live here until I was a teen, and I spent my childhood in Southeast Asia. I've also lived for years at a time in a half-dozen other countries around the world. So far, there's no other country I would rather live in than the USA. YMMV, and I respect that. But please also consider that I am speaking from relevant experience.

abtinf 9y ago

> All this without ... people that police every word you say. Is that a joke? There are literally laws, with actual prosecutions, in the Netherlands designed to police every word you say.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
[citation needed]
- severine 9y ago
  Not OP, not endorsing their opinion, just linking for info: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2016/netherlands https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2016/netherlan...
- abtinf 9y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#Netherlands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#Netherlands http://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/world/europe/sylvana-simons-netherlands-hate-speech.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/world/europe/sylvana-si... http://www.armradio.am/en/2017/03/17/chairman-of-turkish-azerbaijani-union-in-the-netherlands-sentenced-for-hate-speech-against-armenians/ http://www.armradio.am/en/2017/03/17/chairman-of-turkish-aze... http://www.economist.com/news/international/21640748-netherlands-restrictions-free-speech-allow-provocateurs-pose-martyrs-illiberal http://www.economist.com/news/international/21640748-netherl...
- smsm42 9y ago
  Just recently in Zurich somebody was sentenced to a fine for "like" on Facebook: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/man-guilty-libel-over-facebook-likes-swiss-court-150033542.html https://sg.news.yahoo.com/man-guilty-libel-over-facebook-lik...

Tehnix 9y ago

I definitely agree with this view, and it's perhaps also why I really can't understand choices like these, to cancel an event, because of the genders of the people speaking? Why does that even matter? If what another commenter mentioned[0][1], that they did blind-reviews of the papers, then this is actually quite appalling to me and sends the reverse signal that we don't really care about your paper, as long as you fill up our quota. I also deeply believe that this is inherently the wrong way to fix this kind of problem. It's like treating symptoms instead of actually treating the underlying disease. If the papers accepted were all male, then why not ask "why was it only papers from men that were qualified enough?" or "why did only men submit papers for our event?". If the former is true than we need effort into investigating why more women aren't writing these papers (be it quality or just plain quantity), and if the latter then look into the marketing/awareness on the paper submitting process. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480918 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14481098 EDIT: Included links to the comments that mentioned the blind-reviews. -- Semi-related: While I haven't seen it, I saw an interview with Jordan Peele about the movie "Get Out". He mentions that he wanted to tackle the fact that while Obama definitely helped the US move to less racist tones, it was never really solved, it is just there hiding under the skin with super-awareness to not be racist, which arguably is not the desired effect - there shouldn't be awareness at all about race period. I feel like this effect is somewhat similar to what is happening here, and the fact that the US is not able to hold any reasonable discussion at all on these topics doesn't make me optimistic on their capability to handle these issues. I feel like PC culture is causing way more harm than good. </rant>

ygaf 9y ago
They've realised now (or maybe still don't realise) a blind review of papers isn't what they wanted.
rayiner 9y ago
PC culture is a frustrated reaction to how fucked up America is with regard to race. Look at the income/health statistics between blacks and whites, or go live in an inner-city. It's mind blowing. It's a problem we created as a society and we're not doing anything to fix it. So we've resorted to counting the number of different color people at coding conferences.

selllikesybok 9y ago

>>>I live in the Netherlands, a very open-minded country with same-sex marriage, equal rights and were women seem to me to be even slightly more dominant over men (but this is just my perception). I can't comment on the present social climate or attitudes in NL generally, but the history seems pretty similar. Sufferage at about the same time, anyway. Anyway, think about who is offending and being offended. No is being beaten in the streets for saying, "Actually, I think Bill Maher is the height of comedy." Also, holding a sign that, explicitly or implicitly says, "I am inherently superior to you, and I fervently hope you will all die and come to ruin, what are you going to do about that, huh, <expletive>?" seems unlikely to be well received anywhere in the world.

rayiner 9y ago

The U.S. faces challenges the Netherlands does not. Take race for example. One out of every eight Americans are here because their ancestors were slaves. That's not the distant past. Heck, many people today are fighting for the right to commemorate the pro-slavery side of that story. More recently, if Bill Gates had been born in the south, he likely would have gone to a racially-segregated school. And the effects of that are felt today. Black households, for example, have a median income of just 60% as much as white households. How does this affect a coding conference you ask? Because it affects everything. You don't do something like that as a society and expect that the consequences will disappear just a few generations after you stopped doing it.[1] So yes, everyone in the U.S. is really sensitive, with good reason. Frankly it's a miracle that safe spaces and sensitivity training are the worst atonement we have to deal with. People in many regions of the world are fighting decades' long bloody wars over less egregious circumstances. [1] In college I used to be anti-PC. Then when I was living in Atlanta, I walked across one of the streets that historically served as a dividing line for segregation: http://socialshutter.blogspot.com/2012/10/when-street-names-change-on-other-side.html?m=1 http://socialshutter.blogspot.com/2012/10/when-street-names-.... I went from my trendy white midtown neighborhood to a predominantly black very low income neighborhood. For me, it was a major "holy fuck everything is fucked up" moment.

pdimitar 9y ago
With the risk of being downvoted, let me cite George Carlin regarding the "sensitivity training": "Hey, if you need a special training to realize you can't shove large cumbersome objects up somebody's ass, then maybe you're too fucked up to be in the police force in the first place. ... Let's try something else -- intelligence and decency. You never can tell, it might just work, it certainly has never been tried before." I feel that in such areas USA just refuses to acknowledge the existence of a very, very basic common sense.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Okay, so what do you do when people don't have intelligence and decency?

MicroBerto 9y ago

It's social engineering meant to divide and weaken us, and a large portion of the country has fallen for it. Especially in Academia. We are becoming crippled by our own will. It's sad to watch and the pendulum response was the 2016 election.

bmpafa 9y ago
My problem with claims like these is that they imply intent, which implies a coherent (and nefarious) effort behind large social trends. Who precisely is it that's doing this?
- rufus_2 9y ago
  My first guess would be those involved in the trillion dollar diversity and inclusion industry. How many departments of government, academia, and business are there today which depend on a continued societal belief in postmodernism's collectivist explanation of oppression and victimhood? If humanity achieved the goal of absolute equality, would those currently employed in the diversity and inclusion industry simply find new careers or would they continue to find new ways to segment humanity into oppressors and victims in order to retain the power and salary they are accustomed to?
  - bmpafa 9y ago
    This is as specious as "well of course vaccines don't work--pharma doesn't make money if you don't get sick!" By this logic, any profession built on solving a problem can't be trusted. Car broken? Don't take it to a mechanic--they'll just make sure it breaks again! Free-market competition (even the regulated kind) solves this conflict of interests. "Trillion dollar diversity and inclusion industry?" That's ~1/18th of the entire US GDP--which firms, etc., do you include in this sector of the economy? I can't think of a single example. This is why it's hard to reason through these topics. Either I'm told it's verboten to even discuss the implementation details of equal-opportunity initiatives, or I'm told it's some vast global conspiracy master-minded by Pam in HR who, having apparently learned the secrets to controlling the national discourse, can find no better application for that secret than keeping her job in HR.

nobi 9y ago

"a very open-minded country" cough Geert Wilders is the most popular politician in the Netherlands cough

snovv_crash 9y ago
He's also the most unpopular politician. What's your point?
- nobi 9y ago
  That the Netherlands isn't as tolerant and open-minded as it seems to have fooled the rest of the world into thinking so. The man walks around calling Moroccans scum, even in Brexit Britain this would _never_ be tolerated.

owenversteeg 9y ago

So I'm a Dutch-American dual citizen that has lived in both countries. I guess I was born to answer this question :) A big hint to the difference is that my Black American friends spell it capital-B Black. Almost all of them live in, or are from, majority black neighborhoods. The majority listen to different music, and even have different diets compared to my white friends. They speak differently and have different names and are a distinct group of people. This isn't me making this up either; this is paraphrased from a Facebook post by an American Black friend of mine. There are large parts of the country where they can't rely on help from the police, and a significant portion of the country will actively hate them if they marry a non-Black person. I do have some black American friends that aren't like this. They spell it lowercase-b black, they live in mostly white neighborhoods, and aside from the color of their skin they are indistinguishable from another white person in that neighborhood. But those are a minority. The majority of Black Americans are capital-B Black, and they have much different lives because of it. In the Netherlands however, there are no large Black neighborhoods. (There are "black neighborhoods" to some degree, but orders of magnitude smaller.) None of my black Dutch friends would "capitalize the B" so to speak. The average black Dutch person has a pretty similar life to the average white Dutch person: there wouldn't be much of a difference in where they live, their diets, or their schools. A black Dutch person won't have to worry that the police won't help them. That can help you understand the race tensions in the US. To a somewhat lesser degree it can help you understand our LGBTQ+ and gender tensions. Sure, there aren't "female neighborhoods", but there are LBGTQ+ neighborhoods, and both women and non-straight people face discrimination. The Dutch women I'm friends with have pretty gender-mixed friends, while I'm usually the only male friend of the American women I've been friends with. The same for LGBTQ+ people - they tend to mostly make friends among themselves in the US, while my queer Dutch friends are mostly friends with straight people. Basically, in the Netherlands everyone is the same, but in the US people form groups. A big reason for that is that the American groups formed out of necessity. If you were going to be killed for being gay, well it makes sense to have mostly gay friends. If you're going to be lynched because you're Black, well it makes sense to make friends with other Black people. The Netherlands experienced racial tensions to a much lesser degree, so these groups never formed.

mnm1 9y ago

The US is currently deep in a dark age. With a country this big, it may not be obvious as everything is mostly operating as it was in the past, only slowly failing over time. If you look closely, however, you can see that we have pretty much given up on education, science, and the pursuit of truth. Actually, you don't have to look very close anymore at all; it's beyond obvious. We make a big deal out of people graduating high school, a feat that I have no doubt certain non-human primates are qualified for at this point given how much we've dumbed down our education. We have no problem churning out uneducated fools, so why would we expect these fools to be knowledgable when softer topics like "diversity" are so much easier to tweet about? I'm not saying diversity is not a worthy pursuit, far from it, but the way these people are pursing it is indeed foolish and dumb. It's a step above anti-vaxers and climate change deniers, but now we're just splitting hairs on what constitutes stupid.

smoyer 9y ago

I agree 100%. If I'm paying for a conference I want the best speakers and content - if you can deliver that with diversity I'm all for it. If you're number one priority is diversity and it means your content and speakers are sub-par, I'm going to stop coming. I think the more important issue is to make sure you selection committee is not biased. While it might be nice to have a selection committee made up with the front-page names in the start-up industry, you'd probably be better off skipping those that act more like fraternities.

Manchit 9y ago

How do we define the word "diversity" for a tech conference? Shouldn't it about the diversity of idea?

thekevan 9y ago

As an American, I keep getting baffeled how opinions like GH's in this are so prevalent on the internet but rarely seem to occur in the real world. Please don't judge us on the acts of a few. Gender equality in IT is a realistic important issue, but this is just taking it to a crazy level.

TylerH 9y ago

The issue is that here in the US we have an entitlement problem. Everyone feels entitled to everything. Even poor people feel like temporarily inconvenienced rich people, as the famous saying sort-of goes. We are also still obsessed with might making right, even at an individual level. America means guns and freedom and kicking everyone else's ass. It doesn't help that recentlyish our politicians feed this narrative by creating the worst us-vs-them chasm our nation has ever seen. I think this is problematic, but I also think it's inherent in a society that truly wants to allow freedom of expression. Why do we still have the KKK in America? Why do we let things like Breitbart exist? In Germany they have restrictions on Nazi-related things and discussions, and they seem to have turned out pretty well. We need to hold the right people accountable when bad things happen, and pretty much up and down the whole chain, that doesn't happen, because freedom. Hell, we even have judges who have allowed "affluenza" to be used as a legal defense for things as heinous as rape.

Myrmornis 9y ago

Yeah it is out of control in America. Perhaps it's partly that young middle-class people are less wordly (less experience of other cultures) and thus more inclined to juvenile, over-the-top views. Perhaps it's a pendulum swinging a bit too far currently; it's a pretty huge change to have the degree of support for a socialist presidential candidate that we saw with Bernie Saunders. > This is one of the big reasons that always kept me away from the USA, even for short trips at conferences. That's just silly. The first bit of your post was good, but now you sound like someone who really needs to take themselves less seriously. You don't have to avoid going to a continent because you don't like the tone of their culture wars currently. There are plenty of people who think all sorts of shit there, and if you really can't find any people who live up to your European standards then how about going for the natural world etc? (European speaking here)