7 ms·

EDIT: Whoever flagged the post: thanks for proving my point. I could start a long outrage rant, but I don't even care anymore. I'm tired of arguing with people

EDIT: Whoever flagged the post: thanks for proving my point. I could start a long outrage rant, but I don't even care anymore. I'm tired of arguing with people at this point. > Comments like “White people are stupid” were treated the same as anti-Semitic or racist slurs. [and won't be anymore] My opinion, and this won't change: This policy is racist. Whoever came up with it is racist. Whoever defends it is racist. EDIT/OFFTOPIC: Just figured out, on your profile you can enable display of flagged/removed posts. You can then vouch for their un-removal. May I consider myself a hackernews-necromancer now?

happytoexplain 6y ago
I think the blanket insistence that anybody who has an argument for this must be racist is breathtakingly hypocritical.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  > anybody who has an argument for this must be racist Anybody who believes people of one skin colour should be treated different than people of another is, in my books, a racist. There's no conversation to be had here.
  - wbazant 6y ago
    Well I do, I think groups of people who were treated badly in the past should now be treated a little better for a while. It's not enough to say, okay, let's all be fair from now on. I think this misses the acknowledgement of all the past violations of this principle, and any attempts to make this right.
    - caffeine 6y ago
      Hypothetical scenario: Before I was born, my father murdered your father, and got away with it. Now, after my father has passed away, the truth is revealed. What should my punishment be?
      - happytoexplain 6y ago
        For the record, I lean toward the theory that creating balance will eventually return the scale is equilibrium, and that is probably better in the long term than giving the scale a push to get to equilibrium faster. However, your analogy doesn't make sense. No individual should be explicitly punished for the sins of an individual ancestor. But if some huge group of ancestors commits an atrocity against a target group that has effects lasting generations, to the point where that target group still suffers the ancestral hatreds to this day (just look at the dead posts in this thread - on Hacker News), then it's not exactly an outrageous occurrence if the society gives some boon to the targeted group. Of course, society is a zero-sum game, and a boon to any is a burden on others, but that's how the entire system works - there's no getting away from the physics of that. But to say the other groups are "punished" with no further context implies something worse than that. There's no way to compare this scenario with an individual person committing a crime against another.
        caffeine 6y ago
        That sounds reasonable on the surface, but actually it's even worse. Groups are just sets of individuals. And "boons" are punishment if they are forced. So to adjust the example: a group of people who look like my father killed a group of people who look like your father. What is my punishment? It sounds absurd because group identity is absurd. Are there individuals who need help? Let's help them. We do already, but we can do more. Are there individuals committing crimes of real violence? Let's stop them. That's not absurd at all.
      - __s 6y ago
        If they used that murder to reap profit & you inherited that profit, you could pay some of it back
    - __s 6y ago
      Also it's important to realize how recent "the past" is. My grandmother (who's relatively young; she had my mother when she was 19) grew up in a government sponsered residential school which told her she was too stupid to learn anything
    - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
      The saying goes "Two wrongs don't make a right", and I think it applies here. Beyond that, Facebook doesn't just operate in the USA, so, honestly, american history is completely irrelevant to how a big part of their users is going to perceive this "good" discrimination.
    - rags2riches 6y ago
      Your remedy requires institutionalizing the sorting of individuals into groups. Receiving benefits because of your assigned groups rather than your individual merits must become a positive thing. We are all incentivized to add importance to further categorizations of people, so we might gain some favour. The more of your remedy we get, the worse off we will be. How do you imagine this unequal treatment for good will come to an end "after a while"? When all organizations are geared up to divvy up resources among these groups? When even more people in power got there as champions for specific categories? It will be very hard to get out of that situation. I'd much rather make up for past violations of "equal treatment for all" by implementing more "equal treatment". The more of this we can manage to get, the better of we will be. And there will be nothing to wind down "after a while".
      - happytoexplain 6y ago
        I just wanted to highlight that this is a reasonable comment, and it's hard to find these among the noise that permeates the same half of the opinion gradient that it falls on.
      - wbazant 6y ago
        @rags2riches I'm with you against these authoritarian structures built around redistribution. But one can (and you, too, can) treat some groups of people a little better without literally giving them stuff, creating weird power structures, or encouraging a culture of victimhood. Say I was organising a poetry meetup. There are many aspects to making its attendees enjoy themselves, but evenly distributing my effort would not create the most equitable event. If I want the event to go well, most of my effort should probably go to people for whom the barriers are biggest. This could involve making sure the venue is accessible to wheelchair users, extra encouragement for the person who seems to never have heard that their poems can be worth something, or creating a speaking convention that benefits everyone equally, but puts the most burden on those who are bravest and loudest. > Your remedy requires institutionalizing the sorting of individuals into groups. > It will be very hard to get out of that situation. Interestingly, not in the case of what the posted article is about! Facebook can decide on its own to give extra priority to checking comments for (what its moderators consider) anti-black racism, and it's also the kind of thing that will eventually make itself unnecessary.
  - svrtknst 6y ago
    > There's no conversation to be had here. then why engage in one? If we assume that antiwhie and antiblack are both racism, would you argue that, in the current context, political climate, culture etc, that they have the same consequences? If yes, then, well, maybe there is no discussion to be had, it would be an inane claim. If no, some racism has more consequences, then this insistence that "its all racism" is pointless at best - the term is mostly useful to describe harmful relationships and ways to combat that harm.
    - Dirlewanger 6y ago
      This sounds like justification that some forms of racism aren't as racist as others. Sounds a lot like "separate but equal" reasoning. Disgusting.
    - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
      No. This is simple. Do you believe in treating people differently based on their race? It's a yes-or-no question, and one of them is literally the definition of racism. We can argue about the hypothetical merits of this all you want, but my point is not that it wouldn't work. You know what else works? Death penalty. Nuclear bombs. Pineapple on pizza. No, my point is that it's wrong, regardless of whether it has the intended effect. When I say there's no conversation to be had, I specifically mean about whether or not this is right or whether society should accept it.
      - happytoexplain 6y ago
        >Do you believe in treating people differently based on their race? Yes, I do, just like I believe in treating people differently based on all sorts of properties, intrinsic and otherwise. I also lean toward the anti-affirmative-action side of things, despite totally believing that the core rationale has merit. Regardless, you're irrationally insisting that a complex social problem can be distilled into an 11-word yes-or-no question that frames your side of the argument favorably.
        nojokes 6y ago
bitwize 6y ago
"A society which has for 300 years done something special against the Negro must now do something special for the Negro." --Martin Luther King, Jr.
- nojokes 6y ago
  The world is not US. There are many white people who have done nothing to the black people. Even more, they have been under similar obsession for even more time. Get over of your US centric view of the world.
  - valarauko 6y ago
    I think the usual counterargument to your point is that Europeans have greatly benefited, directly or indirectly, from the conquest & colonization of Black & Brown people. I don't know how much water that argument holds, but there it is. Sure, there were European groups that were themselves being actively colonized/conquered (eg, Ireland), but it's also true that the conditions in their home countries led many of these same peoples to seek their fortune elsewhere and to end up at the vanguard of colonization. For example, when the British were in India, there was an outsize presence of Scottish & Irish fortune seekers in the subcontinent who made out like gangbusters.
    - nojokes 6y ago
      This perspective is not any better. Try to put it into your head - most white people did not benefit from the oppression of the black people. I did not, my ancestors did not, my countrymen did not. I do not share any collective guilt with some American slave owners, or French colonists. Like it was told, this policy is racist. Whoever came up with it is racist. Whoever defends it is racist.
      - valarauko 6y ago
        Again, this is not my argument - just one that I've seen brought up in this context. It's also not completely wrong. While it's possible you, your ancestors, or your countrymen did not directly or indirectly benefit a single cent from a transfer of wealth via colonialism or oppression of non-Europeans, I do honestly doubt that would be true for most people of European descent.
rjkennedy98 6y ago
This wouldn't be so awful, if it wasn't painfully obvious that American Black people are some of the most racist people on the planet. Many of them treat acting white or being around white people as something akin to treason. This is just another piece of evidence that they cannot hold themselves to the standards of everyone else and so they must be given special treatment since their culture is so intolerance. Corporations are too happy to oblige since they don't want to kick Black people off their platforms.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  Got any hard evidence for these anecdotes? Your comment reads very poorly and is likely against the community guidelines here.
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    > Your comment reads very poorly and is likely against the community guidelines here I agree with the first part, but what about it would be against any guidelines?
    - sonotathrowaway 6y ago
      Aggressively slandering and smearing racial groups on the basis of made-up anecdata seems the definition of flame-baiting to me.
      - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
        > on the basis of made-up anecdata And you're now accusing them of having made stuff up? How is that any better? Isn't the left all about respecting peoples subjective life experiences?
        sonotathrowaway 6y ago
        To be clear for future context, you’re defending the now flagged & deleted comment that said all black people hate white people as “his life experience”. Do you honestly think that was his life’s experience - that every single minority he’s met has expressed hatred towards him? It seems pretty clear that you’re concern trolling here and not arguing in good faith. Or maybe you’re not, and you genuinely believe that /rjkennedy98 has met every black person and knows us well enough to judge our hearts. Can you please explain if you think he’s met every black person, that he can pass group judgement?

happytoexplain 6y ago

I think the blanket insistence that anybody who has an argument for this must be racist is breathtakingly hypocritical.

DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
> anybody who has an argument for this must be racist Anybody who believes people of one skin colour should be treated different than people of another is, in my books, a racist. There's no conversation to be had here.
- wbazant 6y ago
  Well I do, I think groups of people who were treated badly in the past should now be treated a little better for a while. It's not enough to say, okay, let's all be fair from now on. I think this misses the acknowledgement of all the past violations of this principle, and any attempts to make this right.
  - caffeine 6y ago
    Hypothetical scenario: Before I was born, my father murdered your father, and got away with it. Now, after my father has passed away, the truth is revealed. What should my punishment be?
    - happytoexplain 6y ago
      For the record, I lean toward the theory that creating balance will eventually return the scale is equilibrium, and that is probably better in the long term than giving the scale a push to get to equilibrium faster. However, your analogy doesn't make sense. No individual should be explicitly punished for the sins of an individual ancestor. But if some huge group of ancestors commits an atrocity against a target group that has effects lasting generations, to the point where that target group still suffers the ancestral hatreds to this day (just look at the dead posts in this thread - on Hacker News), then it's not exactly an outrageous occurrence if the society gives some boon to the targeted group. Of course, society is a zero-sum game, and a boon to any is a burden on others, but that's how the entire system works - there's no getting away from the physics of that. But to say the other groups are "punished" with no further context implies something worse than that. There's no way to compare this scenario with an individual person committing a crime against another.
      - caffeine 6y ago
        That sounds reasonable on the surface, but actually it's even worse. Groups are just sets of individuals. And "boons" are punishment if they are forced. So to adjust the example: a group of people who look like my father killed a group of people who look like your father. What is my punishment? It sounds absurd because group identity is absurd. Are there individuals who need help? Let's help them. We do already, but we can do more. Are there individuals committing crimes of real violence? Let's stop them. That's not absurd at all.
    - __s 6y ago
      If they used that murder to reap profit & you inherited that profit, you could pay some of it back
  - __s 6y ago
    Also it's important to realize how recent "the past" is. My grandmother (who's relatively young; she had my mother when she was 19) grew up in a government sponsered residential school which told her she was too stupid to learn anything
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    The saying goes "Two wrongs don't make a right", and I think it applies here. Beyond that, Facebook doesn't just operate in the USA, so, honestly, american history is completely irrelevant to how a big part of their users is going to perceive this "good" discrimination.
  - rags2riches 6y ago
    Your remedy requires institutionalizing the sorting of individuals into groups. Receiving benefits because of your assigned groups rather than your individual merits must become a positive thing. We are all incentivized to add importance to further categorizations of people, so we might gain some favour. The more of your remedy we get, the worse off we will be. How do you imagine this unequal treatment for good will come to an end "after a while"? When all organizations are geared up to divvy up resources among these groups? When even more people in power got there as champions for specific categories? It will be very hard to get out of that situation. I'd much rather make up for past violations of "equal treatment for all" by implementing more "equal treatment". The more of this we can manage to get, the better of we will be. And there will be nothing to wind down "after a while".
    - happytoexplain 6y ago
      I just wanted to highlight that this is a reasonable comment, and it's hard to find these among the noise that permeates the same half of the opinion gradient that it falls on.
    - wbazant 6y ago
      @rags2riches I'm with you against these authoritarian structures built around redistribution. But one can (and you, too, can) treat some groups of people a little better without literally giving them stuff, creating weird power structures, or encouraging a culture of victimhood. Say I was organising a poetry meetup. There are many aspects to making its attendees enjoy themselves, but evenly distributing my effort would not create the most equitable event. If I want the event to go well, most of my effort should probably go to people for whom the barriers are biggest. This could involve making sure the venue is accessible to wheelchair users, extra encouragement for the person who seems to never have heard that their poems can be worth something, or creating a speaking convention that benefits everyone equally, but puts the most burden on those who are bravest and loudest. > Your remedy requires institutionalizing the sorting of individuals into groups. > It will be very hard to get out of that situation. Interestingly, not in the case of what the posted article is about! Facebook can decide on its own to give extra priority to checking comments for (what its moderators consider) anti-black racism, and it's also the kind of thing that will eventually make itself unnecessary.
- svrtknst 6y ago
  > There's no conversation to be had here. then why engage in one? If we assume that antiwhie and antiblack are both racism, would you argue that, in the current context, political climate, culture etc, that they have the same consequences? If yes, then, well, maybe there is no discussion to be had, it would be an inane claim. If no, some racism has more consequences, then this insistence that "its all racism" is pointless at best - the term is mostly useful to describe harmful relationships and ways to combat that harm.
  - Dirlewanger 6y ago
    This sounds like justification that some forms of racism aren't as racist as others. Sounds a lot like "separate but equal" reasoning. Disgusting.
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    No. This is simple. Do you believe in treating people differently based on their race? It's a yes-or-no question, and one of them is literally the definition of racism. We can argue about the hypothetical merits of this all you want, but my point is not that it wouldn't work. You know what else works? Death penalty. Nuclear bombs. Pineapple on pizza. No, my point is that it's wrong, regardless of whether it has the intended effect. When I say there's no conversation to be had, I specifically mean about whether or not this is right or whether society should accept it.
    - happytoexplain 6y ago
      >Do you believe in treating people differently based on their race? Yes, I do, just like I believe in treating people differently based on all sorts of properties, intrinsic and otherwise. I also lean toward the anti-affirmative-action side of things, despite totally believing that the core rationale has merit. Regardless, you're irrationally insisting that a complex social problem can be distilled into an 11-word yes-or-no question that frames your side of the argument favorably.
      - nojokes 6y ago

bitwize 6y ago

"A society which has for 300 years done something special against the Negro must now do something special for the Negro." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

nojokes 6y ago
The world is not US. There are many white people who have done nothing to the black people. Even more, they have been under similar obsession for even more time. Get over of your US centric view of the world.
- valarauko 6y ago
  I think the usual counterargument to your point is that Europeans have greatly benefited, directly or indirectly, from the conquest & colonization of Black & Brown people. I don't know how much water that argument holds, but there it is. Sure, there were European groups that were themselves being actively colonized/conquered (eg, Ireland), but it's also true that the conditions in their home countries led many of these same peoples to seek their fortune elsewhere and to end up at the vanguard of colonization. For example, when the British were in India, there was an outsize presence of Scottish & Irish fortune seekers in the subcontinent who made out like gangbusters.
  - nojokes 6y ago
    This perspective is not any better. Try to put it into your head - most white people did not benefit from the oppression of the black people. I did not, my ancestors did not, my countrymen did not. I do not share any collective guilt with some American slave owners, or French colonists. Like it was told, this policy is racist. Whoever came up with it is racist. Whoever defends it is racist.
    - valarauko 6y ago
      Again, this is not my argument - just one that I've seen brought up in this context. It's also not completely wrong. While it's possible you, your ancestors, or your countrymen did not directly or indirectly benefit a single cent from a transfer of wealth via colonialism or oppression of non-Europeans, I do honestly doubt that would be true for most people of European descent.

rjkennedy98 6y ago

This wouldn't be so awful, if it wasn't painfully obvious that American Black people are some of the most racist people on the planet. Many of them treat acting white or being around white people as something akin to treason. This is just another piece of evidence that they cannot hold themselves to the standards of everyone else and so they must be given special treatment since their culture is so intolerance. Corporations are too happy to oblige since they don't want to kick Black people off their platforms.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
Got any hard evidence for these anecdotes? Your comment reads very poorly and is likely against the community guidelines here.
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  > Your comment reads very poorly and is likely against the community guidelines here I agree with the first part, but what about it would be against any guidelines?
  - sonotathrowaway 6y ago
    Aggressively slandering and smearing racial groups on the basis of made-up anecdata seems the definition of flame-baiting to me.
    - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
      > on the basis of made-up anecdata And you're now accusing them of having made stuff up? How is that any better? Isn't the left all about respecting peoples subjective life experiences?
      - sonotathrowaway 6y ago
        To be clear for future context, you’re defending the now flagged & deleted comment that said all black people hate white people as “his life experience”. Do you honestly think that was his life’s experience - that every single minority he’s met has expressed hatred towards him? It seems pretty clear that you’re concern trolling here and not arguing in good faith. Or maybe you’re not, and you genuinely believe that /rjkennedy98 has met every black person and knows us well enough to judge our hearts. Can you please explain if you think he’s met every black person, that he can pass group judgement?