6 ms·

> all run by white European men in their twenties, I should say Why should they say?

King-Aaron 6y ago
I also found this to be sort of an out-of-place comment in the article.
enw 6y ago
That successfully irritated me enough to stop reading. Why is race and gender so cheaply brought into everything, regardless if it has any relevancy?
- CyanBird 6y ago
  Because US people are incredibly racially polarized and almost any topic is prime for it to be used as a leverage point to imbue their racial polarization on
  - phroobster 6y ago
    Somehow in an attempt to “fix” racial disparities, America is making race relations worse than they’ve been in decades.
    - tomrod 6y ago
      Band aid peeling?
    - atat7024 6y ago
      How else do you hope to successfully continue to divide a populace that's so fed up that they're simultaneously ready to elect Donald Trump AND Bernie Sanders AND Ron Paul in the same generation, just to see who has a shot at stopping the carousel?
      - tjs8rj 6y ago
        I always wonder with this point: who is doing the dividing? Do rich people coordinate on some scale like this? Is this done by powerful groups like “The Clinton’s” or well connected financiers? You could make an argument that all these groups could benefit from a distracted populace, but is there any reason to believe they actually actively seek to do so? It looks more to me like a lot of rich people doing their own thing seeking profits, and the result for the rest of us just ends up crappy as a by product. Traditional media makes a ton of money from outrage, so they forment and spin outrage, not to divide Americans (except as a by product), but because it makes them so much money.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        arminiusreturns 6y ago
        Check out the Tavistok institute history sometime for a small glimpse.
        abraae 6y ago
        Look no further than Rupert Murdoch. His empire is built on monetizing outrage.
        tjs8rj 6y ago
        That’s exactly my point. He and others aren’t trying to divide Americans as some coordinated scheme to prevent revolution or something, they just make a lot of money from clickbait and outrage. It’s independent profit seeking division only as a byproduct
        ardit33 6y ago
        The conservatives have Fox News / Newsmax / OAN scaremongering, and profiting out of it, and the liberals have CNN, MSNBC, Teen Vogue and more, inducing moral panic about everything, race baiting and profiting out of it. They are two sides of the same coin. There is no single entity creating this atmosphere, just a bunch of outlets amplifying the most radical voices, as normal news and balanced debate is boring and not that profitable.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    This was the biggest culture shock I had when I visited. It instantly made me realise when my American mother left ASAP when she was old enough. Exhausting to live like that. What an unbelievable waste of brain cycles.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      For perspective I'm curious where you live or lived when you visited. It's also quite a foreign idea for me living in New Zealand.
      - rorykoehler 6y ago
        Ireland
- justatdotin 6y ago
  > regardless if it has any relevancy to me? hip hop has a racial bias. I think that makes this somewhat relevant to note.
55555 6y ago
The author -- an asian female, I shouldn't say -- may herself believe the detail relevant because she believes the 70/30 deals struck by these white male micro-label owners are "exploitative."
- sebmellen 6y ago
  But is any of it actually racially charged? It’s so strange to use race like this – it cheapens the egregious instances where racism is truly at play.
  - jcims 6y ago
    It's not new but there's clearly a linguistic analogue of the music 'loudness wars' at play, in which we are losing all dynamic range in our language. Where terms previously used to describe people willing to unceremoniously lynch black folks or beat them to death and throw them off a bridge is now, for example, casually applied to millions of people working in an industry that has unbalanced hiring outcomes.
ericjang 6y ago
I think in the last decade, cultural norms in progressive circles have conditioned people to notice and point out when a community lacks racial / gender diversity. For instance, people will pay lip service to the cryptocurrency, AI, cybersecurity, FOSS communities (just to name a few) as being very "white and male" . Just explaining why, I'm not making a normative claim here.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 6y ago
  It's something that members of the "coastal urban elite" progressive circles like to say to affirm their allegiance to the group, without actually having to put in any effort in fixing the alleged issues beyond Twitter activism. It's a way to belong, without sacrificing much and making the purity spiral worse than it already is. It's considered especially enlightened and tasteful when regularly repeated by a white male. Costs you nothing, makes you look good.
  - brendoelfrendo 6y ago
    Good gracious, your attitude irritates me to no end. What on earth kind of omniscient insights do you have about these people that you can proclaim that their activism starts and ends with Twitter? And why do you seem to think it's impossible for a white male to genuinely believe that their position of privilege can and should be challenged?
neartheplain 6y ago
Because the author, Cherie Hu, is softly bigoted against white men. Per her Twitter, she views concentrations of white men in the music industry as "alarming" and "egregious." She encourages artists to boycott lineups where white men happen to comprise the majority of the artists. Her twitter replies, likes, and selective capitalization of white/Black indicate a strong ideological alignment. https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267836435756978179 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267836435756978179 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1327347401368211456 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1327347401368211456 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267874338298003457 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267874338298003457
- phroobster 6y ago
  Softly bigoted? She is blatantly racist and sexist against white men. If she made those same tweets but “white male” was replaced with “black female” it would be enough to get fired from most jobs.
  - DC1350 6y ago
    It’s easier to replace the word “white” with “Jewish” since the arguments about disproportionate wealth and representation will still hold. Everyone knows that’s wrong, so I don’t know why they think white is any better.
  - parsimoniousplb 6y ago
    Yes, but the British Empire was a thing, which is why "white" can be mocked and ridiculed in ways unimaginable to any other ethnicity. Science tells us so...
    - plugger 6y ago
      *is a thing. It's called the Commonwealth now. And I'd rather be mocked when compared to being oppressed and treated as second class citizens or slaves as other ethnic groups have by the British Empire.
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads straight into flamewar right off the bat. Cherry-picking the detail you find most provocative and rushing to the comments to copy and complain about it is a recipe for poor-quality discussion. We're trying for better than that on HN. Especially in this case, where the provocation could not be more off topic. You should leave such things where you find them, not drag them in here and set them on fire. I'm sure that wasn't your intent—and really the upvoters do the greater part of the damage—but it is the effect nevertheless. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  Even though this is obviously a touchy subject, I don't think this is going "straight into flamewar". I also thought that comment felt very out of place in the article.
  - dang 6y ago
    Of course it is. The topic is hip-hop livestreams, not race war. The article contained a phrase that some people found provocative—does that mean we should change the topic to the provocation and have a big argument about it? On HN, the answer is no. If you've read the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), that should be obvious. When I happened on this thread, it had been upvoted to the top and was choking out all discussion on the smaller, more obscure topic. That's a failure mode for HN. When an article contains a provocation, flamewars don't start themselves. Someone has to import the provocation into the thread and start reacting to it here. From an HN perspective, that's the original sin - not the provocation itself. If we just left it in its original habitat and ignored it, nothing bad would happen. Online discussion tends to gravitate to the few hottest, angriest, and most repetitive themes. Something about the mind gets stuck on those and wants to repeat them over and over. This is exciting in one way but it's not interesting in HN's sense of the word. Therefore it's off topic here. Threads like this one should be like a spaceship traveling to a little-known planet that hasn't been visited much. For that, we need to steer clear of black holes. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I also found this to be sort of an out-of-place comment in the article.

enw 6y ago

That successfully irritated me enough to stop reading. Why is race and gender so cheaply brought into everything, regardless if it has any relevancy?

CyanBird 6y ago
Because US people are incredibly racially polarized and almost any topic is prime for it to be used as a leverage point to imbue their racial polarization on
- phroobster 6y ago
  Somehow in an attempt to “fix” racial disparities, America is making race relations worse than they’ve been in decades.
  - tomrod 6y ago
    Band aid peeling?
  - atat7024 6y ago
    How else do you hope to successfully continue to divide a populace that's so fed up that they're simultaneously ready to elect Donald Trump AND Bernie Sanders AND Ron Paul in the same generation, just to see who has a shot at stopping the carousel?
    - tjs8rj 6y ago
      I always wonder with this point: who is doing the dividing? Do rich people coordinate on some scale like this? Is this done by powerful groups like “The Clinton’s” or well connected financiers? You could make an argument that all these groups could benefit from a distracted populace, but is there any reason to believe they actually actively seek to do so? It looks more to me like a lot of rich people doing their own thing seeking profits, and the result for the rest of us just ends up crappy as a by product. Traditional media makes a ton of money from outrage, so they forment and spin outrage, not to divide Americans (except as a by product), but because it makes them so much money.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - arminiusreturns 6y ago
        Check out the Tavistok institute history sometime for a small glimpse.
      - abraae 6y ago
        Look no further than Rupert Murdoch. His empire is built on monetizing outrage.
        tjs8rj 6y ago
        That’s exactly my point. He and others aren’t trying to divide Americans as some coordinated scheme to prevent revolution or something, they just make a lot of money from clickbait and outrage. It’s independent profit seeking division only as a byproduct
      - ardit33 6y ago
        The conservatives have Fox News / Newsmax / OAN scaremongering, and profiting out of it, and the liberals have CNN, MSNBC, Teen Vogue and more, inducing moral panic about everything, race baiting and profiting out of it. They are two sides of the same coin. There is no single entity creating this atmosphere, just a bunch of outlets amplifying the most radical voices, as normal news and balanced debate is boring and not that profitable.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  This was the biggest culture shock I had when I visited. It instantly made me realise when my American mother left ASAP when she was old enough. Exhausting to live like that. What an unbelievable waste of brain cycles.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    For perspective I'm curious where you live or lived when you visited. It's also quite a foreign idea for me living in New Zealand.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      Ireland
justatdotin 6y ago
> regardless if it has any relevancy to me? hip hop has a racial bias. I think that makes this somewhat relevant to note.

55555 6y ago

The author -- an asian female, I shouldn't say -- may herself believe the detail relevant because she believes the 70/30 deals struck by these white male micro-label owners are "exploitative."

sebmellen 6y ago
But is any of it actually racially charged? It’s so strange to use race like this – it cheapens the egregious instances where racism is truly at play.
- jcims 6y ago
  It's not new but there's clearly a linguistic analogue of the music 'loudness wars' at play, in which we are losing all dynamic range in our language. Where terms previously used to describe people willing to unceremoniously lynch black folks or beat them to death and throw them off a bridge is now, for example, casually applied to millions of people working in an industry that has unbalanced hiring outcomes.

ericjang 6y ago

I think in the last decade, cultural norms in progressive circles have conditioned people to notice and point out when a community lacks racial / gender diversity. For instance, people will pay lip service to the cryptocurrency, AI, cybersecurity, FOSS communities (just to name a few) as being very "white and male" . Just explaining why, I'm not making a normative claim here.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 6y ago
It's something that members of the "coastal urban elite" progressive circles like to say to affirm their allegiance to the group, without actually having to put in any effort in fixing the alleged issues beyond Twitter activism. It's a way to belong, without sacrificing much and making the purity spiral worse than it already is. It's considered especially enlightened and tasteful when regularly repeated by a white male. Costs you nothing, makes you look good.
- brendoelfrendo 6y ago
  Good gracious, your attitude irritates me to no end. What on earth kind of omniscient insights do you have about these people that you can proclaim that their activism starts and ends with Twitter? And why do you seem to think it's impossible for a white male to genuinely believe that their position of privilege can and should be challenged?

neartheplain 6y ago

Because the author, Cherie Hu, is softly bigoted against white men. Per her Twitter, she views concentrations of white men in the music industry as "alarming" and "egregious." She encourages artists to boycott lineups where white men happen to comprise the majority of the artists. Her twitter replies, likes, and selective capitalization of white/Black indicate a strong ideological alignment. https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267836435756978179 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267836435756978179 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1327347401368211456 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1327347401368211456 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267874338298003457 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267874338298003457

phroobster 6y ago
Softly bigoted? She is blatantly racist and sexist against white men. If she made those same tweets but “white male” was replaced with “black female” it would be enough to get fired from most jobs.
- DC1350 6y ago
  It’s easier to replace the word “white” with “Jewish” since the arguments about disproportionate wealth and representation will still hold. Everyone knows that’s wrong, so I don’t know why they think white is any better.
- parsimoniousplb 6y ago
  Yes, but the British Empire was a thing, which is why "white" can be mocked and ridiculed in ways unimaginable to any other ethnicity. Science tells us so...
  - plugger 6y ago
    *is a thing. It's called the Commonwealth now. And I'd rather be mocked when compared to being oppressed and treated as second class citizens or slaves as other ethnic groups have by the British Empire.

dang 6y ago

Please don't take HN threads straight into flamewar right off the bat. Cherry-picking the detail you find most provocative and rushing to the comments to copy and complain about it is a recipe for poor-quality discussion. We're trying for better than that on HN. Especially in this case, where the provocation could not be more off topic. You should leave such things where you find them, not drag them in here and set them on fire. I'm sure that wasn't your intent—and really the upvoters do the greater part of the damage—but it is the effect nevertheless. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
Even though this is obviously a touchy subject, I don't think this is going "straight into flamewar". I also thought that comment felt very out of place in the article.
- dang 6y ago
  Of course it is. The topic is hip-hop livestreams, not race war. The article contained a phrase that some people found provocative—does that mean we should change the topic to the provocation and have a big argument about it? On HN, the answer is no. If you've read the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), that should be obvious. When I happened on this thread, it had been upvoted to the top and was choking out all discussion on the smaller, more obscure topic. That's a failure mode for HN. When an article contains a provocation, flamewars don't start themselves. Someone has to import the provocation into the thread and start reacting to it here. From an HN perspective, that's the original sin - not the provocation itself. If we just left it in its original habitat and ignored it, nothing bad would happen. Online discussion tends to gravitate to the few hottest, angriest, and most repetitive themes. Something about the mind gets stuck on those and wants to repeat them over and over. This is exciting in one way but it's not interesting in HN's sense of the word. Therefore it's off topic here. Threads like this one should be like a spaceship traveling to a little-known planet that hasn't been visited much. For that, we need to steer clear of black holes. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...