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You are halfway there, but now think a bit further. Imagine if you were working at a job, but you are stuck with immature coworkers that are making fun of aspec

You are halfway there, but now think a bit further. Imagine if you were working at a job, but you are stuck with immature coworkers that are making fun of aspects of your culture, making fun of names that are similar to your own name, or similar to names of your friends and family. You can't escape these immature people because you need to work the job with them in order to make money. So you deal with it for a while but then you start complaining "hey man that's really not cool". They don't take you seriously, in fact their response is "hey let's not get all political about this". Don't you see how people making racist jokes can be just as annoying as a pushy religious person? There's a lot of ways humans do annoying things to each other, but we should all be working on ways to minimize the amount we are annoying each other, and sometimes that means facing up to the fact that something you are doing is racist towards another person and you have to stop it.

imbnwa 5y ago
The portrayal of a whole spectrum of ethical questions as "religious" is the most bad faith interpretation I see deployed basically all the time in these types of discussions. It's practically a senseless meme at this point. We're literally talking about people keeping a list of names they thought were funny that lead to the situation, which apparently enough people internally found offensive, and you have people in this thread talking about "professionalism" and "religious thinking"; what?
Uhhrrr 5y ago
Making fun of a culture is culturalist, not racist. And all cultures have aspects worthy of mockery. And making fun of names doesn't even rise to that level. No one thinks less of a culture or a person just because their name reads like "fuck", or "Biggus Dickus", etc., in English. It's just a funny impedance mismatch between languages.
- NathanKP 5y ago
  You aren't making the point you think you are. All you are doing is showing that you lack empathy for how others feel. And that is the fundamental problem: it isn't about what you think you are doing, it is about what other people think you are doing, and the fact that what you think is funny is offensive to other people.
  - Uhhrrr 5y ago
    I have empathy for people who experience prejudice, but not for people who think "this name means something funny in English" is racist. Those people don't know what racism means, and they devalue claims of actual racism when they say that.
    - NathanKP 5y ago
      That's the thing though, it doesn't matter whether you think something is "actual racism". It matters whether the person on the receiving end thinks it is racist, or racism adjacent. And making fun of people's names is absolutely racism adjacent. It dehumanizes the person on the receiving end by treating one of their fundamental self identifiers as a joke. It may not dehumanize them to the same degree as a slur, an offensive stereotype, "blackface", or similar, but it is absolutely dehumanizing. I listened to people who have been on the receiving end, and I believe them when they say that this hurts them and offends them. Is it as bad as some other forms of racism? Arguably no. But is it on the spectrum of racism? Absolutely. This is what empathy looks like: you listen to the one on the receiving end and you believe what they say about how they feel. At the end of the day you have the right to decide that this isn't "actual racism" in your own mind, but that doesn't change the reality that the one on the receiving end still feels bad.
      - TimTheTinker 5y ago
        > It [only] matters whether the person on the receiving end thinks it is racist, or racism adjacent. That's where I can't agree. It's possible to do something that feels "racist" to someone but isn't actually racist. If I'm wrong, then there's no objective definition of racism and we can all go home and call it "lack of empathy". You can't have it both ways. Either racism is objectively definable or it isn't. Categorically speaking, there is a big difference between offending someone's feelings or sensibilities and committing an act of racism, which is defined as discrimination on the basis of race and is objectively measurable using well-established tests.
        NathanKP 5y ago
henryaj 5y ago
> So you deal with it for a while but then you start complaining "hey man that's really not cool". They don't take you seriously Far from the truth. How did you surmise that this is what happened? They took it very seriously - the CEO wrote up a whole long postmortem on what happened, why it was a failure of management, and shouldn't happen again, admitting fault for not stepping in to deal with it sooner.
bendbro 5y ago
So combining both halves it seems like people can't actually get along and the idea of a patchwork quilt society is a horrible, dystopian failure?
christophilus 5y ago
It sounds like you think I’m defending the dumb list. I’m not. To me, it sounds like the Basecamp leadership did mostly the right thing. They said, this list shouldn’t exist, we expect better in the future. But also, we’re sick and tired of people making extreme assumptions about people’s motivations and making this list tantamount to a KKK membership. The list was dumb. Calling the list the work of hateful racists was also probably dumb.
arp242 5y ago
From the looks of it, everyone quickly agreed that this list was inappropriate and it was shut down promptly. The drama didn't start over that, but exaggerated claims people made such as "this is the road to genocide", as well as connecting this list to some mass-shooting, as well as some lingering conflicts such as whether or not the title "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" – a book published by basecamp – is ableist or not. People act like "haha, this name sounds funny because it's similar to the English word [...]" is a huge deal and existential threat. It's ... not really. It's just inappropriate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that making fun of your customers for any reason is not a good idea. People seem to have lost perspective here. DHH tried to inject some nuance, and paid the price it seems :-/ All this incident has accomplished is turning off people, in spite of clearly being sympathetic to it to the important bits of social justice. The social justice movement is eating itself from the inside out with stuff like this.
throw123123123 5y ago
> but you are stuck with immature coworkers that are making fun of aspects of your culture, making fun of names that are similar to your own name, or similar to names of your friends and family That is resolved with the manager, and if not, with hr.

imbnwa 5y ago

The portrayal of a whole spectrum of ethical questions as "religious" is the most bad faith interpretation I see deployed basically all the time in these types of discussions. It's practically a senseless meme at this point. We're literally talking about people keeping a list of names they thought were funny that lead to the situation, which apparently enough people internally found offensive, and you have people in this thread talking about "professionalism" and "religious thinking"; what?

Uhhrrr 5y ago

Making fun of a culture is culturalist, not racist. And all cultures have aspects worthy of mockery. And making fun of names doesn't even rise to that level. No one thinks less of a culture or a person just because their name reads like "fuck", or "Biggus Dickus", etc., in English. It's just a funny impedance mismatch between languages.

NathanKP 5y ago
You aren't making the point you think you are. All you are doing is showing that you lack empathy for how others feel. And that is the fundamental problem: it isn't about what you think you are doing, it is about what other people think you are doing, and the fact that what you think is funny is offensive to other people.
- Uhhrrr 5y ago
  I have empathy for people who experience prejudice, but not for people who think "this name means something funny in English" is racist. Those people don't know what racism means, and they devalue claims of actual racism when they say that.
  - NathanKP 5y ago
    That's the thing though, it doesn't matter whether you think something is "actual racism". It matters whether the person on the receiving end thinks it is racist, or racism adjacent. And making fun of people's names is absolutely racism adjacent. It dehumanizes the person on the receiving end by treating one of their fundamental self identifiers as a joke. It may not dehumanize them to the same degree as a slur, an offensive stereotype, "blackface", or similar, but it is absolutely dehumanizing. I listened to people who have been on the receiving end, and I believe them when they say that this hurts them and offends them. Is it as bad as some other forms of racism? Arguably no. But is it on the spectrum of racism? Absolutely. This is what empathy looks like: you listen to the one on the receiving end and you believe what they say about how they feel. At the end of the day you have the right to decide that this isn't "actual racism" in your own mind, but that doesn't change the reality that the one on the receiving end still feels bad.
    - TimTheTinker 5y ago
      > It [only] matters whether the person on the receiving end thinks it is racist, or racism adjacent. That's where I can't agree. It's possible to do something that feels "racist" to someone but isn't actually racist. If I'm wrong, then there's no objective definition of racism and we can all go home and call it "lack of empathy". You can't have it both ways. Either racism is objectively definable or it isn't. Categorically speaking, there is a big difference between offending someone's feelings or sensibilities and committing an act of racism, which is defined as discrimination on the basis of race and is objectively measurable using well-established tests.
      - NathanKP 5y ago

henryaj 5y ago

> So you deal with it for a while but then you start complaining "hey man that's really not cool". They don't take you seriously Far from the truth. How did you surmise that this is what happened? They took it very seriously - the CEO wrote up a whole long postmortem on what happened, why it was a failure of management, and shouldn't happen again, admitting fault for not stepping in to deal with it sooner.

bendbro 5y ago

So combining both halves it seems like people can't actually get along and the idea of a patchwork quilt society is a horrible, dystopian failure?

christophilus 5y ago

It sounds like you think I’m defending the dumb list. I’m not. To me, it sounds like the Basecamp leadership did mostly the right thing. They said, this list shouldn’t exist, we expect better in the future. But also, we’re sick and tired of people making extreme assumptions about people’s motivations and making this list tantamount to a KKK membership. The list was dumb. Calling the list the work of hateful racists was also probably dumb.

arp242 5y ago

From the looks of it, everyone quickly agreed that this list was inappropriate and it was shut down promptly. The drama didn't start over that, but exaggerated claims people made such as "this is the road to genocide", as well as connecting this list to some mass-shooting, as well as some lingering conflicts such as whether or not the title "it doesn't have to be crazy at work" – a book published by basecamp – is ableist or not. People act like "haha, this name sounds funny because it's similar to the English word [...]" is a huge deal and existential threat. It's ... not really. It's just inappropriate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that making fun of your customers for any reason is not a good idea. People seem to have lost perspective here. DHH tried to inject some nuance, and paid the price it seems :-/ All this incident has accomplished is turning off people, in spite of clearly being sympathetic to it to the important bits of social justice. The social justice movement is eating itself from the inside out with stuff like this.

throw123123123 5y ago

> but you are stuck with immature coworkers that are making fun of aspects of your culture, making fun of names that are similar to your own name, or similar to names of your friends and family That is resolved with the manager, and if not, with hr.