4 ms·

“Man I’ve crunched all the numbers, and I just can’t figure out why stereotyping people might be annoying to them!” If race wasn’t important to the article why

“Man I’ve crunched all the numbers, and I just can’t figure out why stereotyping people might be annoying to them!” If race wasn’t important to the article why mention it at all? Where did the OP say the article was racist? (as opposed to just being rude, annoying, unnecessary, etc.) I got the impression from your comments that you’re American. You also seem to think Americans don’t have weird and problematic opinions about race. I further noticed that you take pains to capitalize “Black” and lowercase “white” when describing a person’s race, a weird and problematic habit that only American leftists have. Can you elaborate on that?

gregjor 3y ago
Where exactly did I stereotype anyone? Race was as important to the article as the location and the relative wealth and age of the place mentioned -- Brooklyn Heights. I guess they could have said they noticed the no curtains thing in some American urban area and left it at that, but as writers tend to do they added some detail to paint a picture: wealthy, gentrified urban, young, and white. For some of us just writing "Brooklyn Heights" would communicate all of that but just maybe the writers thought they might need to describe that neighborhood for readers not familiar with Brooklyn's demographics. As for "rude, annoying, unnecessary, etc." that's in the eye of the beholder. An article can't inherently have any of those properties; those describe reactions a reader might have to the article. I didn't have any of those reactions and I'd be surprised if The Atlantic receives bags of mail complaining about the fluffy curtains article. I don't know what "weird and problematic" might mean. I've met lots of people, Americans and otherwise, who have opinions about race that don't match mine. I was just in Japan a couple of months ago, and as a non-Japanese I noticed I got treated differently. Weird and problematic? Those words didn't pop into my head but I know people who have found Japanese culture and what looks like endemic racism off-putting. My capitalization of Black and non-capitalization of white are legacies you can blame on my age, rather than another "problematic" or leftist habit. It's one of the accepted styles of writing, one that I learned a long time ago. You can find examples yourself, for example [1] and [2]. Speculating about someone's motivations, political associations, weirdness, problematic-ness, etc. when you know nothing about them comes across as rude and, if I can use the ugly word, problematic. You can find out from my HN profile that I was born in America but no longer live there -- not trying to hide my heritage. By all means go on stereotyping and insulting Americans, and people you describe as "leftists." I'll steer clear of that kind of immature behavior. [1] https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php [2] https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-ethnicity-us-news-ap-top-news-7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-e...
- subjectsigma 3y ago
  > As for "rude, annoying, unnecessary, etc." that's in the eye of the beholder. An article can't inherently have any of those properties; those describe reactions a reader might have to the article > I don't know what "weird and problematic" might mean I think it’s time to stop reading so much on the Internet when you seemingly can’t grapple with common, everyday words > My capitalization of Black and non-capitalization of white are legacies you can blame on my age This is so subtly misleading I’m seriously impressed. That you intentionally miss the point while making it seem completely reasonable? Wow. You know exactly why what you said isn’t true, but I bet the drive-by reader unfamiliar with the situation isn’t and would take this comment in stride. Your own articles point to this writing style as “a new change” which is driven explicitly by CRT advocates within the past few years. But your mention of “my age” and “a long time ago” is meant to carefully deflect away from that, and make it seem like a reasonable status quo that has nothing to do with politics! “Hey, I’m just some normal dude with no agenda whatsoever, and this crazy guy is just commenting all this super mean stuff for no reason.” Never mind the fact that your posts are clearly biased a certain way, half of what you say is intentionally misleading (or even just wrong), and what I am saying is completely bog-standard for HN in terms of etiquette. The perfect gaslight! You should come work for the government, you’d be right at home here.
  - gregjor 3y ago
    I presented some facts about demographics, and my opinion about what the curtains article intended. You presented innuendo and speculation about my motives and personality, concluding I have a leftist agenda, so subtly deployed that I'm gaslighting here in public. If I actually intended a veiled American leftist agenda in my choice of words I would have used African-American or BIPOC, don't you think? My use of "Black" to contrast with the article's use of "white," dashed off in a comment thread that will influence no one, must mean something, and I have to admire your determination to dig through the layers of obfuscation I cleverly laid on. I could try to dig up common usage from the '70s, when I learned to write in school, and when "Black" got capitalized and I got told by teachers (Americans, and leftists, no doubt) to write it that way. Or maybe I misremember -- that was decades ago, after all, and capitalization of words I rarely had occasion to write or think carefully about might have got mixed up in my head. These days someone with an actual leftist political agenda trolling HN comments would write BIPOC, but I don't want to spoil your conspiracy. My children sometimes try to correct my usage so I don't use words I learned in my youth and embarrass myself, or offend someone, or trigger amateur semioticians I encounter online. Here we are, with you accusing me of promoting a leftist agenda after I started arguing in this thread that the article about curtains doesn't use "white" in a racist sense, and that Americans aren't any more racist than anyone else. Kind of an odd way to argue what you accuse me of, but honestly you lost me a while back, and now you're just engaging in elder abuse. Thanks for the analysis and careful parsing. I'll circle back to my original point: the article has nothing to do with race, it's about curtains (or lack of) as a class status display. The authors of the almost tongue-in-cheek article carelessly chose a neighborhood they could refer to as "white" so people like me could spread out on the internet with our leftist biased gaslighting in order to... I don't know, you lost me somewhere, I'm not sure what I was trying to accomplish, but I'm sure you can tell me.

gregjor 3y ago

Where exactly did I stereotype anyone? Race was as important to the article as the location and the relative wealth and age of the place mentioned -- Brooklyn Heights. I guess they could have said they noticed the no curtains thing in some American urban area and left it at that, but as writers tend to do they added some detail to paint a picture: wealthy, gentrified urban, young, and white. For some of us just writing "Brooklyn Heights" would communicate all of that but just maybe the writers thought they might need to describe that neighborhood for readers not familiar with Brooklyn's demographics. As for "rude, annoying, unnecessary, etc." that's in the eye of the beholder. An article can't inherently have any of those properties; those describe reactions a reader might have to the article. I didn't have any of those reactions and I'd be surprised if The Atlantic receives bags of mail complaining about the fluffy curtains article. I don't know what "weird and problematic" might mean. I've met lots of people, Americans and otherwise, who have opinions about race that don't match mine. I was just in Japan a couple of months ago, and as a non-Japanese I noticed I got treated differently. Weird and problematic? Those words didn't pop into my head but I know people who have found Japanese culture and what looks like endemic racism off-putting. My capitalization of Black and non-capitalization of white are legacies you can blame on my age, rather than another "problematic" or leftist habit. It's one of the accepted styles of writing, one that I learned a long time ago. You can find examples yourself, for example [1] and [2]. Speculating about someone's motivations, political associations, weirdness, problematic-ness, etc. when you know nothing about them comes across as rude and, if I can use the ugly word, problematic. You can find out from my HN profile that I was born in America but no longer live there -- not trying to hide my heritage. By all means go on stereotyping and insulting Americans, and people you describe as "leftists." I'll steer clear of that kind of immature behavior. [1] https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php [2] https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-ethnicity-us-news-ap-top-news-7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-e...

subjectsigma 3y ago
> As for "rude, annoying, unnecessary, etc." that's in the eye of the beholder. An article can't inherently have any of those properties; those describe reactions a reader might have to the article > I don't know what "weird and problematic" might mean I think it’s time to stop reading so much on the Internet when you seemingly can’t grapple with common, everyday words > My capitalization of Black and non-capitalization of white are legacies you can blame on my age This is so subtly misleading I’m seriously impressed. That you intentionally miss the point while making it seem completely reasonable? Wow. You know exactly why what you said isn’t true, but I bet the drive-by reader unfamiliar with the situation isn’t and would take this comment in stride. Your own articles point to this writing style as “a new change” which is driven explicitly by CRT advocates within the past few years. But your mention of “my age” and “a long time ago” is meant to carefully deflect away from that, and make it seem like a reasonable status quo that has nothing to do with politics! “Hey, I’m just some normal dude with no agenda whatsoever, and this crazy guy is just commenting all this super mean stuff for no reason.” Never mind the fact that your posts are clearly biased a certain way, half of what you say is intentionally misleading (or even just wrong), and what I am saying is completely bog-standard for HN in terms of etiquette. The perfect gaslight! You should come work for the government, you’d be right at home here.
- gregjor 3y ago
  I presented some facts about demographics, and my opinion about what the curtains article intended. You presented innuendo and speculation about my motives and personality, concluding I have a leftist agenda, so subtly deployed that I'm gaslighting here in public. If I actually intended a veiled American leftist agenda in my choice of words I would have used African-American or BIPOC, don't you think? My use of "Black" to contrast with the article's use of "white," dashed off in a comment thread that will influence no one, must mean something, and I have to admire your determination to dig through the layers of obfuscation I cleverly laid on. I could try to dig up common usage from the '70s, when I learned to write in school, and when "Black" got capitalized and I got told by teachers (Americans, and leftists, no doubt) to write it that way. Or maybe I misremember -- that was decades ago, after all, and capitalization of words I rarely had occasion to write or think carefully about might have got mixed up in my head. These days someone with an actual leftist political agenda trolling HN comments would write BIPOC, but I don't want to spoil your conspiracy. My children sometimes try to correct my usage so I don't use words I learned in my youth and embarrass myself, or offend someone, or trigger amateur semioticians I encounter online. Here we are, with you accusing me of promoting a leftist agenda after I started arguing in this thread that the article about curtains doesn't use "white" in a racist sense, and that Americans aren't any more racist than anyone else. Kind of an odd way to argue what you accuse me of, but honestly you lost me a while back, and now you're just engaging in elder abuse. Thanks for the analysis and careful parsing. I'll circle back to my original point: the article has nothing to do with race, it's about curtains (or lack of) as a class status display. The authors of the almost tongue-in-cheek article carelessly chose a neighborhood they could refer to as "white" so people like me could spread out on the internet with our leftist biased gaslighting in order to... I don't know, you lost me somewhere, I'm not sure what I was trying to accomplish, but I'm sure you can tell me.