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This article never takes up the cause of the minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, but spends a lot of time whining about having to sho

This article never takes up the cause of the minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, but spends a lot of time whining about having to show even a modicum of empathy by using more inclusive language. For this reason it reeks of self-centered willful ignorance.

logicchains 2y ago
In the US statistically speaking a minority is much more likely to be killed by another minority than a "white" American.
- mindslight 2y ago
  Except the state is doing its killing as normative behavior in all of our names, whereas disorganized gang violence is already generally seen as wrong. And yes, police unaccountability most certainly affects more than just minorities. The lawlessness of law enforcement is actually the most pressing second amendment issue of our time, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the fully-pwnt political hacks at the NRA, pushing their chosen "side" of the group-herding thought-terminating "woke" strawman like pg here (sigh). How can you claim to have a second amendment right to self defense when the police can summarily execute you for exercising that natural right, in your own home, at night? (The answer is that you can't)
- fatbird 2y ago
  Statistically true. What's your point?
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Sure, for the same reasons 84% of white people are killed by white perpetrators, and most child abusers are family members of the victim. Closeness brings both opportunity and conflict, and things like redlining and white flight have ensured the white and black population are quite well segregated.
- Arkhaine_kupo 2y ago
  Most people are killed by someone they know. Due to redlining many minorities live in communities that are, to this day, essentially segregated. Add the disproportionate correlation of violence and poverty, adn you get a volatile cocktail. You will find it that cities with less redlining have less srong correlation between races of victims and perpetrators than cities that are more strongly, or more recently, redlined.
- 012673 2y ago
  Great fact! I wonder... why is that? Is it simply because they are non-white? What do you think is making your fact a fact?
flavius29663 2y ago
If you look how many white people are killed by blacks versus blacks killed by white people, you will have a shock. Even when you account for whites being a few times more than blacks in the general population. I really don't buy this "minorities" are being killed story.
- omikun 2y ago
  This is how to lie with statistics. Two things can be true without contradiction. Does a black gang member randomly killing an innocent white person cancel a white cop randomly killing an innocent black man?
  - flavius29663 2y ago
    The original comment made it sound like minorities are just hunted down by random whites, lynching style. But even if you look at police murders on civilians, they are killing more whites than blacks. You might argue that whites are 5x more than blacks, but police has more interaction with blacks than with whites. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
apsec112 2y ago
"Inclusive language" won't stop anyone from being killed or harassed, especially with Trump in power in the US again.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  Can you point to an increase in minority vs majority deaths while Trump was in office last time?
strathmeyer 2y ago
Their problem with "political correctness" is that someone corrected them who them deem lesser than them.
mullingitover 2y ago
I feel like it's important to enter this part of the cycle where the absolute worst people feel comfortable entering their most heinous takes into the permanent internet record under the delusion that the social pressure to be a good person has been defeated forever. This is effectively putting the popcorn into the popper, but it won't be served until about ten years from now.
- apsec112 2y ago
  Trump won the popular vote; it's very hard, over the long term, to have strong social pressure from a minority over the majority.
  - mullingitover 2y ago
    The quote doesn't go "The arc of history is short and goes straight toward justice. Absolute downhill battle, frankly embarrassingly easy."
lesuorac 2y ago
That's the point. Spending time teaching people to use people of color instead of black is just performant. Actually firing a recruiter that immediately throws any black resume into the trash is real change.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  "People of color" is a broader term than "black people", and is meant to replace the (pretty widely accepted as) offensive "colored people", not "black people". I feel like it's useful to have a non-offensive phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people, but maybe I'm just too woke to reason effectively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - bpt3 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 2y ago
      Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style and please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle? You've been doing these things repeatedly, they're not what this site is for, and they destroy what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - layer8 2y ago
    > phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people That does sound quite oxymoronic. (I’m not American.)
- andrewstuart2 2y ago
  How exactly would you go about implementing the "real change" here?
  - bpt3 2y ago
diggan 2y ago
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do. It seems like pg sees good parts with "wokeness", and also bad parts. He want to continue with the good parts, while getting rid of the bad parts. The essay mostly seems to speak about the historical context, and how to work with "wokeness" so the good parts can persist, rather than "whining about having to show empathy". Lots of comments here would do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay they deem worse, as currently there seems to be a lot of handwavey-arguments based solely on the title alone.
- Arkhaine_kupo 2y ago
  > do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay I mean its a pretty big train wreck from the start to the end but I will try to point some of the dumbest lines, and pg is a smart guy so this is a particularly weird miss by him. >> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness This is simply not true. Stay Woke is a phrase that has a long history and it mostly related to paying attention to political issues not correctness. The hashtag where it became mainstream was around the shooting of an african american man by the police. It wasn't cancelling someone for saying something dumb, it was because police brutality has a never ending history in the states. One of the first issues it was used on was freeing P*ssy Riot an anti goverment band from Russia, again not a political correctness instance but one of censorship and violence. >> Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. He admits he uses the word pejoritively but does not examine why a word that begins in a marginalised community is now mostly an insult. Like that is beyond irresponsible. if you and your gf have a petname and I start using it as an insult, and I control the media and the word becomes a common word to mean dumbass and I analyse it as that, then I am 1) siding with the bully 2) being a shit reporter. >> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. This is just stupid because "the woke" is not a real group of people, he even admits he uses it as an insult, and secondly because he has no reason to know at what scale it is a problem. Handwaving a problem that doesn't affect you is bonkers, like I'd walk in an oncology ward and say "the scale that cancer is killing you is exagerated, but its a real problem". Paul Graham is a 60 year old white dude who went to Harvard, a uni that invented Essays to admit more white kids instead of jews, sport scholarships to put more white kids than asians thorugh and that was caught admitting white kids with worse grades than asians and was sued for it. He benefits from racism in the instituion he went to, spends his life in a subject that has 0 to do with policy, politics or race and then starts a paragraph with "racism isnt so bad yall". >> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that They led to the crumbling of the vietnam war, the desmitification of the american military and the end of racial segregation. I know he was a kid when it all happened but the 60s movements can hardly be called failed political projects. I could go on because its all equally unbased and plainfully dumb. But I think just pointing out the kind of basic mistakes he has in terms of how he treats the subject means you can easily spot other equally dumb conclusions or assertions. Another dumb conclusion, specially coming from someone with a background in computer science is >> Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do. We KNOW that anger is the most potent emotion in the brain, therefore social media algorithms favour it. AI feeds based on "engagement" feed people anger, people dont seek it out. Shareholders and people like Paul Graham who think humanities are stupid do by creating machines that interact with humans in ways that are completely unethical.
xmprt 2y ago
Actually I think that's exactly the problem with "wokeness" today. People care so much about minorities that we've come to a point where people will be extremely quick to cancel someone online who says something wrong but the same people turn a blind eye to the actual injustices that happen in the world like homelessness and hunger. It's easier to ban someone who says something ignorant than it is to go out and advocate for building new homes or deciding to stop buying on Amazon and Temu to curb the capitalism that people seem to hate so much. Change needs to happen and I think the "woke" are at least working in the right direction compared to a lot of the right (who seem to be moving back a lot of progress that's been made in the last 50 years) even if their actions are woefully inadequate.
UltraSane 2y ago
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now? I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition: An aggressively performative focus on social justice. In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
- jordigh 2y ago
  It bothers me so much that Paul Graham people thinks it's performative. He can't imagine anyone actually, sincerely holding those beliefs, because he doesn't hold them himself. If someone is trying to modify their beliefs and then their behaviour, say, by mild self-censorship, he's got a list of insults ready for that person trying to better themselves: prig, politically correct, woke. It's not performative. We really do believe that there are injustices and that if we can begin by changing the language, we can change the behaviour. Just because Paul Graham can't imagine himself sincerely believing in self improvement followed by social improvement doesn't mean we don't believe it in ourselves.
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    You can hold the beliefs without being "performative" A perfect example is when gay marriage was illegal and some straight people loudly announced that they wouldn't get married until gay people could. OK. Your motives are good but how exactly is this going to help legalize gay marriage? And why did the world need to know about it?
    - bpt3 2y ago
      While your example is interesting, I would at least give those people some credit for taking the action they could (even if it is largely pointless as you said). I think a better analogy is people who would criticize other heterosexual couples for getting married when homosexual couples could not, as it is both pointless and needlessly antagonistic.
anal_reactor 2y ago
I think that inclusive language became a symbol of a step too far. If you expect me to adjust some governmental policies to make a better society that's fine, but if you expect me to change the way I express myself because you personally don't like it and you have a bunch of bullies behind you, that's just not okay and should be fought against.
soheil 2y ago
Who's being killed on a daily basis? Could you provide sources?
- dusted 2y ago
  Currently, Ukrainans are. But I suppose the color of their skin means they don't count towards the particular argument that dude is trying to make. Not calling him racist of course. I'm not even suggesting it. [update] Hey! Look! I was down-voted for mentioning that white people are being killed on a daily basis, what an absolute surprise :D
  - skrebbel 2y ago
    You might've been downvoted for bad style, irrespective of your actual argument.
- gedy 2y ago
  People in Chicago? https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/01/03/chicago-homicides-2024/ https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/01/03/chicago-homicides-...
  - soheil 2y ago
    > but spends a lot of time whining about having to show even a modicum of empathy by using more inclusive language Inclusive language can prevent homicide? I'm so lost, what does that have to do with cold-blood murder?
    - vile_wretch 2y ago
      No one is saying that
  - wrycoder 2y ago
    Yeah, and who is doing the killing?
- kkukshtel 2y ago
belter 2y ago
You did notice the trend of 2025 is Billionaires complaining?
- pxtail 2y ago
  I think they don't care at all, this is just signalling, different camp has the power to rule the country now and suddenly all of them are changing their minds
stronglikedan 2y ago
But it's not just minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, so why should they get special consideration? That's the problem I have with it. It puts people into buckets, and then claims one bucket is more important than the others, even when that bucket is statistically insignificant compared to the others. Wokism is simply racism rebranded.
cameronh90 2y ago
> minorities Ahem! I think you mean People of the global majority? Please consider using more inclusive language in the future.

logicchains 2y ago

In the US statistically speaking a minority is much more likely to be killed by another minority than a "white" American.

mindslight 2y ago
Except the state is doing its killing as normative behavior in all of our names, whereas disorganized gang violence is already generally seen as wrong. And yes, police unaccountability most certainly affects more than just minorities. The lawlessness of law enforcement is actually the most pressing second amendment issue of our time, but you wouldn't know it by listening to the fully-pwnt political hacks at the NRA, pushing their chosen "side" of the group-herding thought-terminating "woke" strawman like pg here (sigh). How can you claim to have a second amendment right to self defense when the police can summarily execute you for exercising that natural right, in your own home, at night? (The answer is that you can't)
fatbird 2y ago
Statistically true. What's your point?
ceejayoz 2y ago
Sure, for the same reasons 84% of white people are killed by white perpetrators, and most child abusers are family members of the victim. Closeness brings both opportunity and conflict, and things like redlining and white flight have ensured the white and black population are quite well segregated.
Arkhaine_kupo 2y ago
Most people are killed by someone they know. Due to redlining many minorities live in communities that are, to this day, essentially segregated. Add the disproportionate correlation of violence and poverty, adn you get a volatile cocktail. You will find it that cities with less redlining have less srong correlation between races of victims and perpetrators than cities that are more strongly, or more recently, redlined.
012673 2y ago
Great fact! I wonder... why is that? Is it simply because they are non-white? What do you think is making your fact a fact?

flavius29663 2y ago

If you look how many white people are killed by blacks versus blacks killed by white people, you will have a shock. Even when you account for whites being a few times more than blacks in the general population. I really don't buy this "minorities" are being killed story.

omikun 2y ago
This is how to lie with statistics. Two things can be true without contradiction. Does a black gang member randomly killing an innocent white person cancel a white cop randomly killing an innocent black man?
- flavius29663 2y ago
  The original comment made it sound like minorities are just hunted down by random whites, lynching style. But even if you look at police murders on civilians, they are killing more whites than blacks. You might argue that whites are 5x more than blacks, but police has more interaction with blacks than with whites. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

apsec112 2y ago

"Inclusive language" won't stop anyone from being killed or harassed, especially with Trump in power in the US again.

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
Can you point to an increase in minority vs majority deaths while Trump was in office last time?

strathmeyer 2y ago

Their problem with "political correctness" is that someone corrected them who them deem lesser than them.

mullingitover 2y ago

I feel like it's important to enter this part of the cycle where the absolute worst people feel comfortable entering their most heinous takes into the permanent internet record under the delusion that the social pressure to be a good person has been defeated forever. This is effectively putting the popcorn into the popper, but it won't be served until about ten years from now.

apsec112 2y ago
Trump won the popular vote; it's very hard, over the long term, to have strong social pressure from a minority over the majority.
- mullingitover 2y ago
  The quote doesn't go "The arc of history is short and goes straight toward justice. Absolute downhill battle, frankly embarrassingly easy."

lesuorac 2y ago

That's the point. Spending time teaching people to use people of color instead of black is just performant. Actually firing a recruiter that immediately throws any black resume into the trash is real change.

BobaFloutist 2y ago
"People of color" is a broader term than "black people", and is meant to replace the (pretty widely accepted as) offensive "colored people", not "black people". I feel like it's useful to have a non-offensive phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people, but maybe I'm just too woke to reason effectively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- bpt3 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 2y ago
    Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style and please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle? You've been doing these things repeatedly, they're not what this site is for, and they destroy what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- layer8 2y ago
  > phrase that means "nonwhites" without being defined in terms of white people That does sound quite oxymoronic. (I’m not American.)
andrewstuart2 2y ago
How exactly would you go about implementing the "real change" here?
- bpt3 2y ago

diggan 2y ago

> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do. It seems like pg sees good parts with "wokeness", and also bad parts. He want to continue with the good parts, while getting rid of the bad parts. The essay mostly seems to speak about the historical context, and how to work with "wokeness" so the good parts can persist, rather than "whining about having to show empathy". Lots of comments here would do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay they deem worse, as currently there seems to be a lot of handwavey-arguments based solely on the title alone.

Arkhaine_kupo 2y ago
> do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay I mean its a pretty big train wreck from the start to the end but I will try to point some of the dumbest lines, and pg is a smart guy so this is a particularly weird miss by him. >> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness This is simply not true. Stay Woke is a phrase that has a long history and it mostly related to paying attention to political issues not correctness. The hashtag where it became mainstream was around the shooting of an african american man by the police. It wasn't cancelling someone for saying something dumb, it was because police brutality has a never ending history in the states. One of the first issues it was used on was freeing P*ssy Riot an anti goverment band from Russia, again not a political correctness instance but one of censorship and violence. >> Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. He admits he uses the word pejoritively but does not examine why a word that begins in a marginalised community is now mostly an insult. Like that is beyond irresponsible. if you and your gf have a petname and I start using it as an insult, and I control the media and the word becomes a common word to mean dumbass and I analyse it as that, then I am 1) siding with the bully 2) being a shit reporter. >> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. This is just stupid because "the woke" is not a real group of people, he even admits he uses it as an insult, and secondly because he has no reason to know at what scale it is a problem. Handwaving a problem that doesn't affect you is bonkers, like I'd walk in an oncology ward and say "the scale that cancer is killing you is exagerated, but its a real problem". Paul Graham is a 60 year old white dude who went to Harvard, a uni that invented Essays to admit more white kids instead of jews, sport scholarships to put more white kids than asians thorugh and that was caught admitting white kids with worse grades than asians and was sued for it. He benefits from racism in the instituion he went to, spends his life in a subject that has 0 to do with policy, politics or race and then starts a paragraph with "racism isnt so bad yall". >> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that They led to the crumbling of the vietnam war, the desmitification of the american military and the end of racial segregation. I know he was a kid when it all happened but the 60s movements can hardly be called failed political projects. I could go on because its all equally unbased and plainfully dumb. But I think just pointing out the kind of basic mistakes he has in terms of how he treats the subject means you can easily spot other equally dumb conclusions or assertions. Another dumb conclusion, specially coming from someone with a background in computer science is >> Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do. We KNOW that anger is the most potent emotion in the brain, therefore social media algorithms favour it. AI feeds based on "engagement" feed people anger, people dont seek it out. Shareholders and people like Paul Graham who think humanities are stupid do by creating machines that interact with humans in ways that are completely unethical.

xmprt 2y ago

Actually I think that's exactly the problem with "wokeness" today. People care so much about minorities that we've come to a point where people will be extremely quick to cancel someone online who says something wrong but the same people turn a blind eye to the actual injustices that happen in the world like homelessness and hunger. It's easier to ban someone who says something ignorant than it is to go out and advocate for building new homes or deciding to stop buying on Amazon and Temu to curb the capitalism that people seem to hate so much. Change needs to happen and I think the "woke" are at least working in the right direction compared to a lot of the right (who seem to be moving back a lot of progress that's been made in the last 50 years) even if their actions are woefully inadequate.

UltraSane 2y ago

> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now? I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition: An aggressively performative focus on social justice. In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.

jordigh 2y ago
It bothers me so much that Paul Graham people thinks it's performative. He can't imagine anyone actually, sincerely holding those beliefs, because he doesn't hold them himself. If someone is trying to modify their beliefs and then their behaviour, say, by mild self-censorship, he's got a list of insults ready for that person trying to better themselves: prig, politically correct, woke. It's not performative. We really do believe that there are injustices and that if we can begin by changing the language, we can change the behaviour. Just because Paul Graham can't imagine himself sincerely believing in self improvement followed by social improvement doesn't mean we don't believe it in ourselves.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  You can hold the beliefs without being "performative" A perfect example is when gay marriage was illegal and some straight people loudly announced that they wouldn't get married until gay people could. OK. Your motives are good but how exactly is this going to help legalize gay marriage? And why did the world need to know about it?
  - bpt3 2y ago
    While your example is interesting, I would at least give those people some credit for taking the action they could (even if it is largely pointless as you said). I think a better analogy is people who would criticize other heterosexual couples for getting married when homosexual couples could not, as it is both pointless and needlessly antagonistic.

anal_reactor 2y ago

I think that inclusive language became a symbol of a step too far. If you expect me to adjust some governmental policies to make a better society that's fine, but if you expect me to change the way I express myself because you personally don't like it and you have a bunch of bullies behind you, that's just not okay and should be fought against.

soheil 2y ago

Who's being killed on a daily basis? Could you provide sources?

dusted 2y ago
Currently, Ukrainans are. But I suppose the color of their skin means they don't count towards the particular argument that dude is trying to make. Not calling him racist of course. I'm not even suggesting it. [update] Hey! Look! I was down-voted for mentioning that white people are being killed on a daily basis, what an absolute surprise :D
- skrebbel 2y ago
  You might've been downvoted for bad style, irrespective of your actual argument.
gedy 2y ago
People in Chicago? https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/01/03/chicago-homicides-2024/ https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/01/03/chicago-homicides-...
- soheil 2y ago
  > but spends a lot of time whining about having to show even a modicum of empathy by using more inclusive language Inclusive language can prevent homicide? I'm so lost, what does that have to do with cold-blood murder?
  - vile_wretch 2y ago
    No one is saying that
- wrycoder 2y ago
  Yeah, and who is doing the killing?
kkukshtel 2y ago

belter 2y ago

You did notice the trend of 2025 is Billionaires complaining?

pxtail 2y ago
I think they don't care at all, this is just signalling, different camp has the power to rule the country now and suddenly all of them are changing their minds

stronglikedan 2y ago

But it's not just minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, so why should they get special consideration? That's the problem I have with it. It puts people into buckets, and then claims one bucket is more important than the others, even when that bucket is statistically insignificant compared to the others. Wokism is simply racism rebranded.

cameronh90 2y ago

> minorities Ahem! I think you mean People of the global majority? Please consider using more inclusive language in the future.