The entire article is based on online group dynamics over people trying to figure out how to come to grips with historically ignored problems.
I fail to feel outraged by this process. Is "White Fragility" without criticism? Probably not, I think it is a fantastic book, but it scares the bejeebers out of some people and we get instagram drama and articles like this which I interpret as another attempt at purity (trying to outsmart "wokeness").
It is going to take a while for society* to come to grips with this new shift, because we're clearly not going back, but it definitely is rough around the edges, IMHO, because we haven't found the right vocabulary and framing. Unfortunately it is going to require people to sit with feeling uneasy, and that is something most people cannot tolerate.
> The entire article is based on online group dynamics over people trying to figure out how to come to grips with historically ignored problems.
You have to ignore quite a lot of history to come to the conclusion that these problems were historically ignored.
> I fail to feel outraged by this process.
Maybe if you end up on the receiving end you'll feel differently?
> Is "White Fragility" without criticism? Probably not, I think it is a fantastic book, but it scares the bejeebers out of some people and we get instagram drama and articles like this which I interpret as another attempt at purity (trying to outsmart "wokeness").
Robin D'Angelo has made some deranged, outlandish assertions, and instead of defending them she simply follows up with more outlandish assertions. I had the pleasure of having a non-white person explain things about "white people" that she'd learned from that book that were patently false.
> Unfortunately it is going to require people to sit with feeling uneasy
People throw around this phrase, but it always strikes me as nonsensical.
There's a lot of stupid opinions that can make people feel uneasy, so unease is not some magic barometer of truth.
People are going to feel really uneasy if they are listening to you defend your appreciation of child pornography, but that doesn't mean you have struck upon some deep uncomfortable truth.
Stating that it's a comparison (which it's not) or that it's frequent does not refute the counter-example. GP's contention is "some things people say make others uncomfortable, but not because they're true, thus the fact that a statement makes people uncomfortable tells you nothing about its truth value", and has provided an example of such a thing.
I hear what you're saying, and I think it's true that some people react with hostility when confronted with some of this stuff, but separate from the actual values, this article describes a destructive and unproductive social dynamic. I think the most interesting bit is that the author describes similar cannibalistic dynamics happening in neo-nazi subcultures. Whether the values here are worthy is beside the point.
Questioning the moral standing of those who would criticize the dynamic itself isn't useful or worthwhile. It conflates interpersonal confrontation (useful, good, corrective, it's how we build each other up) with a zillion passersby hurling invective at a guy who, in this case, found it so troubling to have a mass of people condemn him on a moral spectrum that is very dear to him that he ended up suicidal.
White Fragility is an awful book. Even as baby's first guide to thinking about how you treat POC, it's a net negative and that role would be better filled by something like Ibram Kendi's books. Still fluffy and lightweight, but at least not as harmfully neurotic.
That being said, you've hit on the actual shortcoming of "woke culture" these handwringing articles miss. It's admirable, not outrageous, that white people becoming conscious of racism feel compelled to do whatever they can about it. But most people (in the US at least) are so depoliticized that their ability to effect systemic change is virtually nil. The project of rebuilding the necessary political capacity is hard, boring work and we probably won't live long enough to see its fruits. If you want gratification, making some rando on the internet bend the knee is much easier.
One definitely gets the impression from critics like the author that they're less interested in seeing that energy redirected than in it dissipating entirely.
As a black person, I'll say this new crop of books like White Fragility on one hand aren't great, and in the long run some will probably seen as outright bad, but I'm still glad they exist?
It's kind of an Overton Window thing for me. I'm just very used to the 90's, where you couldn't even come close to saying anything like this out loud in, e.g. an academic setting because you know what you would set off.
I'm glad it's out there to at least be reckoned with as a theory.
(Relatedly, this is why I have zero respect for the suggestion that a new form of "censorship" is taking place when people talk about e.g. "cancel culture" and whatnot. This has always been around, the only thing that's new is that it can now come from e.g. both the left and the right)
It has always been around, but it is fundamentally opposed to any intellectual exchange. And we slowly improved here. Yes, freedom of speech does require freedom from consequences. That is also true for the author of said book. I don't think ridicule is prohibiting speech, it can be, but this is not the case here.
I'm not quite getting at what you're saying here? What is the "it?" I ask because the old-school "cancel culture" that didn't go by that name frequently employed bad intellectual exchange.
Put differently, "White Fragility" is intellectual exchange, so was "The Bell Curve", so was "Phrenology" and a lot of other things?
>> people trying to figure out how to come to grips with historically ignored problems
I very much agree that many people have limited knowledge of the history of the last six hundred years, but I believe that sharing the cold hard facts from history (that aren't taught in schools) has a better chance at opening up a person's viewpoint rather than criticizing their behavior.
> Unfortunately it is going to require people to sit with feeling uneasy
You can only make an omelet by breaking a few million eggs. If you chair is uncomfortable I would suggest a cushion. There isn't much more to discuss here I guess. There are people without too much self-reflection but you are not making a good case. Get some distance if you need it.
It depends, I worked briefly for Flex(tronics), and my projects were entirely focused on battery life and size (or at least, the client design requirements were).
There's a difference between a customer who plans on selling a billion units, and some company like this game controller design team that clearly making some crappy kids toys. I think the OP twitter person just learned a valuable lesson.
It seems no one has stopped to consider that some people just like poetry, whether it is from an "authenticated" human source, or AI and is close enough to language to engage the brain in a variety of ways. Does it matter?
I'd be interested to see a HN poll to know how many of you roll your own (that is, you're serving all HTTP traffic on the back end of a load balancer), or using a website hosting service. But I don't know which hosting services are popular so I don't know what to add to the poll.
I have a happy little node server that's been running on an AWS micro instance since 2013 and I periodically stick a new SPA into the public area with auth through the express middleware. It might look a bit frankensteinish, but it works just ducky and costs like US$10/month with 20GB of SSD (most of that is the elastic IP + load balancer).
> Am I even a competent developer if I have to use the Internet every five minutes to code?
It just means you are slowed down by the need to look things up. Do you consider speed part of competency?
The ability to look everything up on the internet didn't appear until the late 90's. I finished my BSEE + MS CompSci degrees before 1994, effectively without the modern internet. We had manpages. And enormous books. All that's really changed is most pop languages don't have manpages, but at least we aren't killing forests for the X specification printouts!
There are many centuries of engineering behind this. I went to the Museum of Horology in Austria. It has examples of the first mechanical clocks, up to today's timepieces. It is fascinating looking at the giant, wrought-iron town clocks that kept shitty time and bent and rusted, and seeing different parts of the clock evolve over the years, especially as engineering & metallurgy improved.
I'm in my mid-50's. I missed the 1950's and 1960's in the US, but I recall the 70's and onward vividly. It is hard to impart to today's generations just how subversive MTV was in the 1980's. Being different in school in the 70's was a mortal sin, so people who did it were either truly weird or had immense self-confidence. "Alternative radio" didn't exist in most of the country, let alone cassettes and albums: department stores only sold what big labels offered. Punk and alternative had to be sought out by college students or people in cities. MTV changed all that radically. "Nonconformity" was a big word for teens in the 70's and 80's. It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in, not sticking out.
Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity.
Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today.
>It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in,
Wait, doesn't that sound like the same thing? Presumably some kids are still non-conforming, and they are still the minority (because most kids of all generations have prioritized fitting in).
Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia. There was plenty of popular garbage in the 70s and 80s, there is plenty of good music being made now. The only real difference is that we have yet to apply the "is this good enough to keep around" filter to modern culture.
>Be very wary of survivor bias when looking back in time, especially when there is a risk of nostalgia.
Case in point: MTV of the 80s would play little to no black music. There's a famous 1983 interview bit of David Bowie where he asked the MTV VJ why they play no black music, and the VJ waffles a bit on the white suburban market. That does not sound very subversive to me.
Another excellent catch. I'm obviously a white dude and I was addressing white dude issues: college radio was largely white punk bands; and rap and hip hop was being marginalized until it exploded in the mid-80's. I don't have perspective on underground black music as a black teen. Did it have the same contour as white experience? Is "nonconformity" just a wypipo problem? Thanks for comment.
you understand black americans have historically been repressed, right? this is pretty uncontroversial.
black american art, especially music, is absolutely saturated with themes of resistance, and even the mildest, most innocent examples have historically been perceived by racists and the establishment as dangerous and rebellious.
the 80s were at the tail end of white flight, when relocation of white people from diverse cities to majority-white suburbs was an explicit response to the desegregation and rebellions of the preceding years. mtv agents making a statement about suburban markets in that time has a clear meaning.
MTV was just one of the first businesses trying to make money on (safe) rebellion tendencies of the youth. Now everybody does that, with for example large clothing brands scouting what the hippest kids are wearing on the streets, and quickly turning that into the next collection.
It seems like there are serious sample size issues either way. When you're a teenager, assuming you're not home-schooled, you knows hundreds of other teenagers, being vaguely acquainted and introduced in some way to thousands, not exactly "randomly" sampled but a pretty broad cross-section of all teenagers at least in your region. As a person in your 50s, you might know 2 or 3 teenagers. personally, I know 0 teenagers. Trying to draw conclusions about what "kids these days" are like in general from personal experience seems unreliable when your experience is that limited.
There's also the issue of how well you know them. When I was a kid myself, as far as I could tell, all 40 year-olds had dull, shallow personal lives and were boring people. I don't have that impression now than I'm in my 40s and my experience of the lives of 40 year-olds goes beyond being told what not to do by them every now and again. How well do you seriously know and understand the inner motivations of your friend's kids?
30+ questions and everything was a composition of shift, rotate, and, or, nand, nor, xor.
If you're a programmer it's just a matter of figuring out what operations are used. If you're not a programmer, you probably have no language to describe the relationships, and therefore can't just zip along looking for common assembly-language instructions.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, I bet I could make an increasingly challenging logic puzzle generator just by increasing the number of composite operations and operands. I bet if I googled I could find a dozen such projects that already exist. My work here is done. :)
Alternatively, you may say that programming is skewed towards people that find it easy to operate in a world of logic. We all know that programming can be like a puzzle and you sometimes have to keep a lot of conditions and dependencies in your head to solve the current problem.
Others may lack the formal language, but I don't see an inherent disadvantage in that. You can play music without knowing the notes.
I fail to feel outraged by this process. Is "White Fragility" without criticism? Probably not, I think it is a fantastic book, but it scares the bejeebers out of some people and we get instagram drama and articles like this which I interpret as another attempt at purity (trying to outsmart "wokeness").
It is going to take a while for society* to come to grips with this new shift, because we're clearly not going back, but it definitely is rough around the edges, IMHO, because we haven't found the right vocabulary and framing. Unfortunately it is going to require people to sit with feeling uneasy, and that is something most people cannot tolerate.