On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality • Hacker News Board

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#251

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 10:26 PM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #243

stcredzero wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there are people in the SLPC who are abusing the reputation of the organization as a political weapon. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an ex-muslim who wants to reform the society she came from and Majid Nawaz is a muslim reformer. Labeling what they are doing and saying as "hate speech" is intellectual dishonesty.

No offense, but I'm going to believe the SPLC in general all the same. They have a pretty good track record over the decades. Yeah, if they screwed up 2 things, that's not good and they should fix it. But, a 99.9% 'correct' rate is pretty damn good all the same. You should email them and tell them though, I'm sure they would want to correct anything they are wrong about. Smearing people incorrectly is something I ima…

They have a pretty good track record over the decades.

They seemed to have taken a "hockey stick" turn in the past several years.

Yeah, if they screwed up 2 things, that's not good and they should fix it.

There's more than just those two things.

You should email them and tell them though, I'm sure they would want to correct anything they are wrong about.

There's already a lawsuit.

Smearing people incorrectly is something I imagine they would want to make right.

I've had pretty much the same thought, but my conclusion is that their definition of "right" has become essentially tribal, and that they feel justified in using their reputation as a partisan weapon, because in their minds, their ends justify those means.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#252

Post by aaron-lebo » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 10:26 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #232

closeparen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modern left-wing view of racism is as a systematic, structural power relationship between races. Individual decisions branching on skin color is neither necessary nor sufficient to get there, although it can and historically has contributed. For example, divesting from your neighborhood out of concern for your property value when PoC start to move in does not necessarily reflect an individual racial bias. It coul…

Agree with this. My personal way of saying this is "we all do racist things, but very few of us are racist." Very often the most pragmatic choice in a situation also happens to be racist. Just own the racist things you do, and try to change the world for the better so you are no longer pushed into doing racist things.

I don't buy that. Moving out of an area due to declining property values is not inherently racist. It's a mix of economic, cultural, and class issues.

Calling that racism is to potentially miss the root cause of much of this stuff, and it has to do with poverty. The poor of any ethnic group or race are treated badly.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#253

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 10:32 PM UTC

rhcom2 wrote: post #238

[deleted] wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Can't you continue that line of thinking to include, "I have no problem with black people but slavery is my family's means of economic security, I'm not being racist, just selfish"? Just because the people in these examples claim they aren't motivated by racism doesn't mean they aren't (at least partly) motivated by racism, maybe even unconsciously. If I care about the suffering of my own race, but not those people o…

[deleted]

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#254

Post by colanderman » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 10:32 PM UTC

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #208

colanderman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where did I mention a violent-religious-fundamentalism-nudist culture? By mentioning "stoning", "shunning", and "nudism" as "examples" of different cultures. That's absurd, as absurd as my joke combining the three. Let me reword your hypotheticals. If someone walked down the street in a hijab, would you think they're "crazy"? If someone celebrated different holidays than you, prayed to different gods, or spoke a mi…

> You did. By mentioning "stoning", "shunning", and "nudism" as "examples" of different cultures. That's absurd, as absurd as my joke combining the three. You're twisting my words in an attempt to delegitimize my statements. Those are real facets of different cultures, and acting like each doesn't happen somewhere in the world is disingenuous. > if someone walked down the street in a hijab, would you think they're "c…

Culture has always played a part in what we call "racism" and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Especially it is disingenuous to claim that racism is rare, yet that it alone, and not anti-multiculturalism, was responsible for white flight.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#255

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 10:33 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #118

Veelox wrote: post #61

I grew up in the Midwest and moved to Silicon Valley. I think that people here don't understand what this author describes as "Midwestern history is a study in racial quarantine." I would go as far as to say that racial is the wrong word to describe what happens in the Midwest. I think that communities in the Midwest have tighter cultural restrictions on what it means to be "one of us." This can be affected by where…

The modern left-wing view of racism is as a systematic, structural power relationship between races. Individual decisions branching on skin color is neither necessary nor sufficient to get there, although it can and historically has contributed. For example, divesting from your neighborhood out of concern for your property value when PoC start to move in does not necessarily reflect an individual racial bias. It coul…

> The modern left-wing view of racism is as a systematic, structural power relationship between races.

Incorrect. More correct would be: the dominant modern left-wing view is that there exists now in much of the world, and has historically, a systematic structural power imbalances between groups identified as “races”, that this disproportionately harms some of those groups, and that this is bad thing.

That the confluence of all those things is the proper referent of the label “racism” rather than that label referring to racial bias which is a component of all that is far more controversial even within the left.

> For example, divesting from your neighborhood out of concern for your property value when PoC start to move in does not necessarily reflect an individual racial bias. It could be a purely rational economic calculation based on other people’s biases. It’s still the bread and butter of the system of racism.

Uh, yes, because it's a product of someone's racial biases, it's still a part of systemic racism even by the simpler and more common definition of racism, because its a product of racial biases within the social system.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#256

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 10:38 PM UTC

CodeCube wrote: post #220

Oxitendwe wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does a chinese family moving into an italian neighborhood all of a sudden mean that no one can open an italian restaurant? No. It does mean a lot of other things though, like a vastly increased chance of chinese/italian intermarriage for their descendants, which means their descendants will not share your ethnic identity - it will be destroyed. Whether you think that's a good or a bad thing is an entirely different…

There it is ... respectfully, I hope your mindset is extinguished and rendered extinct soon. Disrespectfully ... well, I won't share my disrespectful thoughts here; just know that they exist.

[deleted]

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#257

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 10:39 PM UTC

throwawayjava wrote: post #247

stcredzero wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just described thousands of years of history prior to Marx and hundreds of years of history after Marx across every single axis of the political spectrum. Which is precisely what Marx claims to do, with essentially the model which Marx claims does so. Well, anything popular taps into some truth It's pretty obvious that Postmodernism is homomorphic to Marxism. It's also well documented that Postmodernism has in…

> Which is precisely what Marx claims to do, with essentially the model which Marx claims does so. Again, no. Marx's characterization is much more concrete than that, and really cannot be separated from notions of class and capital and commodity-form without rendering the term "Marxist" nearly meaningless. Or at least synonymous with much less politically-charged ideas like "materialism" or even just "politics". Sepa…

really cannot be separated from notions of class and capital and commodity-form without rendering the term "Marxist" nearly meaningless.

The Intersectional claim is basically that inherent markers like race have become a functionally like a marker of class.

Separating Marx from those things is like separating Jesus from Christianity.

You just keep on asserting this without specifying why -- probably because you find it particularly embarrassing. So you're saying there's something magically special about the very specific formulation? Many atheists have noted that Jesus has many similarities to many other religious/mythical figures. The principles are usefully generalized. As is the with religion, the fact that there are these patterns is significant in itself.

"Marxism" in such broad-brush terms is certainly not meaningless in any case. Use "collectivist" if you like. Anyone who throws individual rights under the bus in favor of the interests of the group and says phrases like "By any means necessary" or "all power comes from the end of a gun" is a party to ideologies which have played out in the deaths of tens of thousands to tens of millions of people, across different cultures, in different times, again and again throughout history.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#258

Post by humanrebar » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 10:41 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #232

closeparen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modern left-wing view of racism is as a systematic, structural power relationship between races. Individual decisions branching on skin color is neither necessary nor sufficient to get there, although it can and historically has contributed. For example, divesting from your neighborhood out of concern for your property value when PoC start to move in does not necessarily reflect an individual racial bias. It coul…

Agree with this. My personal way of saying this is "we all do racist things, but very few of us are racist." Very often the most pragmatic choice in a situation also happens to be racist. Just own the racist things you do, and try to change the world for the better so you are no longer pushed into doing racist things.

> we all do racist things, but very few of us are racist

That's confusing because you're using two different definitions of the word "racist" in the same sentence. At some point we should do everyone a favor and use two words when we mean two things.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#259

Post by throwawayjava » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 10:43 PM UTC

weberc2 wrote: post #209

closeparen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The modern left-wing view of racism is as a systematic, structural power relationship between races. Individual decisions branching on skin color is neither necessary nor sufficient to get there, although it can and historically has contributed. For example, divesting from your neighborhood out of concern for your property value when PoC start to move in does not necessarily reflect an individual racial bias. It coul…

The problem with this view is that it describes correlates instead of causes, and worse--that it confuses the two: most people understand racism to mean something like "differences caused by race", and thus something that is morally reprehensible. Your example is one that is caused (though indirectly) by racism, but others examples are not causal but correlated (or at least so indirectly causal as to be meaningless)-…

I believe the reason that the root post is the top-voted comment is that it poses a helpful question: how do we fix this?

My suggestion is that people stop being so damn concerned about their moral status and start caring more about actually fixing things.

A system with de facto separate and unequal schools is just as bad as a system with de jure separate and unequal schools. Whether that's the result of an emergent phenomenon or explicit planning has little effect on the people stuck in the system.

If someone's fragile moral ego gets in the way of an accurate description of the problem... well, that person's ego is the problem.

FWIW you see the same problem in flailing engineering projects.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#260

Post by humanrebar » Thu, Nov 16, 2017, 10:43 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #204

torstenvl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that view is that, in such a definition of racism, it quite simply is not an -ism.

There are lot of systematic "isms" -- capitalism, socialism, fascism, etc.

Those words aren't used the same way as "racism". To wit:

Are communist Americans also capitalist because they part of systemic structural capitalism?