The Fourth of July • Hacker News Board

Re: The Fourth of July

#251

Post by geofft » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #242

tptacek wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you see how a reasonable person might read this as catastrophizing? The tweet you linked to is pretty banal, and appears factual. I'm having trouble even connecting the dots from "many of the founders were slaveowners" to "let's cancel America". The nuns taught me the same thing in 1980s Catholic grammar school.

It would be a perfectly fine observation if that was all. But it goes further and says that “the next time someone says we can’t question their judgment on guns or whatever, show them this image.” That logic—or lack thereof, it’s an ad hominem—can be used to put all of our founding principles on the chopping block. It’s an attempt to delegitimize the animating principles of our country.

It is an attention to argue that the founding principles of this country are open to legitimate debate and that people who love America can hold that some of them were simply wrong without loving America any less.

What I don't get is this newfound attempt to argue that what we once called the Great Experiment is immune from criticism, to portray the success of America as an inevitable result of the holy prophets who gave us the Constitution on stone tablets and not the work of men who made mistakes and learned from them.

Re: The Fourth of July

#252

Post by dorado3 » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

charlescearl wrote: post #226

weiming wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What me and my family talked about today is that, as immigrants, we are so sad how much the "native born" people of the US hate their own country. They seem to never waste an opportunity to remind others of their disdain and it is more and more visible these days e.g. in big news media or on Twitter. Makes me sad and I hope this can change.

If you fail to understand how so many Indigenous and Black people of this country view it with such contempt, I would recommend a few reads. But first I would ask you to consider that whatever greatness it can claim lies not in it’s continued founding myths, but in the many unheralded acts of sacrifice and resistance that so many of it’s marginalized citizens made and continue to make down to this very minute. James…

The idea that others are to blame for one’s suffering is maybe the most potent and toxic of all political ideas, and it has thrived like a mind-virus for thousands of years. The truth is that people of all races in the USA are _not_ blocked by racism from living a good live, but certain political forces sell this story (the victim identity) in order to control certain groups of voters, and play shallow ego-gratifying mind games in academia.

Re: The Fourth of July

#253

Post by geofft » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #145

geofft wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is attacking a straw man. There is no (serious) argument to "cancel" America wholesale (well, apart from the anarchists, but they'd agree with you about all those other countries too). There is a serious argument for holding America accountable for the things she has done wrong. You only hold people accountable whom you believe are actually trying to do good and whom you actually think can do better. People talk…

There is a serious attempt to cancel America, that goes beyond holding America responsible for its past wrongs. Someone posted a link to this tweet elsewhere in this thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/arlenparsa/status/116818940954980... I think this is not an uncommon opinion and it’s becoming more and more mainstream. And that sort of thinking is an attempt to cancel America. It’s not just saying that America has d…

Like software, America is not the set of opinions it happens to have today but the process for changing those opinions. A healthy software development project has leadership that feels comfortable changing the software as they learn more about how people are using it. If, say, Kubernetes adds support for adding containers to an already-running Pod, that's not an attempt to "cancel" Kubernetes, it's an attempt to improve it.

The founders were, in fact, people who made serious errors of moral judgment, in the way the tweet you link points out. That's a reason we shouldn't, in fact, trust every opinion they had. We can still follow their opinions on process and principles - we can believe that all men were created equal, and take it to the logical conclusion that they didn't. We can believe in a representative democracy with certain features. We can believe in the various branches of government. We can believe, as they did, that people with their facilities of reason can govern better than any king with divine right.

If you really think that admitting that the founders owned slaves is an attack on the heart of America and that you cannot love America without agreeing with the founding fathers about slavery, well, that's the first good argument I've heard for canceling America - but you're the one making it.

Re: The Fourth of July

#254

Post by nec4b » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

charlescearl wrote: post #226

weiming wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What me and my family talked about today is that, as immigrants, we are so sad how much the "native born" people of the US hate their own country. They seem to never waste an opportunity to remind others of their disdain and it is more and more visible these days e.g. in big news media or on Twitter. Makes me sad and I hope this can change.

If you fail to understand how so many Indigenous and Black people of this country view it with such contempt, I would recommend a few reads. But first I would ask you to consider that whatever greatness it can claim lies not in it’s continued founding myths, but in the many unheralded acts of sacrifice and resistance that so many of it’s marginalized citizens made and continue to make down to this very minute. James…

I have hardly seen any black or native American viewing its country with contempt. Most of the haters are young native born white leftist without any recent experience with immigration within their families.

Re: The Fourth of July

#255

Post by geofft » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

Godel_unicode wrote: post #160

geofft wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you will find that the descendants of immigrants who suffered unimaginable trauma have not "gotten over it," either - they just know America is not responsible for that trauma, so they don't have anything to demand of America. (In many cases, the political entity that enacted that trauma is effectively no longer existent, so they have no one to make demands from and they have gotten as close to justice as the…

> ...they just know America is not responsible for that trauma... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Ameri... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws

I'm specifically referring to the people referred to in the comment I was replying to, i.e., immigrants who fled trauma in their home countries and became successful in America.

I agree that there are also many cases where America did inflict trauma on immigrants, and they can rightly hold America responsible in such a case. But that's not what the person I was replying to was talking about.

Re: The Fourth of July

#256

Post by nec4b » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #179

beaner wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I might get downvoted for this, but a large part of it comes from a sense of guilt about clearly being the most successful and powerful country in the world. When nearly everyone else on earth constantly gives you shit (while also trying to enter...) many people here have started accepting those foreign perspectives and seeing themselves as spoiled and privileged. I can remember this being true from when…

about clearly being the most successful and powerful country in the world And this to the rest of the world is typical America arrogance. I am sorry to be blunt, but I have to call it out. I won't debate that the US is the most powerful country in the world. But 'most successful' is very debatable. I have been in the US often, and found that most Americans are far less well off than in other Western democracies. Most…

And the majority of world voting with its feet does not agree with you.

Re: The Fourth of July

#257

Post by barry-cotter » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #249

barry-cotter wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Jew or Italian was ever non-white under US law. Racism and religious and ethnic prejudice was there in spades but > No Europeans were ever not considered white under US law. If you have any citations for Jews being considered non-white as opposed to the bad kind of white like the Irish I’d be interested to see it.

That's what the linked wikipedia article says. ("for census purposes", admittedly. But that's one aspect of law)

The string “for census purposes” does not occur in the linked Wikipedia article. The closest to anything saying Jews were regarded as non-white was that they were

> further down the Caucasian pecking order, as Semites.

The obvious interpretation of that is that they weren’t the good kind of white but bad white is still white. The Semitic kind of Caucasian.

Re: The Fourth of July

#258

Post by beaner » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #179

beaner wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I might get downvoted for this, but a large part of it comes from a sense of guilt about clearly being the most successful and powerful country in the world. When nearly everyone else on earth constantly gives you shit (while also trying to enter...) many people here have started accepting those foreign perspectives and seeing themselves as spoiled and privileged. I can remember this being true from when…

about clearly being the most successful and powerful country in the world And this to the rest of the world is typical America arrogance. I am sorry to be blunt, but I have to call it out. I won't debate that the US is the most powerful country in the world. But 'most successful' is very debatable. I have been in the US often, and found that most Americans are far less well off than in other Western democracies. Most…

I don't know that it's possible to debate without going down very large, very opinionated rabbit holes. You're very clearly wrong on a number of things, I'm sorry. But it should suffice to quantify it with numbers and trends. Namely that Americans don't leave America for quality of life reasons; millions of foreign immigrants want to and attempt to and many succeed illegally; immigrants try from all over the world, not just its direct southern neighbor, despite the US's relative distance from the rest of the world; even Americans who claim to hate the country never leave.

I understand your perspective and think it's fair. When it comes to people voting with their feet however, you do not represent the reality for most people.

Edit: Additionally, "Western Europeans move to the US in far greater numbers — both proportionally and in absolute terms — than Americans move to Western Europe." [0]

[0] https://mises.org/wire/3-times-many-europeans-move-us-other-...

Re: The Fourth of July

#259

Post by jessaustin » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #240

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ye gods, no. Never. While the progressives are indeed successfully driving Indians, Asians and other immigrants into the arms of Republicans thanks to their embrace of identity politics and cancel culture, the answer is for the silent majority of mainstream liberals to openly repudiate progressivism, as Obama did, and drive them away from the Democratic Party. Make it clear that the liberal left truly welcomes people…

Is it truly the "progressives" who have the identitarian obsession? From my observations of really leftist folks, they seem most eager to talk about class and economics and peace. (Thanks, Obama!) Meanwhile the presumed presidential candidate, embarrassed as he must be by his racist history, can't decide which woman of color he wants as VP, but he knows she will be a woman of color.

Based on her performance on "Beat the Depressed" this morning, she'll probably be Susan Rice... Less problematic domestically than many of her rivals, but more problematic internationally.

Re: The Fourth of July

#260

Post by mmm_grayons » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

slim wrote: post #141

cywick wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the argument is 78% of Americans don't use Twitter at all, 20% have Twitter accounts but are not very active, and only 2% are responsible for the vast majority of tweets. In other words, what you see on Twitter, especially when it comes to somewhat more extreme messages, is not representative at all for the US population as a whole.

how many people vote in elections ? just to compare the representativeness of the samples

Forty to sixty percent, though that doesn't say anything about the representativeness of voters or twitter users.