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How Basecamp Blew Up

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Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#351

Post by tha0xa2 »

cozuya wrote: post #71
tha0xa1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is the strawman? "No one sane", and then you build the Tucker Carlson strawman, and continue to use him, after we both conclude he's not "sane". > What is the whataboutism? Bringing up right-wing examples here when they were immaterial to my OP. These are textbook examples of strawmaning and whatabouting. >Tucker Carlson, one of the most popular "conservatives", opposes racial equality Where did he oppose racia…

You're just playing word games to refuse to back down on your ridiculous statement, which, again, was: "No one sane opposes racial equality, conservative or liberal." Do you think Americans and the world really don't remember the past 5 years? Do you think we don't remember The Former Guy coming to relevance specifically because of the racist "birtherism" movement, or calling Mexicans rapists? Are those the actions o…

>You're just playing word games to refuse to back down on your ridiculous statement, which, again, was:

No games, just pointing out your bad use of fallacies, and you shifting the goalposts.

>Do you think Americans and the world really don't remember the past 5 years?

Do you think Americans and the world really don't remember the past year? Rioting, burning stores and small businesses down, over 20 death, over a billion dollars in damage, all tied to the BLM riots.

>calling Mexicans rapists?

Never happened [1].

Now you're delusionally inventing things that never happened and using fallacies to make this invented world real in your mind.

Find me where in the Republican Party platform they are for racism.

>Name some mainstream Trump-supporting Republican who has said "I believe in racial equality", or otherwise promote racial equality.

You've literally created a non-provable assertion. Mainstream Republicans follow the Republican Party platform. Can you find me where in the platform it calls for racism? As a matter of fact, it calls for anti-discrimination based on race.

If you can't find where in the Republican Party platform it calls for racism, don't bother replying, and we can all conclude what we all already know:

The Democratic party is the party of anti-white and anti-Asian racism.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/aug/08/tim-kaine/...

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#352

Post by michaericalribo »

bhupy wrote: post #316
michaericalribo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment strikes me as disingenuous and willfully obstinate. disingenuous (adj) giving a false appearance of simple frankness obstinate (adj) pertinaciously adhering to an opinion pertinacious (adj) marked by an unyieldingly persistent fixedness (as of opinion, purpose, action) that is often annoyingly perverse in fact or in appearance It looks like you simply googled those words and copy-pasted the definitions.…

> This isn’t a helpful approach. Prescriptivist appeals to the dictionary and dismissal of others’ viewpoints are not ways of listening to the perspectives of others or empathizing with different experiences, and seem to be actively preventing constructive discussion in this case. Agreed. On the flip side, I think it’s just as unhelpful an approach to co-opt a generally understood word (or phrase) and then (unbeknown…

I hear you. It can be counterproductive to use a totally unfamiliar jargon, especially if it trips the audience up and limits mutual engagement in favor of linguistic squabbling.

That said, I respectfully disagree that it’s “just as unhelpful.” Pedantry over definitions distracts from the underlying issues, while new and inventive and nonstandard usage of language can spur critical analysis and jolt us out of our familiar understanding.

Telling someone “defund isn’t used that way” shuts down the conversation. Demanding we “defund the police” makes me want to start / pursue / expand the conversation: what the heck do you mean by that?

Edit to add: my response sounds overly academic. Another way to put it could be: language is confusing, and it can be problematic if we make it more confusing. But, sometimes I need to get a bit more confused before I can see things in a new / different light, and language can be an effective tool to achieve that “good confusion”

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#353

Post by BurningFrog »

mpyne wrote: post #289
JPKab wrote: post #209

"But Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, had been taken aback by an employee post which argued that mocking customer names laid the foundation for racially-motivated violence, and closed the thread." Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence. At some point can we all admit that the most narcissistic, dramatic people are overly-indulged by this garbage? I'm at a startup n…

> Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence. This isn't the argument actually being made here, so if that's what DHH thought when he shut the thread down then that might explain part of the outcry. The argument is simply that the behavior everyone claims to decry (e.g. racial violence) starts somewhere , far below violence. "Funny names" turn into off-color jokes. Off-color jokes turn i…

> "The argument is simply that the behavior everyone claims to decry (e.g. racial violence) starts somewhere, far below violence. "Funny names" turn into off-color jokes. Off-color jokes turn into jokes with a darker edge. Then it turns into..."

If this is such a common path, why have I never heard of it happening?

How common is this chain of events? What are some documented cases?

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#354

Post by JPKab »

jgwil2 wrote: post #328
JPKab wrote: post #209

"But Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, had been taken aback by an employee post which argued that mocking customer names laid the foundation for racially-motivated violence, and closed the thread." Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence. At some point can we all admit that the most narcissistic, dramatic people are overly-indulged by this garbage? I'm at a startup n…

> My favorite moment was sitting there, and having a coworker (US born, but of Arab descent) who grew up in an extremely wealthy neighborhood with immense privilege, lecturing a blind white male employee about how much privilege he had, and then going on to talk about how white people were uniquely tainted by the slave trade that some of their ancestors engaged in. I find it pretty hard to believe this went down the…

That's exactly how it went down in one of my companies HR "listening circles" in February.

The blind employee is married to a woman who immigrated to the US from Japan. He was being lectured by a young semi-useless data scientist who grew up in a wealthy suburb just outside of Dearborn. I'm totally making all of this up in your eyes because you don't like what you're hearing.

Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#355

Post by sagichmal »

seriousquestion wrote: post #148

white su·prem·a·cy; the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society de·fund; prevent from continuing to receive funds Courtesy of the dictionary. This is not hard. Stop entertaining people who redefine words.

You don't get to assert what other people mean when they say things (shrug)

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#356

Post by didgeoridoo »

nemothekid wrote: post #349
didgeoridoo wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument is simply that the behavior everyone claims to decry (e.g. racial violence) starts somewhere, far below violence This is just a rehash of broken-windows theory, whether its proponents know it or not. The Hutus and Tutsis didn’t start with some off-color ribbing and escalate from there. There is zero evidence behind the “pyramid of hate” — it makes a shallow kind of sense, but has no basis in the real w…

> An equally valid hypothesis is that harmlessly blowing off low-level steam prevents the atrocities higher up in the “pyramid”. Things only really get bad when people are encouraged to form and defend identities around characteristics like race, religion, national origin, etc. I'm sorry - I need help in understanding how this "equally valid". To me this seems like a justification ex post facto to defend "jokes", but…

I want to help clarify but I’m having trouble parsing your question. Can you please rephrase?

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#357

Post by kenjackson »

arp242 wrote: post #295
dools wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oddly, several members of the defund movement have said they literally want to defund and abolish the police. It's almost like words mean things? Yes those are the "few anarchists" I was referring to. From what I have seen of people discussing the "defund the police" movement it's about a dramatic reform of law enforcement, including much less emphasis on armed police storming about the place. > You can try to argu…

One of the BLM co-founders and current directory of the BLM non-profit is one of those "few anarchists" who proposed to outright abolish the police.[1] That article also proposes to abolish prisons, the military, borders, capitalism, and includes phrases such as "U.S. [and its] fabricated borders" and calls to "fight the U.S. state". If you had told me this was written by some troll to make BLM look bad then I'd beli…

The BLM organization and the movement are two different things. You’d be lucky to randomly be able to find a single black person who knows any of the founders of the org or any of their principles except to reduce police brutality.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#358

Post by Tagbert »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #330
mpyne wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence. This isn't the argument actually being made here, so if that's what DHH thought when he shut the thread down then that might explain part of the outcry. The argument is simply that the behavior everyone claims to decry (e.g. racial violence) starts somewhere , far below violence. "Funny names" turn into off-color jokes. Off-color jokes turn i…

> The argument is simply that the behavior everyone claims to decry (e.g. racial violence) starts somewhere, far below violence This is just a rehash of broken-windows theory, whether its proponents know it or not. The Hutus and Tutsis didn’t start with some off-color ribbing and escalate from there. There is zero evidence behind the “pyramid of hate” — it makes a shallow kind of sense, but has no basis in the real w…

The Ugandan violence started by efforts to make one group feel like the other group was foreign and illegitimate. that then progresses to dehumanizing talk. When the violence started people were already considering the other side to be less than human. I’m not saying that that is where Basecamp was headed but this kind of disrespectful treatment of people does warp people attitudes. It’s also painful when you find it directed at yourself.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#360

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

thrownaway564 wrote: post #181
Tainnor wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. But this is (was) a 60-person company. That's about the size of the company I'm currently working at. In other words, you should know everyone and interact with a sizeable chunk of these people somewhat regularly. It strikes me as very odd that you would suddenly so fundamentally distrust your co-workers with whom you share so much. But I'm also not in the US and maybe this is just the current climate over the…

The culture here is getting bad. We have an "inclusion council" that hands out these diktats. The word ban list (not blacklist!) is approaching 100 words including husband, housekeeping, normal, hacker and meritocracy. Worse part is we're a security company edit: "here" is okta, not basecamp

> husband

Yup. Pro tip: If you're at a SV-influenced company and you find yourself talking about your personal life, don't say "husband," "wife," "boyfriend," or "girlfriend;" say "partner." That signals that you're an Ally rather than an Enemy.

You'll notice other weird speech patterns too. Pay attention to them; they're meaningful.

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