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How Basecamp Blew Up

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Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#291

Post by acjohnson55 »

XorNot wrote: post #128
klyrs wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, when did racial equality become an inherently political topic? Especially racial equality inside the workplace. When in the history of the US has racial inequality not been an inherently political topic? At its founding, the statement "all men are created equal" was highly contentious.

Also a massive lie of omission, seeing as how slavery was legal when that was written and would remain so until the Civil War.

Slavery is still legal if you're incarcerated, and last I checked, we led the world in absolute and proportional numbers of people incarcerated.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#292

Post by stjohnswarts »

throthro111 wrote: post #160

I feel bad for everyone involved. This story made me realize that working at Basecamp is not something I would want to do in the future, primarily because DHH and Fried are so egotistic. However, it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned. Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd. I imagine myself working at som…

I think the company will be better off with the 30% gone. They can regroup. Calling it a racist company because some of the head guys are republican that don't see white supremacists every time they see a white person walking down the street is idiocy. Both sides of the fence have turn to zealotry rather than finding common ground. Let the 30% go form their on basecamp rival that is focused on promoting the idea that all white people are racists by their very nature and see how far it goes. Getting politics out of the company sounds good to me. I don't care about your color or your issues, I just want coworkers I can depend on and get along with and don't wear their politics on their sleeves or feel they're owed a special privilege because of their skin color rather than what they bring to the team.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#293

Post by foolinaround »

JPKab wrote: post #232

Do what I did in February: Quit. Life's too short to waste time at a company that's forgotten it's purpose. This ideology borders on cult like. A good sign that you are dealing with an irrational ideology is non-sensical, illogical and inconsisten rules. For example, in this article, "Black" is capitalized everywhere its mentioned, and "white" isn't. There's nothing logically consistent about this, because it's a bor…

no place seems immune from this nowadays... it only seems to differ in degrees.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#294

Post by treeman79 »

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…

Had to quit a company last year due to bigotry.

Constant bashing of white men on company calls. Exceptions if you were openly non straight. They also loved talking about how inclusive they were.

Constant mocking of customer base, who was mostly traditional white people.

I figure out quick I was hired only because they were desperate for someone with experience.

Which sadly meant hiring an undesirable.

At some point if I really need a job I may need to put on a dress.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#295

Post by arp242 »

dools wrote: post #262
vorpalhex wrote: post #218

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? > If one believes that a particular race is, on average, more likely to commit the types of crime for which one should be incarcerated, and one sees incarceration as an "inferior" way of life, then the logical conclusion is that they are racist. You can try to argue that cr…

> 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 believe you. To be fair, there are some good things in that article too, it's not all bad; it contains some anecdotes worth hearing, but that doesn't follow that the conclusions are also good.

This is also the same person who cited Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong as inspirations, by the way.[2] Yes, really, that Mao. I genuinely thought this was inserted by a vandal on the Wikipedia article when I encountered it last week, but the source pans out.

I mean, people don't just get these "abolish the police" and "BLM is a Marxist organisation" out of thin air. Granted, there is a lot of bad-faith trollism from Tucker Carlson and similar people, but if your message is so confused, easily misunderstood, and your leadership says things in support of the most extreme interpretations then quite frankly, you have no one else to blame but yourself.

[1]: https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/04/abolition-and-reparatio...

[2]: https://time.com/5171270/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors...

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#296

Post by 6AA4FD »

pedrosbmartins wrote: post #244
xenophonB wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, weirdly this ludicrous standard is never applied to leftist politics, for example suggesting that any criticism of inequality could "escalate" into the Holodomor or the Killing Fields of Cambodia, so therefore its important not to "normalize" such behaviour.

How is that even a valid comparison? It is logical that making fun of people for characteristics related to race could be escalated to more serious racist behavior, and therefore should be discouraged. But where is the logical connection between criticizing inequality and committing genocide?

I think they might be alluding to things like "kill all landlords" which are I suppose jokes for some and simply calls to action for others.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#297

Post by treeman79 »

JPKab wrote: post #277
threatofrain wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seeing good companies get torn to shreds by this campus idiocy reminds me of how insulated academia is from the real world. What does this have to do with academia?

Academia is where this ideology originated. It's where virtually all of the terminology came from. It's also where these employees were taught that collective identity dwarfs individual identity.

Your being downvoted but it’s true.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#298

Post by anon7725 »

dools wrote: post #191
anon7725 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has hints of "reverse racism" and tends to dismiss that racism is an issue...and if it is an issue, racism against white people is the actual and bigger issue. That's closer to the camp of "white supremacist" or at the very least, a common defense used by white supremacist. This is the problem with cultural Marxism / “wokeness”. It’s a sanctified, totalizing ideology that admits zero daylight between “100% agree…

There is no such thing as "cultural marxism", it's a term manufactured by modern libertarians to distract people with a fake culture war while they're robbed blind by corrupt politicians. Like "virtue signalling". It's also a red flag that someone is racist and ignorant, and should be called out in the same way as flat earth, climate denial or any other range of denialist mindsets.

Marxism is a basis for critical theory. The critical theory that made a species jump from academia to the mainstream has its roots in the ideas of Gramsci and Marcuse, among others.

I call it “cultural Marxism” because unlike plain old Marxism, it has relatively little to say about the redistribution of wealth and other economic interests. In this way it’s made itself innocuous to corporate America, which would otherwise mobilize its immune system to reject the ideas outright.

Case in point: I recently sat through some corporate training on privilege that did not, once, mention wealth or economic privilege.

Re: How Basecamp Blew Up

#300

Post by novalis78 »

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

Come to us. First of all it’s Florida and second of all you can say and think what you like. In fact unique points of view are deeply appreciated and widely supported - and engaging contrarian intellectual conversations most welcome.
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