I don't think the "be nice to everyone" is the thing people are annoyed with, rather it's the "you will be canceled if you step out of line even once" that comes along with it.
what's an example here of unfair cancellation that you are thinking about? I feel that most of those who have been "cancelled" have been so because of fairly egregious stuff like sexual assault, clearly racist speech, etc.
The irony being of course, that the current wave of performative anti-woke articles from PG, Zuck et al is based mostly on fear that they'll be cancelled by the incoming administration if they appear to be too kindly disposed to minorities...
I mean, it'd be a remarkable coincidence if firms queuing up to renounce their DEI initiatives and argue that the President's new bestie was doing a great job of promoting free speech were doing so without regard to the imminent inauguration date of a President who's never exactly disguised his loathing of such things and his desire to make life miserable for people he sees as "woke" (or his fondness for recalcitrant critics for that matter). Even PG himself is busy observing (on Twitter) the trend of removing pronouns from profiles. In fairness to PG, unlike Zuckerberg he's not actually rolling back anything he's been doing for most of the past couple of decades, but it'd be a helluva surprise if he'd just forgotten who was in charge when he got suspended from Twitter in his haste to lavish praise on the president's right hand man for doing such a great job of removing censorship from Twitter
The incoming administration has never been unkind to minorities. If they have been unkind to criminals, yes, but minorities, never. If you conflate that with minorities, then that kind of demonstrates who you protect: Not the minorities.
It’s all words anyway. Wokes hate white people with passion, and that’s why they are not getting half the USA against them.
And yet we're not observing a trend of CEOs rushing to talk about crime in their haste to accommodate the new regime, we're seeing them rush to update their moderation guidelines to stress that "gays are freaks" and "immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit" must be understood as valid political commentary and not abuse, delete pronouns from their profiles and shut down their diversity programmes.
You're clearly passionate about social justice. But pretending it's just 'being nice' and everyone who disagrees is evil? That's exactly the kind of oversimplified thinking that stops real progress and actually causes evil.
Movements for social change are messy. They involve hard trade-offs, heated debates about methods, and yeah, sometimes people on 'your side' screw up or take things too far. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
And the history is just wrong - 'stay woke' wasn't forced on anyone. People chose it proudly before it became contentious. You're rewriting history to avoid engaging with actual criticism.
You can fight for what you believe in without pretending you're in a morality play where the good guys are pure and the bad guys twirl their mustaches. Real life is more complicated than that.
You have it backwards. People who had old conservative views were told they were wrong and got upset. So they started to believe they were being targeted and persecuted when in reality, if you count how many went to jail or got fired, it was people where were brave enough, woke enough, to fight for change.
There's much more ideology attached to "wokeness" than just "be nice" and "be respectful", such as the concepts around gender and neurodiversity spectrums.
Just using the word itself evokes immediate reactions from those aligned with particular political "sides". I've formed this opinion after my many, mandatory DEI trainings at work.
I think all good people can agree that being nice and being respectful of people who aren't hurting others is a no-brainer.
Edit: Note that this comment is being downvoted to oblivion and illustrates my point.
There's also a great deal of sanctimony attached in many cases, which is the thing people hate the most in my experience.
It reminds me of when I was getting breakfast with my wife one day, and there was a guy who had just come from some kind of feminist protest. He was wearing a shirt that said (paraphrasing) that the only two reasons to not call yourself a feminist are that you are unaware it just means "treat women like people", or that you're an asshole. He seemed genuinely unaware that the sanctimonious hostility his shirt expressed is a huge reason why people don't call themselves feminists.
"Woke" is like that. I'm quite certain that there are a lot of good people who really do just want to respect everyone. However, there are also a lot of petty jerks who are using an ostensibly good cause to bully people. Unfortunately for the former people, the latter people taint the movement and make it unattractive to those outside it.
I think even the people you would call the most woke hate mandatory DEI training. The idea is fine in theory, there's three main parts that seem to be common to them.
* Here's some genres of people you might not have interacted with in your personal life before that you might run into at work, and here's the broad strokes of how each of those groups would describe themselves and some cultural differences you might want to keep in mind.
* Here's a baby's first introduction to intersectionality and some situations where that lens might be relevant at work.
* Stop sexually harassing your coworkers, Jesus people.
But the implementation is unbelievably patronizing and presented with so much "sensitivity" that the overall experience is an hour of what feels like walking on eggshells. It's exhausting.
Agreed. But while pretty much everyone hates mandatory training, there's a large group of people who's beliefs align closely with that ideology. In other words, it's a real ideology, regardless of what one thinks about it.
My mental model here is to avoid labeling or lumping people into buckets and just forming opinions of them as an individual, for purely selfish reasons (not missing out on learning from that person).
From my perspective as a white person who grew up in very poor black and Latino communities, where we were often the only white family for several blocks, DEI training has been a super weird experience. I now live in an area where white is >90% of the population. I can't quite pin down why, but it feels really patronizing and disingenuous. I find myself often thinking about something that is taught in the training that my friends would find racist or offensive.
This is why I'd prefer they just stuck to kindness and respect. We're all flawed humans. That is our beauty.
I don't understand this wokery-as-politeness argument. Politeness obviously has a place, but if you're trying to solve real social problems while also being unable to discuss the actual problem, because speaking frankly about it is impolite, then clearly is counter-productive if your goal is to solve actual social problems. As far as I can tell, wokery functions as a straight jacket on language that is designed to make only one solution to a given problem (generally the solution that blames white people) even sayable.
I don't think it is politeness, I think its a political power play to control language that sounds nice to first-order-thinking left wing types.
Yikes, you can't attack another user like that on HN, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. We have to ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again.
(I'm not endorsing the parent comment either, but you can't be aggressive like this here, and you've been doing it in more than one place, which is not cool.)
Who are you preventing from replying to those attacking them?
Are you hiding behind your "algorithms"? Who sets those algorithms, people with compassion?
Look at the organization you are "just following orders" for. Your organization is facilitating the Trumpization of America, with its ignorance and promotion of oppression and environmental destruction. And, behind it all, is a sole concern for money, period.
And now PG has come out as a full-blown ignoramus. I guess that's ok for you so long as those checks clear, huh?
You could be positively affecting the world by helping me teach compassion, but there's no class on compassion in the MBA curriculum, and that's the only Bible an YC company can preach, right?
We are all choosing sides, every day, Dan. Don't follow the losers of the world in their selfish, apathetic, and callous worship of money, my friend.
I guess Nazis can just post whatever they want as long as they couch their views in the proper verbiage, huh? There is no civil discourse with Nazis, Dan. There is no tolerating the intolerant; that's a destructive policy. Take a stand for what is right, or stand on the side of the losers. There is no other path.
Now we know why PG has set the algorithms the way y'all have. His loser mentality has enshittified this place, and all his good soldiers have followed in lock-step, haven't you?
I'm defending this site for its intended purpose. That's all.
If you keep breaking the site guidelines, we're going to have to ban you—not because we disagree with your views (I don't track those, nor care what they are) but because you're repeatedly and egregiously breaking the rules.
> I'm defending this site for its intended purpose. That's all.
You could be a positive force for the world, Dan, if you chose to be, but that would require you to become more compassionate and maybe even work for an organization that considers compassion as a motivating force.
> but because you're repeatedly and egregiously breaking the rules.
Thanks for the warning; it's the first anyone's ever told me that I've been a bad boy around here, to my recollection. I've certainly seen many bad folks coming my way, that's for sure.
I'll try to be better, if I continue to hang around here.
> (I don't track those, nor care what they are)
You should, Dan. Traverse my comments, from the first to the last, for all I want is for you and all our fellow human beings to be happy, and I have endeavored to teach all who read my comments how to achieve such happiness.
Remember that PG would've never hired you if you cared about compassion; it almost certainly wasn't a part of your interview questionnaire. He hired you to tow the company line. It is REALLY important which company lines we are towing in this life, Dan. Your inner peace and happiness depends upon it.
I am at your service. I love you, and may peace be with you.
I don't think Boards of Directors and C-Suites of massive, publicly-traded companies operate based on empathy. They pattern-match cultural trends to maximize shareholder value. To assert otherwise is laughably naïve.
My comment suggests that I think introducing inflammatory political issues into the work environment, issues that have a "correct" answer as far as your boss's boss's bosses are concerned, is unethical, corrosive, and counterproductive.
Beyond that, you know virtually nothing about me. But by all means, continue in your presumptions. Let's further accelerate the breakdown of civil discourse, perhaps that's the only way to eventually get back to something approaching respect for differing opinions, no matter how assertively stated.
The problem is that it's a performance. You know who else cries convincingly without meaning it? Actors in movies. Wokeism has equated performance to action. Pretend you care, make it public, and the problem somehow goes away. If you truly care about solving problems, that position basically guarantees that nothing will change.
You can pretend whatever you want, for whatever reason, to justify whatever ideals, attitudes, and behaviors your culture has inculcated in you and you cling to so intensely.
Only compassion can set you free, but it's your human right to choose otherwise. But it's also your responsibility and your responsibility alone as to what you reap from those seeds you've sown like so many butterflies' wingbeats into their effects upon your karma.
