Part of this is that I think that men feel they are walking on egg shells. The kinds of male assertiveness that my wife found attractive when she met me also can leave women who aren't into this assertiveness feeling harassed.
I feel that we need to be clear more about what is "desirable" masculinity it "desirable assertiveness" vs its toxic counterparts. Failure to do this will essentially neuter men over the long term - and it will lead to "men clamming up" or worse, a significant surge in the number of men who "go their own way" be it in the job or at home in their personal life.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/aug/29/men-wom...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/men-are-afraid-to-mentor-f...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellevate/2019/01/09/dear-sir-do...
https://kelainetaylor.medium.com/to-the-men-whose-response-t...
I guess you yourself repeating the same woke quite took away the uniqueness of the idea as it would be articulated by a non privledged individual.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-15/carry-yourself-with-t...
Yes, many time the distinction in the margins between toxic and desirable masculinity is partially based on the attractiveness of the person in question.
For what it's worth - men and women are equally bad in regards to lookism. I think we need to simply start explicitly saying that we shouldn't discriminate because someone is ugly. If RMS were as attractive as Micheal foucault, he wouldn't get in trouble for those age of consent beliefs (foucault, an attractive leftist, famously defended lowering the age of consent)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_...
No one wants to cancel foucault because him and other french post modernists are the intellectual foundation for today's "wokeism"
A lot of the double standard is due to RMS being fat and ugly. No other explanation.
Please omit personal swipes from your HN posts, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I don't mean 'good' and 'bad' absolutely—that's above my pay grade. I just mean good or bad for HN, relative to what we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... If you want to smite enemies or fulminate snarkily, that's your business—just please don't do it on HN. It's not hard to find platforms that welcome that sort of engagement; we're trying for something different on this one.
Edit: this thread has over 1000 comments now; if you want to read more of them, you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918&p=3
This supposed hierarchy of oppression, based on identity characteristics such as race, gender and sexuality, really is the biggest scam going.
Almost all of the oppression we see around us can be explained by wealth disparities, corruption, and abuse of power. Yet, identarians insist on shoehorning everything into their flawed worldview.
The Black Lives Matter movement was a telling example of this - police brutality is indeed an ongoing problem in society, but it doesn't just apply to black people. It's anyone the police feel they can get away with abusing. Just look at how they treat homeless people, drug addicts, and so on, regardless of race.
Another is celebrating people as tokens regardless of their actions. First mixed-race female Vice President of the USA - okay, but what sort of shitty role model is this? Rather reminds me of: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Co90umqUsAAdgQI?format=jpg
We would all do well to be critical of how identity politics is being used to mask the real root causes of oppression in our society. The so-called left wing of politics is the worst for this too, and I say this as a life-long leftist. Why make everything about identity; where has the traditional focus on class gone?
"It Hurt Itself in Its Confusion!"
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/it-hurt-itself-in-its-confusi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender [2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=cisgende...
That's beyond the pale. I've banned this account for reasons explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613795 above, and everywhere else you'll find moderation comments on this site.
Creating accounts to break HN's rules with will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
A much more realistic and likely outcome, and a far less hysterical perspective than yours, is that the needle was way too far one way, now people are learning to cope with it shifting, and if we try to be more empathetic, perhaps getting help when we need to, we can shift it to a better place than it was before.
How do I know this? Because identical dynamics play over and over, change is scary, even if it is for the better, and people have opposed it on similar grounds -- it would lead to absurdities and worst outcomes for everyone involved -- since time immemorial. For example, see some arguments against women suffrage from just over a hundred years ago [1]:
> Because the acquirement of the Parliamentary vote would logically involve admission to Parliament itself, and to all Government offices. It is scarcely possible to imagine a woman being Minister for War, and yet the principles of the Suffragettes involve that and many similar absurdities.
> Because Woman Suffrage is based on the idea of the equality of the sexes, and tends to establish those competitive relations which will destroy chivalrous consideration.
And, of course, women do not want the vote [2]
The belief that we can -- and must -- work tirelessly change the world by, say, allowing humans to fly and even reach other planets, but when it comes to how people should speak to one another, well, that's too difficult to change, there's no point in trying, and if we try then the outcome will obviously be bad, just seems so bizarre.
[1]: https://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1903/09/why-wom...
https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...
"Clamming Up" because of power dynamics is inherent to hierarchy. This is why relationships with co-founders and employees need to be nurtured carefully. It's the same set of dynamics that happen inside a band.
If you always want candid advice, honest feedback, and critical though unpleasant information to flow freely and undistorted, then you must remember that actions speak louder than words. If someone tried to tell you something you really need to hear, though you may not have wanted to hear it, what did you do? How did you react? It's not enough to just say that you're for honesty and openness. It's not enough to say you value someone's opinion. You have to actually do that!
Did you counter-attack? Did you order your underling to never speak of "it" again? Did you use the differential in power to just shut-up and shut-off? If you were asked to give a detailed account of what the other person had to say, would they be satisfied that you gave a full and fair account of what they were trying to convey? Would you even be able to recall such details, or would your account be sketchy and vague?
Paying your employees well and having a great environment is actually a double-edged sword, here. What happens, if one day, your early employee comes to you with something they know you don't want to hear, and you react badly? What if you raise your voice and manage to make them feel threatened. That employee will get the message that, despite your lip-service, you don't want to hear it. What's that employee going to do? It's not too unlikely they will "get the message" and clam up, go with the flow, and play it safe to keep their cushy 6-figure job. The flow of candid information from that employee will drop by a lot!
Now, to bring things back to the semi-political: If just having hierarchy/authority, period, can raise such sticky problems in communication and corporate epistemology, then let me ask this: What effect would granting power to accusations without evidence have? This is not an argument for the blanket elimination of accusations. Rather, it's an argument for the importance of *evidence."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please note these guidelines also:
"Don't be snarky."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Then, no, you're describing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gynophobia
> Gynophobia should not be confused with misogyny, the hatred, contempt for and prejudice against women
Ok. That's sad. Best wishes.
But then, finally, your admitted smugness bothers me, as it reveals a deep lack of empathy for woman and why the culture is necessarily going through these fits and throws.
To what degree is your “live and let live” actually “live and let live or die, it's not my problem”?
> And, of course, women do not want the vote
Please keep this sort of flamebait out of your HN posts. It's guaranteed to make everything worse, and you can make your substantive points without it.
that's the point of identity politics, to take away that focus by distracting and dividing the working class
Is Modern Feminism starting to undermine Itself? | Jess Butcher | TEDxAstonUniversity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIgytWyo_A
Unfortunately, I think those kind of videos do no reach their required target: new age feminists. It doesn't help either that the comments on the video are mostly made by men, who are angry at the current social situation in the anglophone countries.
IMO, these social issues are pretty inconsequential compared to the bigger problems we face: climate change and wealth+income inequality worldwide. I believe that social inequality would drastically improve if we concentrated on those major problems first.
Education is the linchpin, imo. Were we to work backwards from that, our world would radically change. You can't concentrate on education if you have to worry about housing, food, transport, and access to education. So, those should be as cheap as possible for every citizen.
Educators should have amongst the highest paying jobs in the country and competition should be fierce to become one at any level.
With an educated populace, there's no telling what we could achieve. We could think and reason for ourselves instead of listening to pundits. We could actually discuss things instead of scream at each other all the time.
But eh... y'all would rather fund another war on some poor country over oil, support another big corp to underpay people you don't care about, huddle into groups and be belligerent against those your group deems the enemy, vote for people who wield fear as a tool, or just be indifferent to the world around you as long as you're doing fine...
This is a very real issue. It's already gotten to the point where the people behind the movement are hysterically unreasonable and irrational. Literally even feminists who are integral parts of the movement itself aren't safe from their own vitriol.
Below is an TED talk about the story of a activist feminist who had her entire activist career destroyed simply by saying something that the cancel culture disagreed with:
What I hear you saying is that it's already gone to hell, so it doesn't matter what you do. Actually it matters a lot what you do. Every user here needs to abide by the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Bringing up "Jewish Question" is singularly unhelpful and more gratuitous provocation. It seems to me that you're the main person framing this thread as "Woman Question" to begin with, then using that to justify pouring kerosene of your own. That's not cool.
What I've noticed is that users with strong ideological passions tend to describe as "putrid" and "cesspool" and so on, any discussion in which their own ideology isn't imposed as the dominant one. That's understandable, but it's not a realistic demand. HN is a large forum which is as divided on ideological topics as any other large population sample—moreover this population sample is all over the world, which unfortunately makes people far more prone to interpret others' statements as "putrid" without it even dawning on anyone that that's a factor.
Much as I might wish it, we don't have the power to change how divided this community is. All we can do is look for ways to nudge users into having thoughtful discussion despite divisions. Everyone has a different sense of what that might look like, and we can talk about how to do that, but we don't have the power to make people agree.
Well, sure, but then you are displaying a clear and verifyable pattern, and my original point of candor that can't be twisted into sexism remains no? You had to add a separate sexist pattern ("treats men and women differently").
Your point of high level of distrust is appreciated and one of the reasons why I'd never move there (no offense intended, most individual americans I know and read about are lovely people, but this culture of hidden BS is too much for me). But then, this is an issue in general no? Why are people only concerned about women/feminists twisting words against them? Why not christians, or veterans as well? Or men for that point, last I checked the protected group list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group does not specify women, and there are conservative mobs on social media just as much as "woke" ones. So I'm just a bit confused
Elon Musk's advice: Solicit Negative (constructive) feedback.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/08/elon-musks-advice-to-ceos.ht...
Also, Eespecially for young founders and CEOs, they should study and obtain coaching on how to develop and improve their leadership skills.
https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-conf...
It's unfortunately all too easy and common for people to mistake a divided community for a "putrid horror show", dominated by demons [1] or, as the internet likes to call them, "terrible persons", when in reality most people here just have different backgrounds and experiences from one another [2]. I'm not saying that's the only factor—anyone can scan my moderation comments in this thread to find examples to the contrary (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613942). But I still think the HN guidelines are right to say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." ...and I think that if you took that guideline more to heart, you might see the bulk of the thread differently. (I don't mean the long tail of trolls and flames—those are always with us.)
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
this is the way
>Hegelian dialectic, usually presented in a threefold manner, was stated by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus[27] as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis.
One of the best pieces of career advice I have ever taken was from this TED talk: https://youtu.be/KzSAFJBLyn4
The section on Abraham Lincoln. Perceive no slights. It changed the way I approach people at work.
Edit: also, please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post. We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613077.
The Messenger Is the Message: Science Talk podcast, June 2020.
Please don't post flamebait to HN. Nothing good can come of this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: please don't use HN for ideological battle. You've been doing it repeatedly, and it's not what this site is for. We ban accounts that are using HN primarily for this (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), and your account looks close to that line if not over it.
I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613374.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
...applies to articles too.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613456.
Importantly the speaker and listener are not consciously aware of this happening. The net result is that you can say literal/plain thing A and the listener can hear literal/plain thing B.
Speaking to Americans requires a significantly accurate modeling of the listener's mind and expectations to be able to be clearly understood, much much moreso than any other language I have studied or even heard of.
Basically, it is very easy to be totally misunderstood when using plain, literal speech (such as is common in Germany or in Slavic countries).
I've written about it: https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/
That statement does not seem to be accurate: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nordic-count...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613161
I don't think I ever accuse anyone of "mansplaining" because I don't think that's likely to be helpful in remedying the problem. But I do think the use case that men can be oblivious to the stuff women are dealing with and can kind of pick on women and can then act like she's just not trying hard enough or something if she doesn't jump on his suggestion as a brilliant solution is a common enough occurrence that it isn't unreasonable for there to be a word specifically for that pattern.
It's a word useful to kvetch to allies about it happening. It's not a word useful to build bridges, explain to the people doing it why their random unsolicited advice to a woman can be actively harmful, etc.
Edit: And I am not trying to pick a fight with you or something. I do realize the context here is you are probably agreeing with me in some fashion. (Turns out I'm still not perfect and I apologize if this reads as fighty. It's not intended to be.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Com...
Yes but it's like saying humans live for at least one minute which is true but misleading because humans live for about 80 years. Huge timescale issue that exists despite your caveat.
Your second opinion which I respect is not one shared by experts who study gender roles in anthropology. They cite that the reason why women have more power in modern society is not one made by choice but one made by technology. Women today have greater freedom in our societies because they are no longer held back biological weaknesses such as menstruation as modern technology helps assist them in this endeavor. Additionally, modern society is no longer centered around manual labor so women can gain power without resorting to physical strength.
Keep in mind, this is not MY opinion. This is the opinion of the scientific world that exists outside of both the gender cancel culture agenda or the male dominated mens rights activists.
>I do not subscribe to the belief that patriarchy is biological because there is numerous empirical examples of historical matriarchal societies in places such as South America, Asia, Native American Hopi tribe, Celtic society, Germany and Estonia including in the recorded history of my own non-American society.
You can choose what belief you wish to subscribe to, and I respect your choice. However facts are facts:
Among anthropologists of science within academia there is no question all societies have been patriarchal including the one we live in right now. I am well versed in the anthropological studies on this, very very well versed. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy
Scroll to "History and distribution" and read the following quote:
"Most anthropologists hold that there are no known societies that are unambiguously matriarchal.[59][60][61] According to J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page, no true matriarchy is known actually to have existed.[55] Anthropologist Joan Bamberger argued that the historical record contains no primary sources on any society in which women dominated.[62] Anthropologist Donald Brown's list of human cultural universals (viz., features shared by nearly all current human societies) includes men being the "dominant element" in public political affairs,[63] which he asserts is the contemporary opinion of mainstream anthropology.[64] There are some disagreements and possible exceptions. A belief that women's rule preceded men's rule was, according to Haviland, "held by many nineteenth-century intellectuals".[5] The hypothesis survived into the 20th century and was notably advanced in the context of feminism and especially second-wave feminism, but the hypothesis is mostly discredited today, most experts saying that it was never true.[64]"
I took anthropological studies in UCLA and even the female teacher there outright told the classroom that there are no examples of true matriarchal societies. Also be careful about studies promoted by the feminist agenda as cited by the section above, don't let those articles (they are all over google) lead you astray.
There is a lot of false misguided information on the internet about this topic but if you dig deeply or actually study this topic (as I did) in academia you will find the cold hard truth.
Either way you can still subscribe to your belief despite what the scientific literature has found. Science is not always correct, but be aware about whether or not you're subscribing to that belief because of evidence or because of desire.
The same view shared by myself and my fellow 'intersectional-ists'. I haven't heard of anyone aside from 'centrists' and fascists that adopt a different viewpoint? Perhaps there is a subset of fools on breadtube or facebook, sure, but they are vastly outnumbered.
> Almost as if her terrible politics simply didn't matter because of her identity.
Well then your lenses are vastly, vastly different to mine, and do not match up with both those in modern academic circles (Like, literally just read any new literature covering intersectionality and the introduction of it to communism), those on the ground in protests, and those present in progressive/queer groups (like me). It's worth noting that at the moment there is a huge divide between "progressive" communists, and, well, "regressive" communists (For want of better terms). From what I observed from stalking facebook commie groups, most of the latter are still stuck with 100 year old debates -- and while they have a huge amount of theoretical knowledge, they have no practical contributions to any revolutionary movements thusfar. For example, most of the discussion I observed was focused on rehabilitating Stalin's image, whereas most of the 'on the ground' antifacist-aligned folks are of the mind that that isn't really something modern communism should waste it's time on.
I would suggest at least reading some modern intersectional writing, if only to better understand the thing you're arguing against. The basic focus of intersectionality and how the systemic abuse created by late-stage capitalism impacts specific groups differently (The 'intersection' of those groups and the oppression they face), and how movements (even revolutionary) to improve conditions have backfired have been around for at least 60 years if Tony Cliff's 1978 writing "Why Socialists Should Support Gays" (https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1978/08/gays.ht...) is anything to go by -- at least if you will give me the small leeway of temporarily ignoring how controversial Tony Cliff is as a figure in Communism.
If you are in search of one of the progressive communities I talk of, Something Awful has recently (last 5ish years) turned into a very leftist-heavy place, with frequent debate about neoliberalism, capitalism, etc. You will be able to ask questions there and receive answers and engage in productive discussion.
'Disease and Disaster' (Debate and Discussion): https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=4...
And 'C-SPAM' (The politics subforum): https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=2...
Are both good places to talk about this with progressive, mostly-intersectional communists. Just take note a lot of the thread titles are in jest, you should navigate to the last five pages and pick up context as you go (A lot of the threads have been running since 2016!) and espousing neoliberalism in an annoying way is a swift path to a probation :)
This is sort of true. I'll talk about the aspect that is true. What is true is that men are an order of magnitude stronger than women on average. What isn't true is the violence part. Women are actually more violent then men and the reasoning is simple.
It's because men are stronger will do more damage if they get violent so men have a tendency to hold back. I don't know if you dealt with women a lot socially, but when women get frustrated they're more likely to pound you or push you with their pathetic little fists. They often have much less ability to control themselves.
This is supported by statistics: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/women-are-mo... which should be taken with a grain of salt as violence from women against men is highly highly under reported.
The caveat here is that when it comes to actual damage men do far more greater damage, meaning that when a man actually does decide to lash out at a woman the damage is far greater and the crime far more severe. Outside of specific studies the severe crimes are the only ones that are reported. However, make no mistake, within studies that account for this bias, the numbers show women are more likely to be violent. In fact even those "territorial" men you talk about actually literally hold back when there's a woman around. There is no equal treatment here.
>My own experiences with fighting have not given me a fear of men in general, but they have certainly contributed to a caution that I have around certain types of men - in particular, around men who have either an animalistic concern with territoriality and status, a socioeconomic desperation that makes them willing to rob outsiders, or both. I try to steer clear not only of men of this type but also of entire demographics and parts of the world in which they are common.
Have you had much encounters with women? Even in dating and going to the club practically every aspect of their lives is centered around safety and caution. They rarely go out alone. Always with another man friend or with other groups of women (three at least) and when in bars or clubs even women who are strangers are always watching each others backs.
This is despite the very true fact that Men are actually much more likely to be the target of violence from other drunk men then women are when going to bars or clubs. The fear women have is biological and inbuilt as valid defenses for the more savage hunter and gatherer era. It is currently an outmoded standard of behavior that is no longer as relevant in modern society. But biology is biology and we are slaves to our biology.
Additionally it could be that women have these defenses because the consequences are much more severe. While a man is more likely to suffer from a violent attack from other men and women then a woman herself would, if a woman should get unlucky enough to suffer from an attack the consequences are extreme. This would be an argument in favor of your point of view, but still in support of the fact that women behave this way because of biology not reasoning. The biology is just an "reasonable" evolutionary response to the environmental pressure.
The mob mentality itself supports this theory; a genuine effort to solve discrimination would involve respectful communication in an attempt to understand the problem, iron out any misunderstandings and change minds; but this is not what we see - instead we have witch-hunts, partly because the mere appearance of being human towards the "enemy" would cause the rest of the mob to turn on you, but maybe also because there isn't much willingness to actually solve the problem, or maybe even because there wasn't actually a problem if you drill down into the details?
This reminds me of Daryl Davis, a black man who attended KKK rallies in an effort to understand their racist opinions and change their minds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis - that is a genuine effort to solve a problem, which unfortunately wouldn't be possible today because you'd be attacked by the mob for attempting something like this.
> Perhaps, but that all goes away if discrimination is eliminated from our culture.
I'm not sure this will go away; if certain people (or even entire industries) benefit from outrage they will happily find something else to be outraged about.
> We’ve found ways to combat pandemics in ways our ancestors thought impossible. We’ve found ways to travel to the moon. We’ve found ways to communicate instantaneously across the world. Yet imagining such a casual solution to social issues seems to be naïvely optimistic at best, delusional at worst.
The difference is that there is a major upside for solving these problems and little to no downside. I'm not sure whether mob/outrage/SJW culture will ever disappear instead of just digging even deeper for things to be offended about especially when money or virtue is at stake.
>Becca: What are you doing here? I figured they’d have locked you away in the psych ward for good by now.
>Scott: Nope. And what are you doing here? You haven’t killed off all your patients yet?
>Becca: Only person in this hospital I might kill is standing right in front of me.
>Scott: Be careful, I’m armed and dangerous picks up a central line placement practice set menacingly
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/23/friendship-is-counters...
Not only did these kind of conversations make the company a more fun place to work, they also made it easier to speak critically to each other, because our critical feedback didn't seem like a big deal in light of the daily ribbing. There wasn't a lot of corporate BS at that company either--maybe not a coincidence.
I imagine there are other things you could do, like curse frequently, if you wanted to broadcast that words don't easily upset you. But telling jokes seems best if you think of one.
[Though that's not AFAIK intended as a defensive strategy against reputational harm, rather as one against the dangers of lust].
And as this article points out, the zeitgeist of the moment is the presumption of guilt, so any accusation of being an *ist comes with tremendous consequences, and people are understandably fearful of that.
What you're observing that this creates an unfortunate vicious cycle: the fear of persecution for an accidental offense leads to disengagement which disadvantages the very people who the disengagement is meant "not to hurt."
This isn't a new observation.
MLK said: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ... The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation." [1]
I think this is where the extremes of "wokeism" and "social justice" miss the mark. When the mob is rallied to punish and seek vengeance against those who have done wrong, it can become a witch hunt.
To Dr. King the path to victory over oppression was through forgiveness[2].
"Here then is the Christian weapon against social evil. We are to go out with the spirt of forgiveness, heal the hurts, right the wrongs and change society with forgiveness. Of course we don't think this is practical. This is the solution of the race problem."
In the hypermedia era I honestly don't know if calm, civil discourse is possible. It certainly isn't profitable compared to the level of engagement driven by outrage.
But I think if we wanted to take the next major step forward it would be wise to look back at how much progress happened during the Civil Rights era, and specifically to understand how and why the progress was made. Can we imagine applying Dr. King's words today, to seek to understand each other, to identify wrongs done intentionally or unintentionally, and then to forgive each other for past mistakes so we can do better going forward?
[1]: https://mlk.wsu.edu/about-dr-king/famous-quotes/ [2]: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/mea...
Most recent example outside of Reddit subs catering to neo-feminists that I can recall is this one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/m7f4ln...
Not the literal exact quote, but a fine example of a story about, somebody treated the new hire intern disrespectfully, where the comments go in that direction. Oh wait, it was a woman? Well it definitely must be sexism! Downvote anyone who expresses doubt. It's not like men ever get disrespected and told to sit down and shut up in roles like new hire intern.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. That's the last thing we need on top of the flamewar we already have here.
It is a very common criticism of the Australian constitution that it lacks anything comparable to a "Bill of Rights". It is not just that it doesn't have a section by that title, it is that the content is largely missing. The Australian constitution is largely lacking protections for individual rights.
Australia had a referendum in 1988 to add a Bill of Rights to its constitution. It failed by a 69-31 margin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Australian_referendum#Rig...
"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"
It seems to me this can defuse some communication issues between people too
A coworker of mine once referred to Australia as "that policed state." I guess that's why.
something the High Court has read into the constitution through its case law
Have you just given a complete accounting of that? Are you saying that no principles from the Magna Carta come down to you through Australia's legal heritage in the commonwealth?
Do you, or do you not have rights as an Australian? Do you, or do you not enjoy the benefits of rule of law? Do you have protected property rights? Can you reliably conduct business? Do you or do you not have rights?
You try and weasel out of this, with your use of the qualifiers "establishment" and "entrenched."
Well, if your position is that you don't actually have rights, that the government can take those things away from you on a whim, then you've lost your argument, because that, right there, is what is so great about the US Constitution. There are certain things the government is not allowed to do to us, which guarantees our freedom. Is it perfect? No, but it gives us a fighting chance.
On the other hand, if the case law basically amounts to your having rights, then your argument in the thread above also falls apart, because then Australia has the same things in principle that the US Constitution has.
So which is it? (Hey, I'll also accept a nuanced alternative between!)
I would feel sorry for you, if in principle, you do not have actual rights, and the government could play whatever games it wanted with you. That's basically the situation in China. (My wife is from Fujian, so I have a pretty nuanced view of the Chinese system.) And yeah, the US isn't perfect.
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
But here, we at least have a fighting chance. Just by existing in that state, the United States keeps the world as a whole from sliding further towards tyranny. IMHO.
(Another point of history: When Hitler took power in Weimar Germany, the Nazis already had most of the legal framework for totalitarian rule in the laws as written. As it was, all of the laws touching on human rights had an out for the government, in case of emergencies. I hope you Australians aren't in that situation. It's not as if we in the US are completely free from shenanigans like that, as the Korematsu ruling illustrates. Though some of the current justices have said they'd do something about it, if they got the chance.)
https://inconvenientconsiderations.blogspot.com/2021/03/hero...
And in practice all amendments are proposed by Congress, and Congress always knows what amendments are already pending, and should be able to foresee any potential "merge conflicts" and address them. You can always use conditional patch instructions: "Replace section A with B; however, if amendment C has entered into force before this amendment, instead replace section A with D". There are other tricks too, like one proposed amendment inserts section 29A and the next inserts section 29B, and maybe if the first one never gets ratified but the second one does you end up with a section 29B without there ever being a section 29A.
(Technically there is a process where a convention proposes amendments independently of Congress – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendmen... – but it has never been used, and who knows if it ever will be. Anyway, the same point applies to such a convention – it knows what amendments are already pending so it can write its proposed amendments to include solutions to any merge conflicts)
I think the real explanation – the US constitution is really old, a late 18th century document, before a lot of the contemporary English-language culture around maintaining legislation had developed. And now it is the way it is, and nobody wants to change it. But if they started again tomorrow it is unlikely they'd organise the amendments in the same way. And a lot of US state constitutions are newer, and they are maintained in the more usual manner precisely because they were adopted after the usual manner was invented.
not OP but the silence is a feature that allows you to actively listen[1] which is impossible when trying to come up with an answer while the other person still speaks.
This reminded me of this infamous bit from Yes, Minister, and although it's not actually entirely an example of this, it's too good not to share now i've found it:
Sir Frederick: There are four words to be included in a proposal if you want it thrown out.
Sir Humphrey: Complicated. Lengthy. Expensive. Controversial. And if you want to be really sure that the Minister doesn't accept it, you must say the decision is "courageous".
Bernard: And that's worse than "controversial"?
Sir Humphrey: Oh, yes! "Controversial" only means "this will lose you votes". "Courageous" means "this will lose you the election"!
https://www.ruetir.com/2021/03/29/writer-says-philosopher-mi...
Anyway here are some references:
https://fortune.com/2015/12/10/elizabeth-holmes-sexism-thera...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elizab...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahart/2019/03/31/womens-his... (mainly a summary with links to other articles)
There is a reason america is number 1 in confidence, but ranked 25th in math and 21st in science out of the top 30 developed countries.
Here's a link to the website for The Red Pill, a documentary by a feminist who talked to men's rights activists. You may not agree with the subjects of the documentary, but the perspective is interesting, and was interesting to the feminist filmmaker who created it.
I guarantee whoever flagged me for recommending it did not watch it himself (yes, it was a dude)
