In the long run I think realizations like the authors are healthy ones.
PG is not a hero. He's just a guy. A guy who entered into business transactions with a number of people, many of whom benefitted greatly (as did Paul himself). I'm not saying any of that as a negative! Just that we have a habit of attributing superhuman characteristics to folks (Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize comes to mind) and ending up disappointed.
I'm not an affected group by any means but I still share the disappointment in the world we see today vs the possibilities I felt tech would allow when I was younger. The tech CEOs I previously viewed as visionaries now just look like a new generation of socially regressive robber barons. I wanted to be one of those CEOs, these days I'm still not quite sure what I want to be. My only consolation is knowing that I'm seeing the world more accurately than I once did.
> socially regressive robber barons
At least we got some good universities (and a somewhat functional transcontinental rail system) out of the 19th century iteration.
> In 1975 the student body of Stanford University voted to use "Robber Barons" as the nickname for their sports teams. However, school administrators disallowed it, saying it was disrespectful to the school's founder, Leland Stanford [1]
It's a shame that the school's administrators (perhaps fearing the wrath of alumni and donors) were so humorless – "Stealin' Landford" would have been a highly entertaining mascot, and one oddly appropriate for the gridiron.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
And 2509 libraries.
Indeed – Carnegie Libraries may be one of the best results.
I would like to see our modern robber barons and philanthropists (and society in general) put some effort into creating a usable digital library system; we actually have things like Google Books, which scanned many university collections, but it will likely remain unusable as an actual digital library unless some sort of copyright reform can be enacted.
these thing will come, after it's too late.
robber Barons also destroyed nature and communities. only in their old age they tried to be remembered by universities and libraries.
only question is if musk and Zuckerberg will build their 2080 ouvres still in the USA or elsewhere. remember most Barrons made their fortunes living in the North East and ended up on the West. the world is more global today. the Musk University might as well end up in Shenzhen.
Yeah.
Other than the ability to search the worlds knowledge at our fingertips, having a 1990s supercomputer in our pocket, being able to video call most people in the developed world, having fairly cheap usable computers for most people in the developed world, having high speed internet available around the world, being able to discuss things online with people all over the world, being able to play incredible computer games and having the cost of launching something in space reduced by a factor of about ten have have we got out of having a few hundred billionaires ?
Just think though, some of them might disagree with some our of politics.
The internet was a government project. It's laughable to even imagine that if these billionaires didn't exist then nobody else would have invented video chat...
It's not the invention it's the delivery.
Consumer goods are delivered by businesses. Delivering new, high tech ones is hard.
> At least we got some good universities out of the 19th century iteration.
You mean the ones that turned around and produced the current market fundamentalist and elite-run culture we have today?
What a coincidence.
And the modern generation of tech industrialists? Probably not a coincidence either.
Though technically universities are more than just their endowments, business schools, engineering schools, sports teams, etc. They often have pretty good libraries, for example. Many universities also provide a variety of educational and course materials for free over the internet. Some train physicians and operate hospitals. And many universities have at least some minimal diversity of opinion on politics and policies.
The idea that elite universities produce elite university graduates is probably not controversial, and many of them were founded with the idea of producing "leaders", which they have arguably done.
> The idea that elite universities produce elite university graduates is probably not controversial…
Isn’t it?
No, it's a statement of fact, akin to "universities produce graduates".
The classic Cantrill bit about not anthropormphizing Larry Ellison applies to a lot of tech CEOs.
Thing is Larry Ellison doesn't write blog posts acting like he's a philosopher. Some tech CEOs really position themselves as arbiters of culture and it just feels more and more like trying to transfer their tech/business positioning into a cultural one. I do not like it!
This is it, this is the best comment.
They’re all a bunch of aspiring lawnmowers, some of them just try to ride whatever the latest wave of popular opinion is to cynically accumulate some social currency.
>My only consolation is knowing that I'm seeing the world more accurately than I used to.
also known as growing older ;-)
That might be true, for a while. But I bet many of us have parents that are old enough that are, in uncontroversial, non-political ways, losing their ability to view the world accurately. It's not all that easy to convince them that yes, they are in cognitive decline, and we are doing their best to consider how the version of themselves 20 years before would like us to tackle the decline.
Even in less obvious cases that don't involve old age, we often call something growth, when we should just say change. Sometimes we are all just more set our ways. Others, our "learning" is just abandoning principles so that we can follow random emotional fancies. Knowing when we are actually seeing the world more accurately, instead of being wrong in a different way, is quite challenging. We all want to think we are getting better, which is precisely whi we are blind to the ways in which we aren't. The convenient story often defeats what is actually true, but inconvenient.
For sure. I almost included something in my comment about "I guess this is what getting old is like", losing your idealism as you age. But equally, maybe not. If I'd grown up in, I dunno the 60s? I would have witnessed enormous leaps in technological possibility and enormous increases in standards of living, personal freedoms, yadda yadda. In my youth it felt like there was a viable future where tech enabled radical positive changes in society. Instead we concentrated wealth at the top of society at historically unprecedented levels.
I wouldn't call it "losing my idealism," but, rather "understanding that everything is a lot more complex than my simple young mind could deal with."
I'm probably more "idealistic" than I have ever been; it's just that I no longer have the silly "Let's just do this one simple thing" attitude. I've just found that getting places is always a lot more difficult than we think. Usually, it's people, and all their messy personal issues, that gum up the works.
The good news is, is that I am actually accomplishing more than I did, when I was younger. I'm devoting less energy, and it is often more frustrating, but shit gets done. A big reason, is that I understand myself, and the people around me, a lot better than I used to. They are no longer "NPCs" in my Game of Life.
As to the article, I seriously feel for the author, but I am not exactly in their shoes. I don't have anything against them, but their cause is not my cause. I don't have a dog in this race. I have nothing at all against trans folks. Many of my friends are varying types of LGBTQI+ folks. If I'm not going to bed with them, then who they love, and what they do, when I'm not around, isn't my concern. I'd usually like them to be happy, and support their choices, as long as they don't interfere with my life. I'm even willing to go out of my way, in some cases, to support them (that's what friends do).
The one thing that is almost guaranteed to make our cause to go floop, is insisting that everyone else is either with us, or against us. This is especially annoying, when our cause is important to only a small minority of stakeholders.
For some reason, almost everyone in our life ends up in the "against" column, and many of them started as people that actually supported us, but weren't willing to go much farther than that. So now, they are actively working against us, as we declared them to be "enemy combatants." The "woke" stuff caused exactly this reaction. It's not just left-leaning stuff, either. Activists of every stripe, do the same thing, and then act all puzzled, as to why everyone seems to be against them.
As Dr. Phil might say, "So...how's that working out for you?"
> The good news is, is that I am actually accomplishing more than I did, when I was younger.
How are you making that happen?
This is an honest question.
As I've gotten older, and developed a deeper understanding of the intractability of the world's problems, this change in perspective has cratered my motivation. It was one thing to give my all toward what seemed like it mattered, back when the scope for possible change still appeared to be great enough that one could imagine living in a better world: but knowing now that no matter what I do it's just going to be more of the same old bullshit, with maybe - at best, and this unlikely - one or another of the rougher edges on the great, awful machine of exploitation and suffering which powers our civilization slightly filed down, so that maybe a couple of people here and there don't get hurt quite as badly as they otherwise might have, while the core of the process continues crushing the life and beauty out of the world, unchanged... it's difficult to muster up any real energy to do anything about it. I still go through the motions, when it seems like I must, for conscience's sake; but I don't believe in it anymore. The source of my past effort is all gone.
I miss that past self, but I can't imagine how to believe that any possible accomplishment would actually matter anymore, enough to justify putting my back into it. What's your secret?
> The one thing that is almost guaranteed to make our cause to go floop, is insisting that everyone else is either with us, or against us. This is especially annoying, when our cause is important to only a small minority of stakeholders.
Masterfully said, I'd love this to be the pull quote here.
"The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor."
- Ronald Reagan, 1972
There are a lot of ways of being supportive without being like a full blown activist.
I get that there are some 'purity test' type people out there, and they're annoying, but they're a small minority in most things.
The real trouble starts when regular people allow the "purity test" type people to have any sort of power or influence instead of laughing and ignoring them like we should. This can result in a destructive purity spiral, even over seemingly trivial issues.
https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the US government coming after people because of who they are is a lot more worrying than some knitters in terms of "people getting access to power".
Yeah. I'm clinging to the hope the hacker revolution might not be over just yet :P
"I saw a dead head sticker on a Cadillac."
"His hair was perfect"
At the end of the essay he says "I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015" and my thought was, yea but YC is biased towards college kids. And then I saw your comment and I think something clicked for me. But maybe the ignorance and pliability of youth really is required to make the crazy bet on the startup dream.
The youth has energy and are naive and will take a bad deal. They will work hard while others will make money off their work. Also, the author is not a man.
> pliability of youth
Not entirely dissimilar to the exploitation of eg college athletes.
She. She says she prefers to go by she or they in her essay.
I feel like the best advice is to take the ideas, even principles you like from folks and run with that. That's it.
I still like a lot of what Steve Jobs had to say at times. I do not pretend to know what he was like IRL or if I would even like him ... doesn't matter.
Truth be told folks who take those ideas and principles from others and not carry the weight of those folks as idols, might even do better with them.
I dunno about even that. Forgive my example (though I love bringing it up, since so few people seemed to have grokked it in the time since initial release): in the video game Bioshock: Infinite, one of the later levels sees you transported into the far future of 1984. The game's setting, a flying city named Columbia, which was characterized by its almost cartoonish levels of capital-A capital-P American Patriotism, had featured in its original Gilded Age incarnation many of the ills of turn-of-the-century American society, including racism, an exploited working class, religion-driven insularity, and a predilection for violence. However, it had also presented an enthusiasm for the new and curious, an ambition for high living standards, and other cultural accoutrements that are usually associated with forward-thinking societies.
By this late-game level, however, the city has descended into dystopia. Why? Well, a three-quarter century game of telephone. The ideals of the city's original founder, already imperfect, were further transmitted imperfectly to his successor and her charges, whose personal traumas further warped their interpretation of Columbia's intended values, and the actions taken in their name. That repentant successor, having lost control of the city's populace to a revolutionary fever, sends you back to the past just as Columbia's weapons begin to level New York City (a caricature of America destroying its real-life historical "center").
It's a metaphor, of course.
It's easy for the soul of an idea to get lost in translation. It's easy for principles of one era to be an ill fit for another. It's easy for the original ideas and principles to be fundamentally flawed in ways that no one could or was willing to admit to.
"Running with it" can be dangerous. (Ask us how well Cold War politicking has worked out for us post-9/11.)
I think, at all turns, you must be asking yourself why you're doing what you're doing, and if it's actually effective. If it's actually good. I don't know that Jobs ever predicted that the bicycle for the mind would be beholden to OTA updates or have a commensurate attack surface exposure, but we have to deal with that reality, regardless.
> I'm not an affected group by any means but I still share the disappointment in the world we see today vs the possibilities I felt tech would allow when I was younger. The tech CEOs I previously viewed as visionaries now just look like a new generation of socially regressive robber barons. I wanted to be one of those CEOs, these days I'm still not quite sure what I want to be.
Upvoted because I couldn't describe better how I feel if I tried. There were so many of these tech leaders who I looked at with such awe, and a lot of it was because they did have a set of skills that I didn't and that I really envied (namely an incredible perseverance, amount of energy, and ability to thrive under pressure, while I was often the reverse). So it's hard to overstate how disappointed I am with people (and really, myself for idolizing them) whom I used to look at with such admiration, who now I often look at with something that varies between dissatisfaction and disgust.
But I realized 2 important things: the same qualities that allowed these leaders to get ahead also figures in to why I don't like them now. That is, if you care too much about other people and what they think, it will be paralyzing in the tech/startup world - you do have to "break some eggs" when you're doing big things or trying to make changes. At the same time, this empathy deficit is a fundamental reason I think of a lot of these guys and gals (it's usually guys but not always, e.g. Carly Fiorina) as high school-level douchebags now. Second, it's allowed me to have a higher, more compassionate vision of myself. I used to feel bad that I wasn't as "successful" as I wanted to be, and while I do have some regrets, I'd much rather be someone who cares deeply about my friends and family and really wants to do some good in the world, as opposed to someone I see as just trying to vacuum up power and money under the false guise of "changing the world".
I think the issue is not being disappointed, it's being scared. Because PG yields influence. OP describes the mechanism by which PGs words can create a dangerous world for them, personally. Yes they are disappointed, but mainly afraid.
The very powerful just affirmed a reversal of "wokeness" this may become performative just as much as their acceptance of the "other" became performative by their admirers and corporate copycats. This will result in tangible harm to people. I think OP did a great job in explaining this.
sclerosis happens with time
> Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize comes to mind
Ha well that a particular bad joke.
Most are not so egregious.
> He's just a guy. A guy who entered into business transactions with a number of people
Unfortunately, that's not true. He is also a well-read and influential essayist. He wields power and influence through his words as well as his money.
He also frames himself, accurately I believe, with his essays and the enabling-of-others nature of his successive accomplishments, as someone who genuinely values winning by helping others win.
But frustration can over simplify issues for all of us, at some point.
And power dulls sensitivity to those with less of it.
Not mutually exclusive.
The word "just" in the GP implies that the author did intend for them to be mutually exclusive.
No, the word "just" in "He's not a hero. He's just a guy" indicates that he's not a hero. "Just" applies to the "just a guy" part, not to the "entered business transactions" part.
In conversational English, the phrase "He's just a guy" carries an idiomatic meaning along the lines of, "This person is no different from anyone else. He has no special power or influence or insight." And that might be true with respect to insight, but it is clearly not true with respect to power and influence. And that is why, when PG says something tone-deaf, it can hurt more than when some rando does it.
I agree in general, but not in this specific case. "He's not a hero. He's just a guy" makes it such that "he's just a guy" is applying specifically to the "he's not a hero" bit. I didn't take it as anything more than that, and I don't think the author intended it to mean they believe Graham is just an average person with an average amount of money, power, or influence.
Is he well-read? His essay on the origins of wokeness was pure vibes, with hardly any historical accuracy or understanding of sociology. Many here on HN explained it as him not being well-read.
I assume OP meant that pg is read by many people.
Yes, exactly. (Maybe I should have said "widely read".)
Does this matter if the "vibe" is correct?
Let's all just take a moment to remember that today is inauguration day.
Even if your essays win you a Nobel price (Paul Grahams certainly didn't) the writer isn't protected from becoming a bullshit-dispenser.
This is why I respect authors that publish a consistent level of quality more than those who hit and miss as if they were throwing darts at a map. And the stuff I have read from Paul Graham is definitly not in the former category.
I don't feel he is intellectually honest, either with himself (bad) or with his readers (worse). But if the past decade of the Internet has shown anything, it is that honesty and consistency isn't required to get insecure people to follow you blindly.
Would love to hear a few of the consistently-high-quality writers you're thinking about.
I have a pet theory that volume is required for quality, but would love to be wrong so that I can feel less bad about how much I publish!
it is that honesty and consistency isn't required to get insecure people to follow you blindly.
I’m going to use this. Well stated.
I have enjoyed most of Paul Graham's essays, and even been slightly influenced by a few of them, but let's not overstate his influence. We're in a real echo chamber here. Outside of a tiny tech industry bubble no one in positions of power reads those essays and they have virtually zero influence.
Sure, but at this point, YC is a pretty big echo chamber. And for an individual inside the echo chamber, Paul's words can hurt more than most.
PG is not a hero. He's just a guy.
The downgrading of exceptional individuals like PG to mediocrities is no healthier than placing them on pedestals.
>The downgrading of exceptional individuals like PG to mediocrities is no healthier than placing them on pedestals.
Recognizing that we're all just people is certainly healthier than placing people on pedestals.
It's obvious he's a person, the parent comment implies that's the extent of his achievements.
I don't think that extent of achievements equals heroism. History is filled with enormously productive people we judge very poorly for theirs.
Great, cohesive, and clear essay! Hear hear.
One thing that I think is underappreciated in our current times, that gets lost on both the left and the right sides -- an individual is more important than their identity.
- A specific trans person can also be an asshole.
- A specific white man can also be a saint.
Extremists on both political sides will scream about the reasons one or the other of those statements is wrong, but doing so lumps all possible individuals of an identity into a "them" category to which blanket statements, positive or negative, can be applied.
That reductionism feels incredibly insulting to our shared, innate humanity.
Are there all kinds of subconscious and societal biases that seriously influence our perceptions of others on the basis of their identity? Sure!
But it doesn't change the goal of treating the person standing in front of you, first and foremost and always, as an individual person.
Be curious. Be courteous and respectful. Be a normal, nice goddamn human to human across the table from you.
(And maybe, if you feel so inclined, have some compassion about what they did to get to that table)
Be curious. Be courteous and respectful. Be a normal, nice goddamn human to human across the table from you.
In general I wholeheartedly agree. But if the person in front of you has done or advocated for things that cause harm or is themself a horrible person then I disagree.
> But if the person in front of you has done or advocated for things that cause harm or is themself a horrible person then I disagree.
the current conflict in the middle east shows why this doesn't work in the long run.
despite what a generation that grew up consuming Marvel films was led to believe, not every conflict is a clearly defined superhero-vs-supervillain, good-vs-evil affair. eventually, you will be the one who, according to some, is advocating for things that cause harm and is considered a horrible person.
Very underrated comment. Right and wrong are largely a function of culture, not universal law.
I dunno man.. When someone advocates for treating another person as "not human" or wants to deny them basic human rights, that's universally wrong in my book.
I won't argue that, but there are cultures out there that disagree - so how can it be universal?
What "culture" says it's okay to treat humans as if they are animals?
dehumanization of the other side is one of the most used tools of war propaganda of all sides. Just look at people in the west joking about orcs
But if someone acts inhuman then it’s justified. Russia’s war crimes are well documented and they started the war. When you are the baddies then expect to be called so.
You're still in the goodies-vs-baddies mindset. Western media pushes people into that way of thinking but it's the Marvel level view and is wrong. Also, look at all the people who think Russia is the baddies for starting that war, but Israel is the baddies despite not starting its war. That's an arbitrary standard people invented to justify their simply goodie-baddie view. If you apply a different standard to every war, then it's not really a standard, is it?
It’s mostly about willful acts of violence against innocents. This might be a nuance that is too subtle though. Bad acts and bad actors should be called out. Russia is the bad actor in the Ukrainian invasion. Hamas and IDF are bad actors in their conflict.
Ukraine has also bombed civilians and engages in random/statistical attacks against Russian cities - technically a war crime. We can even stretch out the definition of innocents to include Russians or North Koreans that are forced to fight and have no options. Should Ukraine surrender and let the Russians take over? Clearly the path of least violence against innocents on both sides? All I'm saying is things aren't as clear/simple as you try to present them.
Sometimes violence is unavoidable and often it will impact innocents as well.
I agree bad acts need to be called out but you're casting too wide of a net and that just leads to a loss of clarity/nuance. Is there any war action that doesn't fall under "willful acts of violence against innocents"? Are we talking about "collateral" damage? Are we talking about the Geneva Convention?
Why is Russia a bad actor? Because they invaded? They claim to have legitimate reasons, security concerns, treatment of ethnic Russians or separatists in Ukraine? What if we side with them on the legitimacy of starting the war, does that change anything?
Can you provide specific evidence that Ukraine is intentionally targeting civilians, and not (for instance) flying a drone that gets affected by GPS jamming and hits a building unintentionally?
If you know the Russians are jamming GPS then what's the difference at this point?
There are some examples here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_in_Russia_during_the_R...
or how about:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/18/russia-says-uk...
Just to be clear I'm not claiming the Russians are the good guys and the Ukranians are the bad guys. I'm just pointing out it's not as simple as someone did something bad in a war. You need to look at the totality of evidence and circumstances, challenge your own viewpoints and listen to people arguing the opposite of what you think, reach some conclusions and always be open to adjust to new evidence. Be aware of who is trying to manipulate you and why, what are the biases of the various sources of information etc. Again not that I think Russia are the good guys but things are never black and white. The west did meddle in Ukraine which in my world view is a good thing but unsurprisingly Putin perceived as aggression/attack on Russia's sphere of influence. To me it boils down to Putin being a force against western values that I'm aligned with.
> If you know the Russians are jamming GPS then what's the difference at this point?
Intent?
By the way, one could just as well argue that Russia is putting its civilians in harm’s way by jamming GPS and causing drones to strike off-target.
>If you know the Russians are jamming GPS then what's the difference at this point?
"Why even bother if the chance of success is less than 100%"
Ukrainian attacks are very frequently successful despite GPS jamming and air defense. And vice versa.
>Just to be clear I'm not claiming the Russians are the good guys and the Ukranians are the bad guys. I'm just pointing out it's not as simple as someone did something bad in a war.
I have yet to see any videos of Ukrainian soldiers filming themselves laughing while using a knife to slowly decapitate a live prisoner. Or cut their balls off. Or put their decapitated heads on spikes. Or execute a dozen Russian POWs at a time
Ukrainian TV channels don't expound on the need to kill "as many as 2 million civilians" to denazify their opponent the way that Russian TV does fairly regularly. I've not seen any Ukrainians wave around the skull of a Russian killed in Russia live on stage at a metal concert.
But then everyone is a bad actor. All the countries supplying arms to Ukraine are perpetuating the war and causing more deaths, so they're bad actors. As is Ukraine itself of course. You can't actually define that in way that has any use. It's ultimately just whatever your cultural influences led you to believe.
People should just be honest and admit they're nationalists, other kinds of ideologists, or just trying to fit in when it comes to opinions about war, because that's really all it is. If it was really unambiguous who was a bad actor, it wouldn't be a war in the first place because everyone would agree.
I think it makes much more sense, and is more productive, to reason about good and bad acts, than people.
Especially with regard to conglomerates of people, like whole nations, or whole governments. Having said that, some people and some groups do fall heavily on one side or the other. But most groups are a dynamic mix of players and situations, not good or bad in any rational or stable way.
Wait are we still in the thread discussing that it's childish to call one side baddies?
It’s not childish to call bad people bad.
But that's still too simplistic. It's certainly not fair to say that every single Russian (or non-Russian!) soldier who is or has been in Ukraine is a "baddie". Some are trapped by their circumstances to fight in a war they don't believe in and don't agree with.
It's easy to say, "well then they should refuse to fight", but you are not that person, and you don't know their struggles or what they feel they are capable of doing.
I think it's reasonable to say that Putin and his war-mongering crones are baddies, but you just said "Russia" and "they started the war". Lumping all people together like that is how we dehumanize people and fail to find common ground that can improve everyone's situation.
OK, but in practice what sort of common ground do you think we can find here? Because it sure seems like the only possible solution is to give Ukraine enough advanced weapons to exterminate all the orcs. If you have a feasible alternative then I'm sure we'd all love to hear it. The real world is an ugly place and sometimes there is no win-win solution.
Are we solving the Russian-Ukraine war in this thread? ;)
- Realistically no amount of weapons the west supplies Ukraine is going to enable them to push the Russians out of Ukraine.
- Putin doesn't seem to care about the number of Russians lost in this war.
- Direct involvement by western armies could lead to a nuclear escalation. NATO could easily push Russia out of Ukraine in a conventional war. Too big of a gamble.
- This is just part of a larger geopolitical struggle between the different powers. Russia. China. India.
We don't really know what Putin wants here but if some sort of end to the war can be negotiated that includes territorial adjustments in Ukraine I think that's the best win the west can hope for right now. The cold war wasn't won on the battlefield, it was won mostly economically. Doubling down right now on a military solution in Ukraine doesn't feel like the right path forward. Stopping the hot war and switching to a colder war is probably the path of least pain for everyone. Even if it seems like a temporary win for Putin. If the west helped Ukraine more in the early days maybe we'd have a different outcome but the west made some bad choices and here we are.
That said if Putin wants to keep fighting then the war will continue. I don't think he does but who knows.
My take anyways.
> Realistically no amount of weapons the west supplies Ukraine is going to enable them to push the Russians out of Ukraine.
OK, general. I wasn’t aware of your military credentials. Russia is about 12 months away from completely exhausting all of its Soviet stockpiles of (tens of thousands of) vehicles and artillery, and their war economy is already unable to sustain production at replacement rates.
On the contrary, it’s only a matter of time.
Source? I thought it was the west that couldn't ramp up and is running out of stockpiles. I'll admit I'm an armchair general but I did serve so I have at least some minimal idea of what war looks like.
EDIT: Also not clear how long the US is going to keep supporting Ukraine now that Trump is in power so that's another factor.
>I thought it was the west that couldn't ramp up and is running out of stockpiles.
It's worth pointing out that Russia's "production" claims generally include refurbishment. When they say they produced 4 million artillery shells, that sometimes means they produced 400,000 artillery shells and refurbished 3.6 million artillery shells from deep storage.
I hope that the Trump administration will continue supporting Ukraine and not try to force them into an unfavorable temporary peace settlement, but the US isn't essential. Other NATO and EU countries are fully capable of keeping Ukraine in the fight, if they want to make it a priority. They might have to cut back some of their social spending and agricultural subsidies to afford it.
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...
Russia will never completely run out of materiel, but they have already exhausted most of their stockpiles of good stuff. At this point they've been reduced to using refurbished armored vehicles built in the 1950s and modified civilian cars along parts of the front.
https://www.youtube.com/@CovertCabal/videos
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/01/19/russias-btr...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/12/24/a-pink-comp...
You can track Russia’s stockpiles through open source satellite imagery, here’s a recent video overview: https://youtu.be/TzR8BacYS6U
Ukraine benefits from being on defense, as the attrition rates are significantly in their favor. I’m not sure what will happen after Trump does whatever it is he’s going to do, but it is clear that Russia’s current trajectory is not sustainable beyond a year or so
I’m worrying that one can’t win an US election without the support of morons and bigots. You don’t need to get their vote on the basis of those qualities, but you can’t say “leaders should be smart” or “bigotry is bad.”
It’s pretty hard to stand on principle when those principles aren’t broadly shared anymore, unless you are okay with being a principled minority.
You're already doing it.
There are legitimate arguments on both sides of these issues.
Couching the Outgroup's opinion on X as "erasing" or "killing" or "dehumanising" just precludes understanding.
Religious conservatives do this with abortion for instance. Is it constructive to say that Freedom of Choice advocates actually "support murdering babies"? Does it help, or is it just in-group signalling?
> Right and wrong are largely a function of culture, not universal law.
Sure, but then you're handwaving away questions about why cultures align along similar axioms.
> Sure, but then you're handwaving away questions about why cultures align along similar axioms.
there's a lot of reasons, but it doesn't make someone with a different opinion due to their culture a horrible person and not worthy of respect.
as a concrete example, let's take gay marriage. on a site like HN, i expect people here to be supportive. on the other hand, the vast majority of Africa, the Muslim world, and Asia do not support support it. according to gedpeck, nearly everyone in Africa and Asia, and every single practicing Muslim, is a horrible person... which sounds pretty bad when it's phrased that way, doesn't it?
according to gedpeck, nearly everyone in Africa and Asia, and every single practicing Muslim, is a horrible person...
I said no such thing.
if you don't think you said that, you're not listening to yourself.
Care to point out where I said this or implied this? I’m opposed to gay marriage.
EDIT: I’m not really opposed to gay marriage. But I never said anything about my views on gay marriage or anything inconsistent with the view that gay marriage is wrong.
EDIT: I don’t consider people who oppose gay marriage to be bad people. I consider people who support and vote for a known felon, rapist, theif, and bribe taker to be terrible.
Do they? Different cultures have widely different axioms. E.g. compare Islam and Christianity. Not to begin with cultures far away geographically from each other.
Most definitely. Each person decides for themselves where the lines are drawn.
It only “doesn’t work” if your goal is to appear morally impeccable to everyone.
If instead of this worrying you
> you will be the one who, according to some, is advocating for things that cause harm and is considered a horrible person.
you have a set of morals that centers something more or different than theoretical other people’s opinions, your example of the current “conflict in the Middle East” is still a good example just not for the reason you stated. It is a perfectly valid ethical position to think that genocide is bad and that people that advocate for genocide are also bad. To pivot to “actually the Really Bad Thing would be if you said that and someone somewhere disagreed with you” is weird and hollow.
“The truly wise know that everything is morally equivalent, except for the pursuit of unbounded approval which is Good for some reason, and believing otherwise is the same thing as getting your morals from comic book movies” isn’t a coherent or defensible moral position. The Marvel movie comparison is a thought terminating cliche.
> It is a perfectly valid ethical position to think that genocide is bad and that people that advocate for genocide are also bad. To pivot to “actually the Really Bad Thing would be if you said that and someone somewhere disagreed with you” is weird and hollow.
to clarify, are you saying that Israel carpet bombing Gaza and killing many Palestinians is bad, or are you saying that Hamas being allowed to murder Israeli civilians without Israel being permitted to defend itself is bad?
"genocide is bad" is the Marvel-brained zoomer reductionist good-vs-evil take. it's easy to take the moral high ground when you don't actually take a stance on issues with nuance to them.
Genocide=bad is too simple. If some country kills 100% of a 10,000 population ethnic/cultural group, is that worse than killing 10% of a 10,000,000 population ethnic/cultural group? Are some people's lives worth more because of their ethnicity? What if that happened because the 10,000 fought to the death against the 10,000,000 and ended up losing? Is that genocide? Is that bad?
This is precisely the sort of gibberish I am talking about. There is no ethical requirement, upon seeing something happen in the real world, to entertain a series of hypotheticals so tedious and exhaustive that you have to throw your hands up and declare all things to be equally good and bad. That’s a weird habit!
You can simply have a moral or ethical stance on a topic! “Genocide is bad“ is a defensible moral position to have, full stop. “Oh yeah well What if the Rohirrim were contacted by Section 31 in contravention of the Prime directive?? What then??” is not a defensible moral position, it is just gobbledygook.
The other response to my post somehow managed to post, through a cirque du soleil-level amount of artistry and contortion, something along the lines of “there’s no difference between carpet bombing and being carpet bombed” as a sort of gotcha sandwiched among flailing insults. It is nonsense in the same way that “You said that genocide is bad but have you seen this spreadsheet that exists in my head?” is nonsense. This habit is not actual moral or ethical reasoning, it is simply behavior that emerges when someone fails to fully suppress their urge to tell an internet stranger to shut up.
No it's because genocide is too simple and poorly defined a concept to apply appropriately to every situation. It's just the result of people trying to generalize from a few specific events that happened in the past which they already decided were bad for some other reason and ended up creating the label genocide to describe them.
Look at the disagreement people have over whether Israel or Hamas committed genocide in this current war. People can't even agree on the meaning of the word as it applies there. It's a novel situation that doesn't fit the mold of what this word was invented for. Are civilians really civilians if they're complicit in the fighting as in Gaza? Are they really civilians if they've done or are still doing compulsory military service as in Israel? It's just an attempt to draw a line in the sand so people will agree what's bad.
>In general I wholeheartedly agree. But if the person in front of you has done or advocated for things that cause harm or is themself a horrible person then I disagree.
I feel like the parent comment is pretending to be deep and meaningful but is really just rehashing the 'both sides are the same' argument with a side of 'everyone is entitled to their own opinion'. It's nice to say that we should judge everyone for who they are, but if who they are is a vocal member of a group that wants to hurt other people, that's all we need to know to judge them. Pretending otherwise is silly.
The difference is between judging an individual for what they themselves say vs what identities you associate with them (or even those they associate with themselves).
>or even those they associate with themselves
I see no problem judging someone for the identities that they choose to associate themselves with.
Over and above their works and words?
Their associations are their works and words. You can't just handwave that stuff away as being irrelevant because you like the parts of their works and words that don't touch on anything you deem to be an association.
I know people of the political party I tend to disagree with who are saints and dedicate the majority of their time to others.
I know people of the political party I tend to agree with who are insufferable selfish pricks and treat others terribly.
Works and words aren't always associations.
>I know people of the political party I tend to disagree with who are saints and dedicate the majority of their time to others.
Except for the part of the time that they are devoting to supporting a political party that is actively harming you and people you love.. you can't just wave that off as not being important just because they are nice the rest of the time.
>I know people of the political party I tend to agree with who are insufferable selfish pricks and treat others terribly.
And they should be negatively judged for the latter behavior.
Both examples should be negatively judged for their behavior, you're just choosing to ignore some of the behavior of the first person.
I'd say what a person chooses to put their time and energy into is more important than their political affiliation.
Otherwise, all we'd have to do to be good in life would be to support political parties on internet forums. ;)
Then you don't agree at all. Every single adult in the world has "done or advocated for things that cause harm". It's inescapable.
Great harm then? I’m not morally obligated to to treat Putin with respect. Most people agree that there are people who are so reprehensible that they don’t deserve respect.
There are obvious bad/evil actors in the world. When people talk about engaging with other humans respectfully, they're generally not referring to the Putins of the world.
And it's pretty rare to have so much clarity about a person to know they're in the "obviously reprehensible" bucket.
I'm not saying this is what you're doing, but I often see people argue like this:
1. There are obviously bad actors in the world
2. Nobody would argue those bad actors should be given respect
3. So I won't respect people I come across who disagree with me
The fallacy is in the jump from 2 to 3, and the assumption that the existence of bad actors means the person I'm interacting with right now is one of them. The vast majority of people aren't Putin, nor can they be judged so quickly/clearly. And setting aside whether or not someone like that deserves respect, there's also a clear difference between respecting someone for who they are vs. behaving in a respectful manner out of self-preservation. The latter may ultimately keep you alive.
Herein lies the crux of the matter in my view. The jump from 2 to 3. When Bob Dole ran for President I wholeheartedly agreed with the position about being respectful to those you disagree with. Politics was still normal in the U.S. at that time. But now we in the U.S. elected a known rapist. A felon and a con man. He can’t run a charity in New York due to his misdeeds. He lusts after his own daughter. We have entered into an era where supporters of one party’s President deserve the assumption of being terrible people.
Now obviously there are many people who disagree with the above. But this is how I see things and I act accordingly. The call for civility comes from those who hold terrible beliefs. We are well into the Paradox of Tolerance situation in the U.S.
To me, the issue boils down to pragmatism and utility.
It’s just human psychology; people tend not to change their minds when someone screams at them and otherwise disrespects them. If the goal is to move society in any particular direction, that requires some degree of successful communication, and throwing respect out the window directly counteracts the goal. If the goal is just to hold some moral high ground for the sake of it, that’s a pointless goal if it doesn’t lead to any underlying change.
Collectively, we don’t need to change the minds of obviously evil people, but we do need to influence the population that can vote them into or out of power. I just don’t see that ever happening if your outlook on life is this extreme:
> We have entered into an era where supporters of one party’s President deserve the assumption of being terrible people
I know many people have convinced themselves that this is true, but this ultimately boils down to the question: so what then is the goal? To push these people deeper into their bubbles?
At some point one has to ask how much of the problem is being directly created by this “they’re all terrible people so I won’t even talk to them” mindset.
My personal view is as follows. American society has reached a point of no return. Something has to give before a new equilibrium has been found. As an extreme example look to Nazi Germany. The repugnant views that were normal in 1939 Germany weren’t normal in 1960 Germany. A similar (though far less extreme) change will happen in the U.S.
I have no desire to change anyone’s mind about their political views. Anyone who supports a known rapist and felon and who openly takes bribes can not be convinced of anything. I don’t engage in political discussions with such people. There is no consistency in their beliefs so no meaningful discusion can be had.
For me, my desire is secession. The country needs to beak up. This is an extreme view but will likely be increasingly held by people with similar political beliefs as mine.
I'm going to be pedantic for a second, as a sort of dark coping mechanism:
>Anyone who supports a known rapist and felon and who openly takes bribes can not be convinced of anything
Clearly, they can be convinced of something, just not anything you or I might consider good.
In all seriousness, I think the truly disturbing thing about this whole sorry situation is just how many people don't actually hold any durable ethics or morality, just rank self-interest. Pearl clutching over the death of American dreams like economic mobility is a sideshow to the death knell of American idealism. America is not the shining city on a hill we thought it was, and honestly, it never was.
Clearly, they can be convinced of something, just not anything you or I might consider good.
Yeah. I should have been more precise.
The country deserves what is going to happen.
Why is the comparison always Nazi Germany?
By the way, the jury explicitly rejected the rape allegation. So you're just making stuff up from your high-horse:
https://apnews.com/article/trump-rape-carroll-trial-fe68259a...
The colloquial definition of rape includes using your fingers, which is what he did. The fact that the specific NY law defines digital violation as a separate offense from "rape" doesn't make using the term improper for the non-NY-lawyers among us.
The judge said that Trump was guilty of rape, as it is commonly defined.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-car...
> “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Kaplan wrote.
He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”
The former requires forcible, unconsented-to penetration with one’s penis. But he said that the conduct the jury effectively found Trump liable for — forced digital penetration — meets a more common definition of rape. He cited definitions offered by the American Psychological Association and the Justice Department, which in 2012 expanded its definition of rape to include penetration “with any body part or object.”
I didn’t compare anything to Nazi Germany. I gave Nazi Germany as an example of how what is socially acceptable can drastically change in a short period of time.
I apologize. He was found liable for sexual abuse, battery and defamation. These distinctions are extremely important. He’s not quite as bad as I made him out to be. What about him calling his daughter a nice piece of ass? The other stuff?
"over 50% of the country i live in are irredeemably terrible people" is obviously hyperbole -- if it were true, the onus would be on you to start taking action against those terrible people. but my guess is you don't actually think they're so terrible, because you're still working your 9-5 for your terrible-person boss, getting paid like every other schmuck, and you're happy to let those irredeemably terrible people deliver your DoorDash, teach your children at public school, and keep your electricity and water running.
"over 50% of the country i live in are irredeemably terrible people"
A large majority of the people did not vote for Donald Trump.
but my guess is you don't actually think they're so terrible,
People who support Donald Trump are, in general, terrible people. They aren’t evil people doing evil things so why would I have an obligation to take action against them?
It is a fact of life that we all must live amongst people who we think are terrible human beings. Of course I haven’t the slightest idea what a person’s views are for almost everyone I interact with. I give everyone the assumption that they deserve respect until proven otherwise.
Given the context of the thread it’s ironic that you don’t seem to understand what it means to give the assumption of respect to people. I think you edited your disparaging remarks to me. It was hilarious to read those remarks given the context of the discussion at hand. Feel free to put them back. I don’t mind them.
> People who support Donald Trump are, in general, terrible people
This is not true, and that shows your narrow mindset. To give you the benefits of the doubt, can you explain why Trump supporters are not only wrong, but generally "terrible people"?
I have no desire to change anyone’s mind about their political views. Anyone who supports a known rapist and felon and who openly takes bribes can not be convinced of anything. I don’t engage in political discussions with such people. There is no consistency in their beliefs so no meaningful discusion can be had.
Do you not see how you're part of the problem? You're applying cherry-picked standards that just happen to match what Trump did because you'd already been brainwashed to hate him and his supporters. What if you judge presidents by how many deaths they cause in wars instead of what dirty jokes they made? Wouldn't that be more meaningful measure of badness? No because you're cherry-picking to support your pre-existing hatred that you were driven to by the news and social media.
Cherry picked facts? Ha. Being a rapist is a cherry picked fact?
The difference between me and you is that I consistently apply my morals and ethics. I don’t support rapists and bribe takers for President. I didn’t support Clinton when it became clear what he did and I don’t support Trump. Have a higher standard for yourself. Don’t support bad people.
I do judge George W. Bush for the deaths he caused. Obama too.
> The call for civility comes from those who hold terrible beliefs.
Oof, that's a lot of assumption.
Do you realize the exact same things can be said about the President we had for the last four years?
It's really hard to worry about your own guy being a scumbag, when the opposition supports a scumbag too (and then lies about it).
Biden hasn’t been convicted of felonies. He’s not an adjudicated rapist. He doesn’t refer to his daughter as a nice piece of ass. He isn’t banned from running a charity. He hasn’t bribed any porn stars. He hasn’t accepted $30 billion in bribes. He hasn’t taken secret documents to illegally keep in his bathroom. He hasn’t met with Putin alone without an interpreter or any other U.S. official present. He hasn’t made fun of a reporter’s disability. He didn’t appoint his son-in-law to be an advisor who then accepted bribes from Saudi Arabia. He hasn’t engaged in Twitter feuds with 15 year old kids from Sweden. He didn’t threaten to withhold disaster aid to states that didn’t vote for him.
Nothing I’ve said against Trump is about his politics. He, as a person, is narcissistic, self centered, selfish, boorish, infantile, incurious, lustful, and greedy. He’s a despicable person and those who support him are terrible people.
"If you want to discuss Biden then start another thread. This one is about Donald Trump."
You cannot talk about Trump without putting him in context. The fact is, the reason why we have Trump for President again, is because the person who replaced him was so horrible, that Trump looked better in comparison.
And what's more, conisdering what I said -- and what you are responding to -- I have to bring up Biden, because my entire point is "both sides do it". If you want to bring back honor and decency to the White House, you have to do it with an honorable and decent person. Neither Biden nor Harris fit that bill.
"Harris’ moral and ethical failings are nothing compared to Trump. You can do what I did and not vote and not support either candidate. Stand up for truth and righteousness and stop trying to justify your support for a person as shitty as Trump. It’s a choice to defend shitty behavior. When you do so you end up smelling like shit."
She implicitly supported Biden. She was complicit in all the lies that were pushed about Biden, particularly those about his fitness for the position. She endorsed going after political enemies with the legal system -- and then had the gall to claim that Trump would do just that himself.
And then to go on and claim that if you supported a crappy candidate, then those people are crappy too, you have basically condemned the 95% or so who voted for one or the other -- for motivations that are well beyond either yours or my understanding -- this attitude right here is why politics is so toxic these days.
You cannot talk about Trump without putting him in context.
I can. I did. It doesn’t need context. It’s well documented the things he did.
The fact is, the reason why we have Trump for President again…
This is not an established fact.
… Harris fit that bill.
Harris’ moral and ethical failings are nothing compared to Trump. You can do what I did and not vote and not support either candidate. Stand up for truth and righteousness and stop trying to justify your support for a person as shitty as Trump. It’s a choice to defend shitty behavior. When you do so you end up smelling like shit.
You aren't aware of what was found on Hunter's laptop, or in Ashley's diary (she had to choose her showering times carefully to make sure her father wouldn't join her), or Tara Reed's allegations. To say Biden hasn't accepted $30 billion in bribes, in particular, is laughably funny, and he was caught having secret documents kept illegally in his garage. He is on record threatening aid from Ukraine unless they fired a particular prosecutor who was investigating his son. He has, for all intents and purposes, withheld disaster aid from North Carolina, who didn't vote for him. He has plagiarized speeches several times over the years -- indeed, this is what derailed his first attempt to run for President, back in the 1980s. And he hasn't been particularly nice to reporters, and considering what he is on record saying to constituents, I can confidentially say that the only reason he doesn't engage in Twitter feuds is because he's too senile to be allowed near Twitter.
Biden, as a person, is narcissistic, self centered, selfish, boorish, infantile, incurious, lustful, and greedy. He’s a despicable person and those who support him are terrible people.
Either that, or they are just ignorant -- because the mainstream press has worked hard to hide these kinds of things from us. It is why trust in them has plummeted over the last few years.
Great. We are in agreement that a person who engages in odious behavior is not worthy of support. As such Donald Trump is not worthy of support.
If you want to discuss Biden then start another thread. This one is about Donald Trump.
No, I don't really think you're right about this.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. That's a right I wouldn't take away form them even if I could.
They are not entitled to me being nice to them. Fuck that; if they advocate for something that I think is harmful, then I'm not going to be "respectful" to them.
My grandmother in no uncertain terms said that my wife should be deported. She doesn't have any power deport my wife, so she wouldn't fall into the "bad actor" in your definition, but she's made her opinion clear on that.
I could swallow my pride, roll my eyes, and ignore the horrible racist shit she says, but why exactly? The whole point of free speech is the ability to criticize bad ideas, and sometimes that's going to involve hurting a Republican's feelings.
Sure I can support that. The difficulty as always comes with the grey area in defining "great". There are truly reprehensible people in the world, but they're the exception not the norm. I see you did address that in your comment with "in general" so I was a bit strong in my wording, but I do believe the in general case covers >99.99% of people.
It’s like.. incredibly escapable. Nihilism makes for a weak argument
Moral hubris - where one believes all of one's positions are morally correct - is the shortest path to becoming a monster.
Stupid and vapid. Tech is already full to the brim with people with zero moral convictions aside from the things that get them paid. Those are the real monsters
At least someone being paid to make your life worse can often also be paid to stop. I'm more afraid of someone convinced that they're saving the world as they destroy it instead.
Why are you writing in the tone of a Christoper Nolan movie? These hypotheticals have literally nothing to do with real life.
Fair, but in our current times using someone's identity as a justification to act like an asshole to them is a sith's whisper.
We all have our less enlightened moments. Better we not afford ourselves easy intellectual justifications for being our worst selves.
As the quip goes: the greatest evils are perpetrated by those most assured of their own righteousness.
Edit: Or in video form. Beginning summary: "brick suit guy" was apparently an extremely aggressive heckler of the media at Trump rallies. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fRSIv7alUZ8&t=95s
In normal times I would agree with you. At present in the U.S. I’d not agree with this sentiment. People who support electing a known racist, thief, con man, and felon are deserving of ridicule and ire. They don’t deserve respect in my opinion.
When the politics of a nation shift so far in one direction we get into a situation where supporters of that shift don’t deserve respect. Stalinist Soviet Union is an extreme example of this.
So what lengths do you think you're justified going to against individuals you disagree with?
And how do you feel about them feeling the same about you?
Mutual righteous hostility is why ethnic and religious wars simmer forever, because there's always a convenient justification for acting violently towards others (and them towards you).
… justified going to against individuals you disagree with?
I don’t do anything at this time. But I understand why there are those who do have vitriol for supporters of a rapist who lusts after his own daughter. There are times when a nation’s society fractures as the social cohesion evaporates. We are beginning to be in such a time in the U.S. Well, it appears that way to me. Only time will tell.
What constitutes "harm"? Is hurting someone's feelings harm? Is misinformation harm? How do you determine intention? To what extent does intention matter? How do circumstances impact the answers to these questions?
When your creed is basically "I only hate bad people", you have given yourself permission to hate anyone and feel righteously justified about it. And you'll never feel the need to empathize because bad people always deserve whatever bad things happen to them.
You don't need to love everyone unconditionally, but clearly more neuance is needed.
What constitutes "harm"? Is hurting someone's feelings harm? Is misinformation harm? How do you determine intention? To what extent does intention matter? How do circumstances impact the answers to these questions?
I know the answers to these questions…for me. Each person decides for themselves where the lines are drawn. It has always been this way.
Good thought. The only change I'd make, to make your neutrality explicit, is to say
- A specific trans person can be an an asshole. A specific trans person can be a saint.
- A specific white man can be an asshole. A specific white man can be a saint.
Yes, the also implies that there is a default.
I call it the "could I share this with my grandmother" test. I don't like things that are supposed to have a point or make a good argument but fail the grandmother test.
> gets lost on both the left and the right sides
It gets lost because of this black/white US perspective on politics. If you were multiparty system there will be less identities in politics.
> If you were multiparty system there will be less identities in politics.
If only it were that easy. I come from a country that is notorious for having political parties dissolve/new ones forming all the time, and politics are still all about identities and people still treat issues with a very black-or-white perspective.
As many have made the point before, I think this kind of discourse/attitude is more due to the social media echo chambers environment we now evolve in, and that modern societies can't escape it.
India? If so (or otherwise), what do you think a fix would be?
I went down a rabbit hole of Indian parliamentary party history and was fascinated at the level of machination over the decades.
No, that just means the identities split into smaller groups that constantly fight for power within larger coalitions. Instead of Red vs Blue you get racial groupings and all sorts of subdivisions.
Lebanon is a good example of what happens when you try to enshrine smaller subdivisions than A vs B.
Also, diffusing the bully pulpit and celebrity between a president, prime minister, and/or ceremonial royalty. Policy > popularity.
I'm so tired of hearing "both sides" though.
Focusing on the individual means dropping the notion of “sides”. Identifying people (or even arguments) by their alleged “side”, instead of taking them on their own merit, is where things go wrong.
Where things go wrong is that the "extremists on both sides" is used to distract from what people on one side do. It is just a shield designed to prevent analysis.
It's not, because there's a difference between 'extremist individuals in a side' and 'a side as monolith.'
It is currently en vogue to use the excesses of specific instances or individuals to tar entire identities, but that's statistically dishonest.
Most people are not extremists, in the sense of 'if you talk to them at 1:13pm on a random Tuesday.'
I would argue it's currently en vogue to incessantly repeat the argument that "Both Sides" have bad actors, thus commenting on the bad actors of one side is an incomplete argument.
It's tiring and non sequitur to hear such arguments however, as what the opposition to a position does is wholly unrelated to the arguments related to that position.
I'm not making a "both sides" argument: I'm making a "the individuals that support sides are more important than the sides" one.
There is actual political program and actual laws being pushed on. That is the reality. And yes, that political program belongs to that side.
It is OK to blame republicans as such for what Trump or JD Vance does, because they made them big. It is ok to blame them for the for the supreme court politics too, because they knowingly put exactly those people there, knowing they will remove protection for abortion and lied about it.
It is OK to blame democrats for what Biden does.
For the both sides thing however, you need to attribute acts of people who Democratic party actively pushes away to that party ... and to pretend that people voting for republicans have zero to do with what that party does.
I think about it with different divisions.
For politicians (as opposed to people in other professions), they are obviously responsible for the policies their parties support, to the extent that they support their parties. Given not every politician votes in lockstep with their party.
BUT for individuals in the US, their personal positions are often more complex than the binary reductions the two-party system affords us.
Consequently, there are many (most?) dissenters on one issue or another in both parties.
If a person has thoughts on matters, it's therefore more interesting to me to discuss those thoughts, than to derive my interactions with them solely by their D or R label.
I think your point is what gets missed in this conversation.
Many people just want to go to work and do their job … and not have social topics or politics discussed at work.
That doesn’t mean they don’t care about those topics, they just don’t feel like work is the correct place for discourse.
And the sense I get from recent moves by tech execs is that they simply want employees to focus 100% on work (because obviously they want to get the most productivity out of their paid staff), and anything non-work related is viewed as a distraction. Regardless of what that non-work topic might be.
"I’m certain he wouldn’t be rude to my face, but he might quietly discriminate against me, say no thanks. He might not even think of it as discrimination, only that I don’t have what it takes."
This resonates pretty strongly (and depressingly) with me being an immigrant academic in Europe who came originally from a third-world country. Even though I am one of the most productive researchers in my department, even though I studied in the best university in my country (which is mind-blowingly better than the one I'm currently in), even if I say yes to almost everything, and even if I work easily 150% what an average native colleague does, none of this matter at all. Every morning I wake up there is a new knife on my back. Opportunities just vanish transparently; pressure amounts over pressure amounts pressure; there is always that quiet, mute side look that says (without words) "if you don't like it, why don't you leave?".
And what really makes this ten times worse is that the country I'm in has this almost ethereal reputation for begin some kind of paradise where everyone is super polite and calm and rational, so whenever I complain about anything it feels like I'm some kind of spoiled child. Half the time I even convince myself of that.
I'm not a target of tech's fascist turn, but my head is still spinning from the change of direction. When I entered this industry it was for hackers, nonconformists, weirdos, nerds, people who don't care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.
What particularly stings is that the vipers at the top tricked people into giving away an enormous amount of intellectual property. Zuck is removing tampons from the men's room—will he also remove open source code written by queer people from his company? Of course not.
I feel like the way you describe it came from the people who came of age in the 70s and made so much of what we now see as “hacker culture.”
Now, the leadership is mostly people who came of age a couple of decades later, and got sandwiched between the elders’ ancient wisdom and a newly democratizing toxic online culture.
Some found the right path, many hung out with (or were) the sort of people who pretend to pretend to have heinous opinions on 4chan and are finally feeling comfortable enough to drop the facade.
Amazing what a little (a lot of) money and power can do to a culture. Some of our worst traits come out when we're all of a sudden in charge.
It's time for tech to go back to its roots and starve the kings and 'noblemen' of our talent.
Stop working for billionaires.
Remains to be seen, but attention_is_all_you_need.pdf might put a kink in your plan.
This one's really going to break your heart: your "talent" is based on freely available knowledge. There are people in India and Pakistan with equivalent capabilities that will fill a billionaire's seat without a second thought, many with no moral reservations whatsoever. There are entire agencies that can be hired at half your salary.
Go on - spurn the kings and noblemen, go protest the war in Gaza like those poor saps at Google. You'll end up on every blacklist in the industry and retire with accolades like "Employee of the Month" from Home Depot.
> When I entered this industry it [... didn't] care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.
Are we experiencing the same industry? Because as an LGBT person, I have experienced a tech industry so drunk and fixated on identity that it can't shut up about it. It's patronizing, insulting, and divisive.
Isn't the problem here that the author is unnecessarily bringing up the topic of their genitals? She mentioned that she's improved at her job and as a founder, but I didn't see any discussion of their progress. It seems more like she's focusing on the perceived slights she's encountered.
I believe her final conclusion is a bit of a stretch, and the essay gradually builds up to it with smaller claims that are also somewhat exaggerated.
> "It feels as if people like pg, or at least people he hangs out with, who once upon a time believed in me, who lifted me up, recognized my talent, would now prefer that I be relegated to the sex slave caste."
Once upon a time, not that long ago, within my lifetime in fact, being gay was targeted for public abuse the way that transgender people are being targeting now.
That has declined as people came to understand that being gay, lesbian, bi is part of how a person is made. Under public pressure, a gay person can act straight or at least act not gay. But it doesn't change who they are, doesn't help anyone around them, and makes them miserable. There is no point to it. Thankfully popular opinion and the law have adjusted to that reality.
Being transgender is the same way. A transgender person is not someone who dresses a certain way, takes hormones, or gets surgery. A transgender person is someone who is absolutely miserable when they are not permitted to express the gender they feel. It is part of who they are deep inside, how they feel every day of their life. Like gay people, they can hide it to avoid abuse. Like gay people, it's not fair to force them to do so. And it doesn't help anyone around them either.
It seems to me that prigs, as defined in pg's article, are just jumping on the transgender issue because it's an easy way for them to enforce rules. From my understanding, having read both articles, PG might say that the prigs have chosen to ride the lgbt movement. The problem is not with the lgbt movement itself.
Unfortunately, this gives the movement a bad reputation. Some prigs aren't lgbt people at all, but they speak on behalf of them, as they also speak on behalf of other groups that they aren't a part of. Some prigs might actually be a part of the minority they speak for, but I would hazard a guess, based on no data, and say that these are the minority of all prigs.
I think PG's problem is with the prigs, not the lgbt movement itself. Can these be separated?
Self-congratulatory, self-righteous prigs are all over the place within human society.
When people complain about them, the substantive content of their complaint is the context in which they issue it. For example pg is complaining about the prigs who nag everyone about transgender acceptance, but not the prigs who nag everyone to reject and abuse transgender people.
Matters of speech, manners, and decorum are convenient ways to launder the advocacy of a certain set of values. All you have to do is accuse your enemies of violation when they advocate, and stay silent when your allies apply the same tactics.
In order to consistently navigate politics, one needs to start with one's own values. That's why I posted my comment above. The core issue for me is whether transgender people can show up in their preferred gender. Not whether other people are annoying jerks when they talk about that question. There are plenty of annoying jerks on both sides of any value question, if one has the open eyes to see them.
> Self-congratulatory, self-righteous prigs are all over the place within human society.
They try to be. A given social movement will be judged on how well it deals with them - whether it embraces/encourages them (or, worse, makes them its leaders), or discourages them. Bullies, grifters, and sexual predators are everywhere, but "this organisation protects/doesn't do enough against its bullies/grifters/sexual predators" is a legitimate criticism (in cases where it's accurate); it's the same with prigs.
> The core issue for me is whether transgender people can show up in their preferred gender.
Break down what that means. Are you talking about whether these people act in a particular way? Or whether they demand that other people treat them in a particular way? Those are very different asks.
>not the prigs who nag everyone to reject and abuse transgender people.
The scale is not remotely the same.
I hang out in conservative/right wing circles online. I have never seen anyone advocate for the abuse of trans people. I'm sure you can find such talk in the depths of 4 chan, but it certainly is not a common view on the right wing.
Meanwhile, the prigs of whom pg speaks are literally in the mainstream, foisted on pedestals. It's literally everywhere. And people got tired of it.
Have you considered that using the term woke as a pejorative is priggish behavior? Because amongst my conservative friends it is used at least once every social setting.
I think this is spot on. The confusion for me comes from the fact that, as far as I can tell, I've never met a prig in real life. And yet they seem to be the biggest political issue of our time. Is it because I live in Australia and it's more of a US thing? Or is it because I'm not online as much maybe? I find it really confusing.
What Graham means by "prig" is, say, an HR person who informs you that you need to use your coworker's preferred pronouns.
If you're calling a coworker something that they are uncomfortable with enough to get HR involved, HR may be the prigs but you're being an asshole.
Yes on a pragmatic basis, if the coworker is male and gets upset at being referred to by "he", but it goes against your own personal beliefs to refer to him as "she", it's best just to refer to him by name and practise wording your sentences to be pronounless. And, where possible and not disadvantageous, to avoid situations where he's involved in your own work.
With this approach, he's less likely to make a complaint to HR about you (though he might notice the careful lack of "she", but that's much more difficult to make a substantiated complaint about), and you still get to stick to your own beliefs.
It's still somewhat vexing to have to do this, but at least it prevents you from getting in the crosshairs of HR.
If it goes against your personal beliefs to call someone what they prefer to be called at no expense to yourself, then you need some new personal beliefs.
Or you could just call people what they want to be called when it does not inconvenience you in the slightest.
Personally, agree with calling people what they want to be called. That said, here's a thought experiment: What if someone is inconvenienced? What if someone feels uncomfortable using pronouns that don't match the sex of the person? What about uncommon "neopronouns" like "zhe", "xe", or "fae"?
Whose comfort gets priority in this situation?
We expect people to say things that make them uncomfortable all the time. I don't feel comfortable telling my boss that I'm the one who wrote the buggy code that caused the incident, but I have a responsibility to do it regardless. I might be expected to thank everyone involved in a project, even if I don't feel personally grateful to them. And so on.
Obviously there's no easy way to reason these cases from first principles. As it is, I'm aware that being affirmed in their gender identity is recognized as therapeutically important for trans people. On the flip side, I'm not aware of any condition that causes people to suffer significant distress due to using a particular pronoun. So in this case, I feel like it's a pretty easy decision.
EDIT: The "neopronoun" question was added after I replied, or I missed it. I have never met a person who expected me to use them, nor have I ever encountered a workplace environment where policies required their use, so I haven't formed an opinion.
I've never met anybody who used neopronouns either, I've only heard about it online.
I wonder if there are any long term effects of forcing someone to say something that they consider to be untrue? Taken to its most hyperbolic extreme, it could be used as a form of psychological torture, like something out of 1984, where Winston is tortured for not accepting that four fingers being held up is five, or "Four Lights" from Star Trek.
To get one to renounce what they know to be true and accept whatever you say without question is probably the ultimate form of control and subjugation.
For emphasis: "taken to its most hyperbolic extreme".
edit: more realistically, you could say that transgender or gay people might feel like they are compelled to lie about who they are in order to fit in, or in certain circumstances. Surely, if we recognize this as psychologically damaging, then we should recognize all other types of forced lying to be similarly damaging.
Yes and by the same principle, vegans could just eat meat and dairy instead of adhering to their philosophical beliefs. That's your argument, right?
That analogy doesn't work. A closer analogy would be a vegan refusing to talk to a coworker who eats meat. That would be unacceptable to me, too.
The analogy in my comment was about adherence to philosophical beliefs, in response to what appeared to be a suggestion by you that such beliefs should be ignored if someone else finds them to be an inconvenience.
Could you explain why you think your analogy works, please?
A vegan doesn't eat tofu at you.
Your right to untrammeled adherence to your philosophical beliefs ends the moment that those beliefs result in conduct affecting other people. After that point, some form of balancing occurs.
Exactly, which is why the balanced and pragmatic solution described in my earlier comment works well in a conflict of philosophical beliefs over sex-based pronouns versus preferred pronouns.
Simply avoid using them at all if a colleague is likely to get upset and complain to HR should the colleague's sex be accurately described.
Noticeably treating a coworker differently because of your beliefs about their gender identity is not a balanced and pragmatic solution.
If treating this colleague the same as you'd treat anyone else is likely to cause a complaint about you to HR, but at the same time you don't want to compromise your own philosophical beliefs, then it's about the most pragmatic and balanced approach you can achieve given the circumstances.
Do you ask everyone you work with for a birth certificate so you can ensure you're referring to them using the terms you consider appropriate?
>I think PG's problem is with the prigs, not the lgbt movement itself. Can these be separated?
You're essentially asking if the LGBT movement can be separated from the exact kind of activism that's enabled the advances in LGBT rights that we've seen since the 1960s. In a word, no, they can't be separated. The 'priggishness' of one or two decades ago is the moral truism of the present. Here, for example, is a spoof flyer in the British satirical magazine Private Eye published in 1969:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
It's funny. But what's even funnier is many of the items in the list of obviously ridiculous demands (demands that surely signal that Political Correctness Has Gone Mad, etc. etc.) have turned out to be completely reasonable and, in time, uncontroversial.
Read his essay again, past the first two paragraphs. Look at the social movements he describes as priggish, woke, politically correct etc.
> There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment."
> In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia
Going by the examples pg gives, anyone willing to support women, or LGBT, is a prig. Don't let his abstract theory cloud the rest of the essay. He says it in black and white, his problem is with minorities standing up for themselves.
I don't think that's a fair reading of it.
Consider, for example, expanding the definition of sexual harassment to also include creating a "hostile environment".
I think that pg's point is that this expansion to include a "hostile environment" makes it fall under the "eye of the beholder", which makes it a lot more vague and arbitrary. Something being vague and arbitrary is the perfect playground for a prig, because they can essentially invent new rules and enforce them. For one example: Microagressions. What are they? They could be anything, really.
"Supporting women" and "enforcing arbitrary rules" are not necessarily the same thing. One can claim that they're doing the former when they're really just doing the latter.
If you were to make up a new rule and say that men need to bow to every woman within a 10ft radius in order to show respect, is that really "supporting women"? Is that what women want? This is an intentionally ridiculous hypothetical (in certain cultures), but I think it demonstrates the issue that an arbitrary rule is not necessarily "support".
Remember Donglegate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681
Did this joke create a hostile environment? Did the shaming of these people make anything better, or did it make things worse? Was this an example of "supporting women", or was this just an example of punishing people for not following arbitrary rules?
>He says it in black and white, his problem is with minorities standing up for themselves.
Someone who acts priggishly may not be a part of the minority that they are 'standing up' for.
I agree with the definition pg gives in the first two paragraphs of what a prig with, which is why I suggested you reread past that section. As OP said, DEI initiatives are regularly hollow and performative. Re: dongle gate and the other hypotheticals, sure, not great, I agree enforcing arbitrary rules isn't good for society, and we really gain nothing.
Let's look at this essay critically, and let's not doing any legwork for PG. He has an opening statement about priggishness that, again I agree with, and then (eventually) dives into examples that we're discussing re: hostile environment. Does this example support his argument about what wokeness is?
You claim that the goal of this example is for PG to provide evidence
> that this expansion to include a "hostile environment" makes it fall under the "eye of the beholder", which makes it a lot more vague and arbitrary. ...
Which i agree is PGs point in introducing this example as he says so himself
>But the vagueness of this accusation allowed the radius of forbidden behavior to expand to include talking about heterodox ideas.
So we have this example, and we can clearly identify how PG /thinks/ it supports his argument. This is where I disagree, and like almost all of the examples in the essay, it does not support his argument.
Do you believe that, as PG says, in 1986 and the following few years, (not now, we'll save that for later, he specifically is talking about the 1980s) this title IX ruling that expanded the definition was misused in a priggish sense, to punish people arbitrarily, and that it did not support women? Talk to some women who were alive at that time, and you'll soon realize that yes, outside of direct sexual advances there are many things that professors would do or say to dehumanize female students. So by giving these students a mechanism to hold professor accountable for dehumanizing them, we are... supporting them!
Now maybe you believe that is the minority case, and that in general this was misused. Would you trust women in the 1980s to decide for themselves whether or not they were being sexually harassed by a professor in this expanded definition? Remember, the original definition was just when a professor/whoever would make a direct sexual advance. Ok, so say we trust women to know when they themselves are being sexually harassed. Do you think that men were going around in the 80s accusing professors of sexual harassment? Yea probably not. So who was misusing this? Basically no one. Who was benefiting from it? Women. So this is not priggish in any sense.
As far as today goes, I went to university within the past few years, at a very woke school even by my standards, and even with this expanded definition, I have not heard of any professors suffering from false accusations of sexual harassment. I have had quite literally dozens of friends tell me their experiences where professors dehumanized, belittled them, or have even blatantly asked for sexual favors or been assaulted by them. And of course these reports go through title IX, with this expanded definition, and even today rarely is a professor's career upended. So even today, not priggish.
You can rinse and repeat this for almost any example pg gives. His examples do not support his argument at all. So either his initial argument is wrong, or this essay is just plain bad. Either way it's worthless as a way to defend the argument we both agree on. OP explains why it's also harmful.
In his article, Graham said the following:
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
Bud Light sent promotional cans to a trans influencer. The content of the promo was completely anodyne, a joke about March Madness. For this, a boycott was led by social conservatives.
Aren't the people who led this boycott "prigs"? Why is Graham referring to them in a neutral-to-laudatory way if he's so opposed to priggishness? What "wokeness" does he think Bud Light was punished for?
The prigs are doing a motte-and-bailey thing, where if you're against them, then they will claim that you're against trans people or gays or minorities or whoever.
> But it doesn't change who they are
This is the part that we all don't really actually converse about. It's not an easy point to prove (genetically, after sequencing the entire human genome, there is not actually any proof that gay is something one "is" intrinsically), but it's also so personal and getting it wrong has such heavy consequences that most avoid the topic.
Graham says he thinks wokeness is a religion, which I think is silly, but ironically religion in the workplace is an effective model here. I don't have to believe in someone's religion to understand that I shouldn't challenge their beliefs in the workplace, nor should I whine that so-and-so took time off for their holiday, and so on. I've regularly seen people make "[holiday greeting] for those who celebrate" remarks in work chats for Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu holidays, and it would be pretty inappropriate to jump in and say (as an atheist myself) "by the way, your god doesn't exist".
Similarly, I don't need to have any particular belief about the nature of gender to respond to my coworkers asking me to use "she" or "he" or "they" to refer to them. It's not my business.
Even trans people don't have a single monolithic set of opinions about what it means to be trans, what gender is, etc. The bar for not offending most people is extremely low.
I agree with you about a transgender person who is 23, but not about anyone who is claiming to be transgender at 13. That is way too young to be sure of such things, and peer pressures/influences exist.
The current backlash is mostly caused by the hardcore activists pressuring for "the alternatives are either gender-affirming care or SUICIDE! SUICIDE! even for 13 y.o.'s"
This attitude is so hysterical that it cannot stand for long.
This does not feel like at all a good faith reading of the situation. Hardcore anti trans-activists on the right would like to make life so miserable for transpeople as to essentially eliminate them from public life entirely. That is the context in which these supposedly hysterical responses emerge. I say supposedly hysterical because transgender people of all ages do commit suicide at a higher rate than other groups. This should be considered a public health emergency but it largely isn't because transgender people are the most useful scapegoat of the day (even better than immigrants). Of course that doesn't mean that every child who questions their self identity should be given immediate medical intervention, but neither does it mean we should deny care for all.
>Hardcore anti trans-activists on the right would like to make life so miserable for transpeople as to essentially eliminate them from public life entirely
Who are these hard core anti-trans activists? Are they mainstream? (Please dont say JK Rowling)
Stephen Miller just gave a speech last night saying that trans people don't exist, and the new President he advises is issuing an executive order to that effect.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-sex-gender-transgender-dei-...
Hmm, the governor of Florida to start with. Criminal penalties for changing your gender marker on your driver's license.
"Hardcore anti trans-activists on the right would like to make life so miserable for transpeople as to essentially eliminate them from public life entirely."
You may be right, but the anti-trans backlash in the context of the anti-woke backlash is much wider than just a few hardcore anti-trans activists on the far right. And it mostly revolves around two issues:
a. Very young kids being treated in invasive or hard-to-revert ways on flimsy evidence.
b. People with male musculature competing in women's sports leagues.
If these two things go away, the popular reaction will significantly moderate itself, maybe into gay-marriage-like acceptance levels.
But these two things won't be broadly acceptable anywhere soon, if ever.
Those two things already barely exist. I’m skeptical it’s possible, in a nation of hundreds of millions, to get them much closer to not existing than they already are.
So if those are the parts really bothering people… it sure seems like a case of looking for something to be upset about, in which case attempting to address their grievances won’t help. Or, a case of being told by people who are exaggerating the situation that these are actually really big deals, then not bothering to check whether that’s true. And in that second scenario, I don’t think making reality even closer to what they prefer than it already is will convince them of anything, so again, why bother to try to address their concerns?
Their perception is out of phase with what’s actually going on, that needs to be fixed before any useful discussion about some nugget of a point they may hypothetically have or helpful nuance their perspective might provide can meaningfully be engaged with.
It is more like "outrageous things dominate the news cycle". It is not even a new thing; on a similar note, already in the 1990s, people started believing widely that child abduction from the street was a real danger in their own communities.
That said, the politicians meet the demand, sometimes to their own detriment. The Trump campaign could only deploy the "Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them" slogan because Kamala herself, in 2020, felt the need to conform to then-prevailing winds and declare that she would fund gender-change surgeries for prisoners from taxpayers money.
Is that a thing? No, as far as we know, 0 prisoners asked for a taxpayer-funded gender change surgery before or after, and there was probably no risk for Kamala in 2020 if she brushed that question aside as marginal and irrelevant.
But she wanted to prove her progressive credentials on a thing that barely existed, and the thing that barely existed turned viciously against her four years later.
Maybe it would be better if politicians just didn't chase barely existing things in EITHER DIRECTION.
> The Trump campaign could only deploy the "Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them" slogan because Kamala herself, in 2020, felt the need to conform to then-prevailing winds and declare that she would fund gender-change surgeries for prisoners from taxpayers money.
She was asked a question about it once by Fox, because Trump had brought it up, and answered that yes, she would follow the law and not deny medically necessary gender affirming care, and noted that the Trump administration had also followed the law in the same way. It was a response to an unfounded fact-free attack, prompted by a question from an unfriendly network. She didn’t bring it up again.
You have not found an example of a leftist politician chasing barely-existing things in this example—the opposite, in fact, she was playing defense to right wingers trying to make something out of nothing at all.
Do prominent democrats do this, on some topics? Probably! But they don’t have a media machine and strategy structured around that as a core activity.
[edit] I mean, they do this because it works, of course. Look at the thread on PG’s piece, and this one. It’s clearly working to get people riled up and shift the zeitgeist, reality be damned. “Welfare queens”, that was a fun one, and so successful that I bet 35+% of Americans who’ve heard the term still think it was an actual problem. Some fizzle (“they’re eating the pets!”) but they’re not punished for those instances, so why not endlessly throw out BS and see what sticks? Some of it does, and then we’re all talking about a bunch of basically-fake grievances instead of anything that matters, and they may even use the BS to advance positions that do affect things that matter. It’s so very tedious to deal with.
I don't get why is there so much energy wasted on these non issues:
> a. Very young kids being treated in invasive or hard-to-revert ways on flimsy evidence.
Leave it to the doctors/counsellors/psychologists and parents. They know best. If my kids wanted to change their gender I would sure appreciate if the state wasn't making it any more difficult.
> b. People with male musculature competing in women's sports leagues.
So a man won a boxing match with women. Who cares? Sports are entertainment. They have never been fair. Women boxers have a federation they can decide themselves who gets to play with who. No need for state to get involved.
> So a man won a boxing match with women
This should be stated hypothetically, because it hasn't happened (at least, not in any official, regulated match).
Sports are more than just entertainment. There is no way for the state to avoid getting involved when the sports are run through publicly funded schools. And this impacts more than just boxing. At some point the state has to decide whether inclusion or fair play is more important. At least for sports that involve strength and speed we can't have it both ways. There are no easy answers here, and we can't just pretend the issue doesn't matter.
There is a social movement that seeks the suppression of all transgender expression, including by fully informed adults. They led with “save the kids” for the emotional impact, as many other well-organized social movements have in the past.
It works because concerns about kids are real. But it’s important to see and understand the greater goals of the movement, and how it affects everyone. The essay at the top of this HN thread was written by an adult, expressing their adult concerns.
It is somewhat quaint, but the truth is often in the middle and compromises work the best.
Which is something that doesn't really resonate with the social network era, which rewards wild posturing and extreme views with attention and clicks.
I agree, and I hope you stand up for your sense of the middle. Because there is something going on that is way larger than kids. Look at how quickly this adult essay got flagged off the HN homepage. Look at what the president said in his inaugural address today.
I do try to do so.
Can we actually vouch for the entire essay to come back?
I know that people can vouch for flagged comments, but I am not sure about entire submissions.
You should have finished reading PG's essay.
It's really quite narrowly scoped. There's no indication I could see that he doesn't still hold the same basically liberal politics (he included explicit disclaimers, for all the good that did); he might still be fine with transgender identity. He just wanted to talk about how the particular loudmouth brand of annoying leftist came to prominence. He even had a decent definition of them beyond "leftist I don't like", and put them in a broader context.
Even in the HN thread on the essay, it felt like hardly anyone actually read and understood it, just brought their own assumptions and intellectual allergies and let them run wild. It would be great if people could discuss these issues rationally, but the vast majority can't. Everyone is on a hair trigger.
It is not narrowly scoped, it states that we need to stop another "wave" of "social justice piggishness" which would include challenging the gender identity framework the author is using among other things. It also makes broad claims about social justice politics writ large.
Having read it carefully I found the hn thread interesting and it correctly criticized the essay's lazy reasoning.
Unless pg just now edited it out, you're making false quotes and misrepresenting his words.
I cannot find the quote "social justice piggishness" or the word "gender" in his essay. Every single mention of the word "wave" is attached to "wave of political correctness" or a close variation thereof.
Edit: OP meant "priggishness". Got it.
It's a typo. Paul's term is "priggish". And "political correctness" is a broad brush euphemism for, among other things, genderqueerness.
Thanks for this. I've always considered PC an entirely different thing, but after perusing the comments here, and given our new president's attitude toward the people affected, I can see your point.
Sorry my mistake I meant "priggishness"
I don't think pig and prig mean the same thing.
> It would be great if people could discuss these issues rationally, but the vast majority can't. Everyone is on a hair trigger.
If only we in the tech industry could blame social media on anyone but ourselves :(
Are you sure? How many of us in tech actually made decisions that made social media how it is? How many of us were even complicit in implementing it? I wasn't. Most of "tech" is not social media. Now how many of us were sounding the alarm and trying to build alternatives?
I don't think we should put all the blame on social media anyway.
My startup idea is a iPhone/Android virtual keyboard that detects the user is writing something toxic, and refuses to cooperate. Using AI. Who wants to fund me?
My other idea is a video/audio communication app that mutes the user if they become toxic.
Yes, I'm only joking. I wonder how many will be triggered and foam about "But who determines what is toxic!?!". That makes me think about the joke about feminists where the setup is "I have a joke about feminists..." and punchline is someone from the audience yelling "That's not funny!" straight away.
From the essay: "Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
What Bud Light did was hire an influencer to promote their product in an Instagram video (and then of course they later backtracked). The only thing "woke" about the video was that the influencer was a trans woman.
If Paul Graham would like to elaborate on this passage meant I welcome it, but my read was that supporting a trans woman falls under his definition of "wokeness".
I read this less as "the Bud Light campaign was morally wrong because it was woke" and more as "the Bud Light campaign went disastrously badly for its brand and sales because it was woke". I have heard people call it "the gay beer", which is a pretty bad branding change when double-digit percentages of your (former) drinkers are homophobic and you sponsor NASCAR.
One of my personal beliefs is that paedophiles who never act on their inclinations and instead seek treatment are doing the right thing, but I sure as hell wouldn't market a beer using that belief.
How was the campaign "woke" unless you define "trans people exist and should be supported" as woke? If Graham dislikes prigs, shouldn't he be criticizing the censorious social conservatives that led the boycott?
I define "trying to market a beer that's commonly drunk by Republicans using a trans influencer" as woke because it's:
A) ineffective at marketing the beer, because it prioritises a social justice objective instead (making it a political stance)
B) ineffective at changing any Bud drinker's mind on trans people, because it prioritises aggressive performance (making it woke)
The problem is not "oh, trans people exist, that's so woke"; it's doing activism in a way that harms both your company, because your brand is now "the gay beer", and trans people, who have to put up with a public debate about the existence of Dylan Mulvaney as well as a damaging boycott that scares marketing departments and moves the Overton window rightward.
Indeed. I mean, an article on censorious "priggishness" could have easily picked outrage mobs boycotting brands over deeming a trans person worthy of association as evidence that the "woke" people didn't have a monopoly on self righteousness and censoriousness.
Instead, he effectively endorsed the position that trans people were "woke" simply for existing and the consumers cancelling them had a point.
Better than endorsing Dylan Mulvaney's regressive and misogynistic "Days of Girlhood" act. A boycott was the right thing to do.
I'm too lazy to search my comment history, but I wrote a comment on the original post about pg's essay that I did pretty much agree with what pg wrote, and so consequently I agree with most of what you wrote.
But that said, I definitely could not ignore the timing of pg's essay, and it felt plain gross to me. It felt like a lazy, convenient pile-on at that moment, even if pg's position had been largely consistent for a long time. I've seen all these tech leaders now lining up to point out the problems of the left (again, a lot of which I agree with), so where is the essay about the embarrassingly naked grift of the POTUS launching a ridiculous and useless meme coin just before his inauguration?
Also, there was nothing in that essay that I felt was particularly insightful or that I learned much from. It was, honestly, some bloviating pontification from someone who I now think holds his ideas in much higher regard than they deserve.
I can largely agree with this as well. There were plenty of interesting and valid critiques people could make of the content, if they actually read it. I'm seeing a few of them in the replies to my comment here, but more intellectual sneezes.
> embarrassingly naked grift of the POTUS launching a ridiculous and useless meme coin just before his inauguration
It appears to be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
Idk if it's just me, but I voted blue in the last 3 presidential elections and I'm way more pissed about the Democrats than the Republicans right now.
They failed the country, so hard, by making poor decisions which made them lose. They did this repeatedly, I think which decisions were the wrong ones is up for debate, but the surest one imo is Joe Biden running again instead of stepping aside and having a real primary.
Anyway, all that is to say that I feel like I understand choosing now as a time to talk about what things you despise most about the left, because a lot of people feel like they failed America and the entire world by losing so decisively for reasons that feel stupid.
That makes you "way more pissed" than DJT literally trying to steal the 2020 election? The Dems are bad, but let's keep things in perspective.
Very much agree, but as I've found myself saying lately, "As much as I think the Democrats deserved to lose, I can't fathom thinking Trump deserved to win."
> “he might still be fine with transgender identity”
How extremely generous!
This is couched because he doesn't express a view, not because there's reason to doubt or to assume a level of acceptance.
Be charitable.
> Even in the HN thread on the essay, it felt like hardly anyone actually read and understood it, just brought their own assumptions and intellectual allergies and let them run wild. It would be great if people could discuss these issues rationally, but the vast majority can't. Everyone is on a hair trigger.
I think the essay was a rorschach test for readers. On its face, it has a very reasonable and measured tone. It also has some nods to the other side like the disclaimer you mentioned. However, it starts from some uncharitable premises (e.g., its definition of wokeness) and contains unnecessary gibes (e.g., against social sciences). More importantly, it takes the tone of a social sciences essay, a discipline that he mocks, without any of the rigor. There are not sources for his claims about the origins of wokeness or how universities operated from the 80's until today, you just have to take him at face value. It gives the illusion of being erudite without doing any of the actual work.
pg writing about non-tech topics has always rubbed up against Gell-Mann Amnesia.
This one’s footnote #2 addresses PG’s definition of “woke”, which I agree is useless (I’d go further: that kind’s so inconsequential that it’s nonsense to bring it up unless you’re using those complaints to attack other actions that do maybe have some justification, using the definition as cover to retreat to if called out; if that’s actually the only part you’re complaining about, just don’t write the piece, everyone already dislikes that kind for the same reasons you do)
What is “that kind” referring to? That kind of essay? The first essay? The response essay? That kind of definition? The author? Which author? That kind of person who is aggressively performative? If by “that kind” you mean that last definition, then let’s take one example in that happened recently and address your claim that “that kind” is inconsequential.
Undemocratically, performatively, anointing behind closed doors a weak but social justice signaling candidate to run on the democratic ticket in the recent US election, seems to have been just a wee bit consequential.
> Undemocratically, performatively, anointing behind closed doors a weak but social justice signaling candidate to run on the democratic ticket
You’re just stringing together bingo-card words. I don’t think this is going to be a productive exchange, so I’ll leave things where they stand.
This is exactly the thing the essay seems to be complaining about. It's not the ethics of equality being targeted, it's the moral hypocrisy.
People put on a false front with offensive messaging claiming support of these groups, but the whole purpose is to build clout or benefit themselves. They don't care about the message at all.
Messages like "I support lgbtq, and if you don't you're a bigot," are self-aggrandizement. "I support lgbtq," is all that's needed if you want people to know they are supported. No one needs to hear it at all if the discussion isn't relevant. Just try to treat everybody with respect.
Your argument is, "Don't say 'I believe X and if you disagree with me you're bad'. Just say, 'I believe X.'"
But then literally in the same sentence, you say, "If you do the thing I don't like (in this case, calling people bigots because they don't support lgbtq) *then you are self-aggrandizing."
"Nobody should be called a bigot for their views on lgbtq, but it's virtuous to call people self-aggrandizing for calling people bigots."
Either name-calling is okay or it's not. You can't have it both ways.
You can argue hypocrisy or about the way the argument is presented here, but it’s beside the point. Saying “there is only one correct opinion on this matter and if you disagree then you’re a bigot” is exactly what is driving people to oppose those opinions, regardless of whether they are correct. It’s just a really, really poor move, in terms of rhetorical strategy.
I agree that people don't like being called out for their views (on race, lgbtq, women, whatever). They would rather be left to believe what they believe in peace and not face the disapprobation of others.
Calling individuals may even further radicalize them, as you say. I am not convinced on this point, I sort of think their mind is not changing either way, but maybe I am wrong.
What I am sure of is, it is not the responsibility of people whose rights are being taken away to be polite to their oppressors for the sake of rhetorical strategy.
> What I am sure of is, it is not the responsibility of people whose rights are being taken away to be polite to their oppressors for the sake of rhetorical strategy.
This is very much the TERF line of thinking.
That term is considered to be a pejorative.
Re your last paragraph: I feel I'm quite left, but it feels like a lot of these activists are busy trying to make enemies out of everyone, which makes me think "I'll just shut the hell up" and, if I ever get confronted as being a part of the enemy class (I'm a heterosexual male, get the pitchforks!) , I'll just point out, "if you don't want me as your ally, then hey, no worries, I can be your enemy."...
Have you heard of or witnessed someone who was confronted as part of the enemy class just for being a straight male?
Where are you going that you need a contingency plan for this situation? Are you expecting this in a work situation, on a campus maybe, or just walking down the street?
That's how I feel. Everyone always has to have an "us vs them" methodology. Like you have to take sides. No thank you, I'm apathetic to the situation. I'm not going to deliberately make life worse for anyone or support it.
Yes - this is exactly how I felt about the "Wokeness" essay. I am constantly afraid that PG is gonna fall down the same strongly right rabbit hole so many of his colleagues have, and he hasn't so far, so seeing the title of the essay was worrying.
When I read it though, I realized he was just using "wokeness" to mean the dogmatic surface level understanding of the subject (IE, not that he was being surface level, but he's talking about people who engage with equality/identity issues in a surface level way). It's kind of a strawman idea, but people like that exist and are annoying. It makes me wonder how many people who are really centrists hate wokeness because they think the most annoying wing of it is representative of the whole movement.
Reading PGs article, I get the sense of someone who doesn't fully understand the thing he's criticising, so makes me hopeful he can learn. But again, I'm always a little afraid that the legit criticizisms of his article will get drowned out by people who reinforce what he says in it.
The mere fact that pg takes the word “woke” seriously tells me he’s fallen for the right-wing doublespeak where they take a word vaguely related to left-wing ideals, pretend it means something else, apply to anyone center-right or leftward, and get the mainstream media and self-conscious centrists like Paul to accept their intentional distortions at face value.
This pattern happens again and again with words and phrases like “liberal”, “socialist”, “Black Lives Matter”, “critical race theory”, “woke”, and “DEI”. Anyone who can’t see through it is either okay with the distortion, or not as good an observer as they think.
From the essay:
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?
It's early in the essay, too. Pretty near or above "the fold".
It might be reasonable to disregard Mr. Graham if he were somehow abusing the term "woke", but it seems wrongheaded to disregard him due to "the mere fact that [he] takes the word "woke" seriously".
The point OP is making (and it ‘s one that I agree with) is that Graham’s particular usage of the word “woke” as written in his essay functions as a shibboleth for a collection of reactionary beliefs and impulses — not merely that he uses the word, but that he does so in a poorly-defined and pejorative way that is characteristic of the word’s usage in various right-leaning circles.
> He just wanted to talk about how the particular loudmouth brand of annoying leftist came to prominence.
Nah, this is just not true about that essay. This is sort of excessive "lets twist what people say with maximum leftist spin so that we can paint everyone who disagree with them as crazy". It is getting repetitive, tiresome and amounts to a massive amount of online gaslighting. Center and left are all supposed to pretend that everyone is leftist just concerned with some extremists, no matter how much it is clear it is not the case, unless someone actually supports nazi party ... and sometimes even longer.
That essay did not even cared about actual history of events either.
I appreciate the author and this article. As an immigrant and person of color, the author's concerns resonate with me. I don't think people like PG or Andreessen are evil bigots. But they are underestimating and enabling a movement that is cruel and exclusionary by design. A movement that they seek to tame and harness, but not understanding that the movement is fundamentally untameable.
I miss the days when the Republican party was led by a President like Bush, who told America that Islam is a religion of peace. And nominees like McCain, who told his supporters that Obama is a decent family man, and a natural-born American. I worry for the future, and my children's place in it.
> I miss the days when the Republican party was led by a President like Bush, who told America that Islam is a religion of peace
At the same time he also said that if you don't agree with him, you're with the terrorists. I do agree that Bush went out of his way to not stigmatize Muslims or Islam, but "don't be a flaming racist" is not that high of a bar to meet, and he was very much not a moderate open to nuanced views (on this topic, and various others). Never mind stuff like Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, torture. I'm not sure it really matters for the Guantanamo Bay whether Bush is or isn't prejudiced against their ethnicity or religion: they're still detained in a camp. Without trail. For years. Being tortured.
McCain defending Obama against vile racist attacks was also not that high of a bar to meet. McCain was also a standard GOP senator during the "obstruct whatever Obama does at all cost" years, never mind how he tried to appeal to the crazy Tea Party fanbase with Palin. I don't entirely dislike the man by the way – I'd say his legacy is mixed and complex.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: don't look at it the past too rose-coloured. The current mess didn't spontaneously come to exist out of nothing. People like Bush and McCain made a pig sty of things, and then were surprised pigs turned up to roll around in the mess. The old "gradually and then suddenly" quip applies not just to bankruptcy.
> I miss the days when the Republican party was led by a President like Bush, who told America that Islam is a religion of peace.
He said this as he invaded a majority muslim country causing the deaths of tens of thousands of muslims. It was perception management, not a genuine concern for muslims. Words are not more important than actions.
Far be it from me to defend GWB, but in fairness he didn't invade them because they were muslim. There were many (poor) reasons for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, but their primary religion was not among them. If it were, many other Middle Eastern countries would have also been invaded.
Words are not more important than actions. But words can inform us of the intentions behind the actions - which must be considered when casting judgement.
> I miss the days when the Republican party was led by a President like Bush, who told America that Islam is a religion of peace.
As an ex-Muslim, I can assure you that Islam is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a religion of peace.
And you seem to be forgetting that Bush was a warmongerer who killed millions of innocents. I hope you are not endorsing the horrors he wrought.
I don't have exact numbers but my understanding is/was the US-led wars into Iraq and Afghanistan didn't cause millions of deaths but the insurrections against the governments established afterwards did. Iraqis killing other Iraqis, Afghans killing other Afghans.
Bush might have been the one who toppled the existing equilibrium of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, but most of the suffering was inflicted by the bloody civil wars (often fueled by third parties such as Iran).
You break it, you bought it. You get zero points for invading a country for no good reason and saying you’re going to bring freedom and democracy while having no realistic plan for actually doing it.
> Islam is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a religion of peace.
It is. The word Islam and Salaam are etymologically tied to the word "peace".
If your definition of peace is "never wages war", well there's no country or political regime in the world like that. Even India, which was liberated by the famous nonviolent philosopher Gandhi, did not last many years without needing to wage war and take territory.
Islam is the only remaining religion with a political element and an existing desire for statehood. You could argue for Judaism (but some of the Orthodox would disagree) also. Back when Christendom had aspirations of statehood, it was also not "peaceful" in the way most people imagine. But this isn't a feature of the religions. It's a feature of world politics. No one can be peaceful and engage meaningfully in world politics. Everyone is propped up by some army somewhere.
You can have many arguments against the social regime, views on gender, etc. Etc. of Islam, but to say it's not peaceful because it is a political entity is just not understanding politics or the world, imo
> Islam is the only remaining religion with a political element and an existing desire for statehood
What do you mean by this? There are several countries that declare themselves to be Islamic.
As POC I feel like equity movements in the US have, by far, become majority LGBT+ issues with a minority of racial or religious issues. Many POC cohorts in this election shifted toward Trump and I suspect it has to do with how much diversity initiatives have come to settle around White LGBT+ voices. I don't think I've seen the topic of Islam in America covered in any MSM article in years unless buried deep into an Opinion section.
I like to build bridges between minority groups but the current moment is really about mostly White gender minorities in the US. This is especially fraught right now because many POC communities tend to be more socially conservative than white communities, and LGBT+ acceptance is lower in POC communities than among the general American public.
That said I am not a fan of Trump and the modern MAGA movement's discriminatory politics, lack of respect for rule of law, denial of basic climate realities, and many many other things that I could list for days.
While I understand the point you're making, I am surprised by the examples you chose.
What Bush's speechwriter wrote, did not stop Bush from authorizing torture stations across the world, murdering hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians in two failed military occupations, while weakening America vis-a-vis Russia and China, a confrontation that has dominated the past several years. Do not mistake public statements as any indication of actual policy.
As for McCain, his words were "No Ma'am, he is not an Arab, he is a decent family man", which I suppose is addressing misinformation with a decisiveness Republicans wouldn't dream of today.
"who told America that Islam is a religion of peace"
This is something I considered a brazen lie in the interest of stability.
I believe in existence of individual peaceful Muslims, but I don't believe in inherent peacefulness of a religion founded by a warrior who converted Arabia by the sword and which had since seen an endless series of holy wars initiated in the name of Islam.
You can't really build societal understanding on a foundation of such misinformation.
To be clear, Christianity and Judaism aren't "religions of peace" either. Some explicitly anti-militaristic sects like the Amish maybe. But the Abrahamic faiths as such, no.
To pretend that every Muslim area in the world was converted by the sword is just totally unsupportable
I haven't said that every Muslim area in the world was converted by the sword.
But Muhammad led a lot of wars, in which thousands died. Which is fairly untypical among the founders of currently widespread religions, though the Old Testament heroes like Joshua can be categorized into a very similar slot.
Having read many of PG's essays from the 2000s and seeing how he communicates now, I can only reach one conclusion. Like Musk, Zuck and the others who got rich quick decades ago, they are too far removed from any kind of "hacker" ethos today, and see everything from 30,000 ft, almost literally. What kind of self-described hacker spends their days advising incubees on the best way to close "high-touch B2B sales"?
They concern themselves with accumulating power first, and maintaining their "innovator" image second. Any empathy or compassion they may have had for the concerns of ordinary people appear to be long gone, except perhaps for their personal friends who may be on the receiving end of state-sanctioned bigotry. Reagan for example ignored AIDS, seeing it as a "gays and minorities" issue, while in private he looked out for the care of his AIDS-afflicted gay actor friend Rock Hudson, who passed from complications in 1985.
Back to PG, see his essay from some years ago, "How People Get Rich Now"[0]. You would think it was ghost-written by an investment bank's IPO division. Every single line is another way of saying "raise money for speculative bet, then go public", ignoring his own decades of experience at YC indicating the overwhelming majority cannot achieve this, in the biggest VC market in the world. Much of the United States population has absolutely no entry point into Sand Hill Road.
A response to that essay from a software engineer provided a sobering perspective to counterbalance the winner-take-all world PG lives in. [1]
[0] https://paulgraham.com/richnow.html
[1] https://keenen.xyz/just-be-rich/ (HN discussion link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40962965)
tbf, "high touch B2B sales" is very much something a quite ordinary hacker doing quite ordinary B2B stuff is likely to want to figure out unless they're already quite good at it or know someone else that is, and I'm sure some of the suggestions are "hacky" in ways with both positive and negative connotations.
But yeah, he's always ultimately been an outspoken advocate for the most optimistic outcomes Silicon Valley ecosystem, because that's where his startup funnel leads. See also his article from 2004 in which he suggested that a startup was a way to work at a high intensity for four(!) years instead of forty[1]. Wonder what proportion of YC alumni retired happy after the four year work life?
I'm sure if you actually met PG in office hours he'd be realistic enough that your most realistic exit strategy almost certainly involved a lot more than four years of hard work and that yeah, your chances of success probably aren't high enough to impact the Gini coefficient, and I'm sure if you were trans he wouldn't take the side of people that send death threats to Budweiser for featuring people like you. But most of the essays are about positioning Silicon Valley. In a sense, he's a low touch, very high stakes B2B salesperson
I really appreciate this article, and I would like the author to know that there are lots of people - yes, especially in tech - that support their happiness.
This was also my first thought -- a deep sadness over someone hurting and feeling threatened and persecuted. I'd also like them to know they're not alone in this.
I was genuinely afraid of this post hitting HN, but thank you for the kind words.
I found your post extremely touching and humanizing. We need more of these perspectives right now that highlight the complex feelings of lived experiences. This is literally what makes us human, and has the potential to reach people in ways that polemic does not (which is not to say polemic isn't important). Thanks for sharing.
As someone pondering the exact same sentiment of "I like women so much that I kinda want to be one" but who hasn't fully committed to it yet, I really appreciated your vulnerability and lucid writing. I hope folks are kind here in the comments.
> It took me a while to remove my facial hair, I still haven’t trained my voice.
The facial hair removal really does take forever, it's so annoying :sob:. And I've found voice training (particularly around other people) to be really intimidating. I wish you the best of luck if you decide to pursue it!
Take care, OP.
Hi, thanks!
My unsolicited advice is: whether they realize it or not, _everyone transitions_ ;) http://okayfail.com/garden/everyone-transitions.html
I came out socially for most of a year before I committed to hormones, and it took me another year and a half to commit to removing my facial hair. At some point it really is a leap of faith. But you can do a lot of exploring and trying things out until you feel comfortable – or decide it's not really what you want.
Either way, good luck!
Your piece is very very well said. Thank you so much for putting yourself out there.
I was terrified to look up through the comments after reading the article, but HN truly surprised me today.
This is a very important conversation to have right now. Thank you for your vulnerability in sharing it.
Beautiful writing. I also read pg's essay and was also upset. Just know there are cis men like me who are on your side and hate where tech is going. The bigotry being out in the open is disturbing.
I thought this was better than most essays in this vein.
I do fundamentally disagree with the author. People can think poorly of you for whatever reason they want. If someone hates trans people, they can, and you can't stop them. The whole "war on hate" thing was a bad idea; you can't forbid hatred. It predictably didn't work, and it's good that we're turning away from it.
Adding on, the trans issue isn't simple. There are real questions about bathrooms, women's sports, and when medical interventions are called for. Of course, there are also just bigots. The proper response to bigots is not to banish them, ban them, shadowban them, etc. That didn't work. The proper response is -- in the spirit of the new era of free speech -- to firmly state your opposition to their beliefs.
> The whole "war on hate" thing was a bad idea; you can't forbid hatred. It predictably didn't work, and it's good that we're turning away from it.
This is a myopic view. You are obviously correct that you cannot legislate that someone think in any particular way or otherwise force someone to change their minds, but the idea that collectively deciding that a viewpoint is not longer tolerated within the broader society and then making efforts to support that at all levels is ineffective and not worthwhile is absurd. Threats, physical violence, and murder have always been illegal, but used to occur with much higher frequency against many minority groups toward which society tolerated hatred and abuse. It's plainly obvious what changed is the idea that it would be brushed under the rug, that others would at worst turn a blind eye to the perpetrator if not support them, that there would be no real consequences whether legal or in social circles - this environment in which people act on impulse rather than thinking twice about what they're doing - went away. We must remember that progress isn't permanent, that civil rights must be maintained and won't protect themselves, and that there's probably someone out there that hates someone each of us loves and cares about for some arbitrary reason and would act on that if only society gave them permission.
> The whole "war on hate" thing was a bad idea; you can't forbid hatred. It predictably didn't work, and it's good that we're turning away from it.
I don't understand any of this. It feels like you live in a different information bubble than mine.
What was the "war on hate", and who is turning away from it?
What would it mean to say that the "war on hate" worked? That there was no more hate, or that the situation improved somehow? What does it mean to say that it didn't work?
I've literally never heard the phrase "war on hate" in my life.
> If someone hates trans people, they can, and you can't stop them. The whole "war on hate" thing was a bad idea; you can't forbid hatred. It predictably didn't work, and it's good that we're turning away from it.
It is disingenuous to suggest that anti-discrimination laws for trans people are attempting to legislate away the hatred held in people’s hearts, instead of access to healthcare, public facilities, protections against workplace discrimination — things you describe as having “real questions,” but which are, in fact, the parts of a full and dignified life that bigots would deny to trans people in particular. If you pretend like it’s trying to legislate “thoughtcrime,” it’s much easier to distinguish anti-discrimination laws for trans people from rulings like Obergefell or Brown v. Board — far easier to say “look, those were good, but this particular civil rights legislation is simply unreasonable.”
To platform these beliefs is to afford them a legitimacy they do not deserve. To suggest that bigotry, when amplified, will be in some way countered or reduced is naïve beyond belief. Instead, it becomes easier for bigotry to find an audience of receptive listeners and willing conduits for further transmission.
You’re wrong that a so-called “war on hate” doesn’t work. More correctly, it doesn’t work in the US because of the first amendment and the few limitations on it.
Many other countries have robust anti-hate speech laws that are effective, although less so in the age of the internet.
People broadly conform to the society in which they live, and the rules of the society are broadly set by the laws they adhere to. So in countries where hate speech is disallowed, people conform to a less hateful viewpoint as a rule, and hateful people are the exception.
In the United States, it is clear that hatred is the norm as long as it is permitted by law and by leadership.
> People broadly conform to the society in which they live, and the rules of the society are broadly set by the laws they adhere to
Well this can work very differently from what you imagine I believe. Like late Soviet Union where certain things were said in public and other things were said in private or in "trusted environments". For years and years... From what I hear this is in part what goes on in large multinationals where the pressure to conform is quite tangible.
> it doesn’t work in the US because of the first amendment and the few limitations on it.
This isn't clear to me. For instance, Meta was free to forbid hate speech on their platforms, or not to promote it in their feed algorithms. I don't think first amendment would force them to authorize hate speech. They do it to align with power in place (freely or coerced, not clear), but it's not a legal enforcement.
> So in countries where hate speech is disallowed, people conform to a less hateful viewpoint as a rule, and hateful people are the exception.
There are hateful people in Europe too.
German woman given harsher sentence than rapist for calling him ‘pig’ : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/28/german-wom...
That's what "war on hate" slides to.
"Maja R was sentenced to a weekend in jail after her comments because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attending the court hearing for the case."
Whatever you can say about the suspended sentences, merely "given harsher sentence than rapist for calling him ‘pig’" is not true by your own article.
Article is behind a paywall. I found another article
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/a-german-woman-said-she-was-...
> The court did find the two men guilty of wrongly making and distributing the sex video and fined them 1,350 euros ($1,500) each. But it reserved its gravest punishment for Lohfink, levying her a fine of 24,000 euros for falsely accusing the men.
If we're talking about the same story, it has nothing to do with "war on hate".
>The whole "war on hate" thing was a bad idea; you can't forbid hatred
You can't forbid it but you can absolutely make it socially unacceptable. "Free speech" doesn't mean letting people spew hate and doing nothing; choosing not to hand them a megaphone, support their business, etc. is entirely valid.
It became so socially unacceptable that its proponents won the US presidency and took control of Congress and globally famous business leaders are bending the knee to them without repercussion? What definition of "can absolutely" are you using?
I personally did not read the parent comment's saying of "can" as meaning "has been"
The popular vote does not determine what is right. The US elected an incredibly racist Richard Nixon by a Landslide in 1972, but that doesn't mean society couldn't make progress on making it unacceptable to use racial slurs in public.
It is less socially acceptable in some cultures, more in others.
The fact that a gradient exists is proof that, under different circumstances, the social acceptableness of hatred can change.
There is a danger to hating something so much, that it goes underground. A major reason why President Trump won the first time around was because hatred against Trump and his supporters was so strong, that many people being polled were afraid to tell the pollsters who they were really voting for, for fear of being destroyed. This is a major reason why Trump outperformed his polling.
In the meantime, when people are lied to by every avenue of culture, they are convinced everyone else believes in the lies, so they feel alone and in the minority, even though they may very well be in the majority. So long as this spell can be maintaned, the dictator can hold his grip on power.
But what happens when that spell was broken? When something happens, and all of the sudden, everyone realizes they've been in the majority all along? This is how dictatorships topple -- and the toppling can happen very swiftly, as Ceausescu discovered in Romania.
Elon Musk acquiring Twitter and taking out the censorship is what initially cracked the spell this time; and when Trump was elected not just by Electoral College, but by the Popular Vote, the spell was broken completely. It's why we're seeing so much change now, and why it's so rapid.
How can you disagree with the author, they are doing exactly what you suggested, firmly stating their opposition to PG's beliefs.
It seems you didn't read their post. Also, yes, if someone hates you, you can definitely change their minds. The weapon in the war on hate is love. And there is a lot of love in the author's essay. Love for others in their position.
So you too can join the War on Hate by showing love to the author and letting PG know he is wrong, so very wrong.
> There are real questions about bathrooms, women's sports, and when medical interventions are called for.
Yes there are real questions, but there are also real answers. Currently, 99% of people asking questions have literally zero interest in answers. They do not care about what research say or whether there is harm or not. They ask questions to convince the audience about their political project.
They do not care about whether medical interventions are good, bad, safe or unsafe. They want to convince you that that they are unsafe. They want to stop the interventions regardless of their impact. They do not care about safety of bathrooms, they want you to punish transgender people in the wrong bathroom. They do not care about women sports either, in fact they are the same people arguing against women sports whereever it matters.
> People can think poorly of you for whatever reason they want.
And it should be my god give right to call them sexist and racists if they think of me poorly because of those reasons. But somehow that is supposed to be a taboo. We are all supposed to pretend there is no sexism, that there was no historical sexism, so that someone feels good about themselves. Again and again, sjws pointed out someone is sexist/racist, there was an outrage in response, they were painted crazy stupid exaggerating. And I actually believe the response, multiple times. Except that it turned out, multiple times, that they were right all along.
I would think that your claim about "99% of people asking questions have literally zero interest in answers" applies more to 'both sides' than one might initially think.
Is either side open to being told "no", or at least "wait, we need to be more cautious about this"? Or do both sides just want their demands to be accepted?
Would either side actually back down if the research said that what they were doing was harmful or ineffective?
> "wait, we need to be more cautious about this"? Or do both sides just want their demands to be accepted?
I think that yours "wait, we need to be more cautious about this" or is this just another "I do not care about answers, I just want to pretend so".
> Would either side actually back down if the research said that what they were doing was harmful or ineffective?
Research is there and it is saying current clinics were not harmful and were not ineffective. So yes, one side cares about research and the other is not.
>I think that yours "wait, we need to be more cautious about this" or is this just another "I do not care about answers, I just want to pretend so".
I don't know what you're referring to, but if you would like to get specific about it, many authoritative medical organizations, such as the one that presides over Sweden, have declared a halt on procedures such as prescribing puberty blockers to minors. This is an example of a "wait, we need to be more cautious about this", saying that the risks outweigh the benefits.
https://segm.org/Swedish-2022-trans-guidelines-youth-experim...
But here you are implying that the science is already "settled" and that there is no harm. So when you say that one side cares about the research and the other does not, are you completely sure about that?
I am completely sure about that, yes. Because even your "many authoritative medical organizations" thing cherry picks one organization saying maybe and ignores any positive results entirely.
You do not care about which procedures were actually done nor about what it took to get them. Puberty blockers for minors are not something new or done to transgender kids only. They have been used for years for non-transgender kids and they are not the only treatment constantly under attack.
If you cared about puberty blockers safety, you would care about also about when they work, you would care about accessibility when they do work ... and you would not act as if they were so easy to get in the first place.
And that last thing gives the game away.
It's not just Sweden, I could list other countries too, such as Denmark, Finland, England (outside of trials), Wales and Scotland. Norway calls it "experimental". All this information was found on the homepage of the same site I linked earlier.
But you don't seem to be open to discussion on this issue, and that's the double standard I'm pointing out. "They do not care about what research say or whether there is harm or not" is what you've said about others, and it seems like it applies equally to you as well.
And since you don't seem to be open to discussion on this issue, I'm going to leave it here. I think my point has been made.
Besides, the whole bathroom thing is so old hat. You know what I hate in a bathroom? Other people. Of any gender. Thankfully, stalls have doors.
I miss the days of Ally McBeal when unisex bathrooms were hip and the future.
In my local city there was conservative article about unisex bathroom putting framing it as transgender thing.
The bathroom was unisex when I was a kid, when trans were universally mocked. Bathroom is unisex, cause there is exactly one toilette in a small cafe in a super old building.
Unisex bathrooms mean women get to clean the bathrooms again because men can't be bothered to aim or sit.
The author isn't talking about abstract "hatred" in the sense of people's internal, personal experiences. They are talking about hate speech, a specific concrete act with external material consequences.
> Adding on, the trans issue isn't simple.
It really kind of is though.
I feel this a lot, not so much from the perspective of someone that belongs to a formerly "protected" group, but came into tech at the height of the tech revenge-of-the-nerds style "zeitgeist" in the early 2010's to 2015, around the same time he mentions being involved in startups. My first job was a startup, with a bunch of students and a professor at my alma mater. We failed miserably - not in the way I had envisioned, but because of just basic VC funded stuff. We were a $20 million company with half a dozen of us, which would have been great for any of us, even our founders - but the VC's wanted a $200 million company. Poof.
That put a bitter taste in my mouth that has gotten more bitter when the "promise" of a society led by technocrats has yielded a barrage of increasingly shitty and invasive products that don't provide any additional utility to anyone except the people who stand to profit from them. It's exhausting, extremely depressing, and if I had to do it again I probably would have avoided tech, as much as I like what I do - I feel a deep sense of shame sometimes at the state of how it's gone.
There are a lot of things that bother me these days. But particularly some things that are pervasive, unnecessary, habitual amplifiers of disagreement.
If someone is going to address extremists on an issue, don't just be anti-extremist. What empty courage is that?
Address extremists by pushing the dialog back to the real issue. In this case, treating people who have been denigrated for centuries better.
Otherwise, ungrounded one-sided criticism of extremists on one side of an issue, just gives tacit permission for the extremists on the other side. It can even be difficult to tell, whether they are not simply mirror extremists themselves. But either way, they just amplify the extremist vs. extremist narrative.
And completely distract from the real human level issues that are being hijacked.
Don't be anti-bad, while conspicuously avoiding acknowledging what would be good. How should we address discrimination against trans and other non-binary people? What changes are beneficial? What companies have DEI approaches that are good models?
PG, any thoughts?
Please, don't call out "your going too far!" - no matter how necessary or accurately - if you don't have the courage, insight, or a genuine desire to solve the underlying problem. And express "how far" you agree we should go.
Don't just poke a bear. Address the elephant!.
--
One-sided viewpoints just make an easy sport, score trivial (dare I say, also performative?) points, out of something more serious.
I.e. don't make strong arguments for or against one side of the Israeli-Palestine situation, without acknowledging the strong points you do accept as valid from both sides.
I hope I don't offend anyone by suggesting that any intellectually honest discussion of divisive views cannot possibly boil down to one-sided criticisms of other people's one-sided views.
I agree with your premise that there is often an unproductive pendulum-like phenomenon in public debates where interpretations swing from one extreme to the other, making nuanced discussions difficult.
However I don't believe that PG's article meant to address the elephant, but rather was a meta-level thesis on how he sees debates being shut down by orthodoxy, and for that he does suggest what he thinks would be a possible solution.
Perhaps the thesis could have gained in being more balanced to as you say "avoid giving tacit permissions for the extremists on the other side"? On the other hand, does one always have to shield one's expressions with disclaimers and is one not free to share thoughts however raw in order to express, discuss and learn, update our beliefs?
There likely is a bigger responsibility when one has a larger audience to avoid misinterpretations, but ultimately I believe as long as there is a rational and nuanced discussion to take the good points and have a productive debate, it should be okay.
How can we create incentives to have a more nuanced discussion?
> does one always have to shield one's expressions with disclaimers and is one not free to share thoughts however raw in order to express, discuss and learn, update our beliefs?
The problem with one-sided criticism of extremism is:
1. It is indistinguishable from the default extreme-vs-extreme debate. So it amplifies stupidity all around.
2. The takeaway is unclear. Are all programs to counterbalance discrimination just evil things from the bottom up.
3. It ignores middle ground. Guess we better give up on being more fair, and benefiting more from societies outcasts, and more fairness in general? It must be anti-capitalist, -technology, -patriotic, or something?
None of that is helpful.
So yes, I would say quite strongly, addressing complex divisive issues requires wide situational awareness, nuance, intellectual humility, curiosity, honesty, and an aim to move discussion away from division and toward solutions.
Not more reactionary communiques.
---
A completely different approach would be: these DEI programs are out of hand and creating new problems of their own. Not good. But the status quo they are meant to address isn't good either.
So, here are some thoughts on how we could systematically address harmful discrimination in a way that doesn't forget to be fair to everyone else... And fair to everyone is the point of all this, right?
If anyone might be a useful mentor here, it could be pg, if he steps back and thinks about things more. It fits with his general quest to help startups succeed on all fronts. Wisdom for handling side issues well, professionally, creatively, so they don't keep cropping up as distractions.
Does PG or YC have a sensible practical low-ideological view on ensuring hiring and employee treatment reflects and benefits from diversity, avoiding the pitfalls of unfair discrimination, without creating new ones, and defining diversity to mean ALL of us?
That might take more thought. But it would be well worth a PG post. It is also liable to hit more people FROM ALL SIDES or NO SIDES, as worthy of consideration.
> I.e. don't make strong arguments for or against one side of the Israeli-Palestine situation, without acknowledging the strong points you do accept as valid from both sides.
What Israel is doing to Palestinians last 77 years it exists is much worse than what Palestinians do to Israel on average from several perspectives by at least an order of magnitude or more (eg. amount of destruction and killing for sure, amount of subjugation, ...).
So wanting balance and giving one-sided defence to one side seems fair, regardless of any "strong points" on any side. If one has strong arguments, they should be used and voiced, because it's simply a numbers game in democracy.
You make a good point that no one else had, afaik: PG is strawmanning, and not steelmanning his opponents. This is craven.
So much said, with such fewer words ... :)
And giving voice to power vs. power, instead of to the less powerful. Reduced by both "sides" to pawns, their needs to playing cards.
> Are “identity politics” just a status game that economically advantaged elites play?
Yes. But it's a disgrace that we're throwing the baby (genuine progress, like the slow acceptance of non-binary people) out with the bathwater.
Huge pretending going on though that we are doing this. We are not throwing away the baby.
There is nuance and people are pretending there is not. I support trans people but also support safety for all people. There are some nuanced details when you get to reality, and we can’t just pretend those away.
The symptoms or pretending are things like not finishing the essay, or not even reading far enough to uncover PG’s definition near the beginning, so it had to become a footnote later when someone told them about it.
I appreciate this post, and that HN clearly isn't moderating it in a way outside of their stated policies.
It is really hard to see the backpedaling of big tech with regards to identity politics as something other than virtue conformance. The sad and natural question that gets drawn is, where does the real virtue start and the performance begin?
> where does the real virtue start and the performance begin
This reminds me of when people criticize other people for not simply being themselves. Maybe they are being themselves, and that's just not good enough for you?
The argument against "virtue signaling" is a judgement against doing something which the critic doesn't think is beneficial or necessary, and so they conclude it must be performative. But, the person doing it thinks it is beneficial or necessary.
Thus, the critic is failing to allow for a different view. Not that they have to accept the different view, but they should at least be able to recognize that someone else has a different view than their own. But, they can't or won't.
>We could get people to pay us hundreds of dollars per month, but not thousands
I find it interesting that they say their startup folded because they could only get people to pay hundreds a month. That sounds like success to me.
>That’s the death knell of a vc-backed b2b saas sales model. >We were too burnt out to pivot to another business idea, and we quietly folded.
I guess VC funding killed their successful startup and burned them out. It sounds like they didn't need funding in the first place, and it caused more harm than good in their case.
> He thought it was a decent enough idea, but the name, Appcanary, he wasn’t crazy about the name. He was very good at naming companies.
FWIW, he hated the name Reddit, and the mascot even more. He said if they have to keep the mascot, it should be on the bottom right where no one can see it.
PG is a smart guy, but you gotta trust your gut sometimes even when taking to experts.
These days I just feel sad for some of the richest people. First their wealth seem to have pulled them away from their humanity. Now I just see them lead troubled existence and inflict pain on others, amplified by the said wealth. All the money in the world and no humanity or peace at heart.
My guess is there are two possibilities as to what's going on:
* Many tech pioneers and leaders deep down felt an animosity towards supporting people who didn't fit the mold and finally feel free to express it (the worst-case outcome), and/or
* Many tech pioneers and leaders wish to continue supporting those who don't fit the mold but feel their own status threatened by figures with nearly infinite power[0] who disagree.
The former are simply the intolerant coming up for air. The latter exhibit a cowardice, though there's a subpoint to that second bullet: there could be some in this crowd who prefer to conform to but then dismantle the power structures enabling hatred from within, but these people likely won't be known for a while, and it'll be difficult to predict who's acting subversively in this way. Though given PG's narrowly scoped essay, there's a reasonable chance that this is his footing.
The best people can do is assume the least-worst case - the cowardice - and instead seek to either craft themselves as the people they wish to see... and/or protect oneself from the rising tides of hatred.
[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
There's also a third type, that I consider to be the most likely reality given self-selected population of founders / successful leaders:
- People who will amorally play to the limits of the rules if it helps them win.
It doesn't matter what they personally feel, or even if they have feelings at all. They tack with whatever way the wind is blowing in order to derive the maximum benefit.
E.g. the million dollar inauguration contributions
That's not a lot of money for that sort of person. The point of kissing the ring is the visible action and the favor it curries, not because the kiss is dear.
This is lacking a lot of nuance though isn't it? You're basically saying hate the player not the game, and that isn't really useful. When you step up to the arena and decide to play a competitive sport, because of game dynamics you can only know so much about who you are playing against, so you should play. The whole philosophical theory behind capitalism is literally progress emerges from the conflict and tension created between it's functional systems. If you want to get down to blaming humans, you're going to hav to go over to Adam Smiths or Joseph Schumpeter.
I'm saying it's debatable judging the player if they stay inside the rules as enforced.
I definitely hate the game.
Yeah I don't know why I skipped this one, but given the relationships between CEOs and psychopathy I shouldn't be surprised.
> Many tech pioneers and leaders wish to continue supporting those who don't fit the mold but feel their own status threatened by figures with nearly infinite power[0] who disagree.
If only tech had some sort of rugged frontiersmen who weren't afraid of a bit of hardship. Davy Crockett types, pushing boundaries and standing firm under siege no matter the personal cost.
We could call them "pioneers" - if any existed.
Yeah, there’s probably some Pulling The Ladder up like my Irish immigrant ancestors did. At one point everyone in the discussion was a nerdy social outcast. Now that they can afford to hang out with the Beautiful People, time to be as agreeable as possible.
Or maybe the world is simply returning to the way it has been for pretty much all of recorded history. Wars, male dominance, two fixed genders, oligarchs and barons and racism is the norm for all human beings since forever. “Wokeness” is a very recent anomaly.
You probably need to read more history, and maybe challenge yourself to find sources, if you think those things were always widely true everywhere.
Even most of the world right now doesn’t care about wokeness and never has. India, the Middle East, Africa, China, Russia etc. never caught on to most woke stuff that came out of the west in the past 20 years.
This isn't a response to what I posted. You said that it's a recent concept without any presence in non-Western spaces. My link clearly demonstrates that's not the case.
goose comic Who has recorded that history?
This is a really personal article and I'm really grateful the author shared it. I think too often conceptual terms like "wokeness" and "identity politics" get thrown around without really considering the people underlying those ideas.
It's easy to make snap judgements along the lines of "the world is too woke these days", but a lot harder to argue against peoples ability to live as they choose with basic dignity.
Why did this person write an essay about an essay, condemning it with a lot of serious accusations about potential future harm, while also stating they didn't fully read it?
He does some throat-clearing that help address some of these complaints.
It is a very bad essay that says "I am unfamiliar with the target of this essay, but I felt strong emotions when I read bits of it, which qualifies me to pontificate and condemn".
Some of the disagreement or confusion seems to stem from the definition of the word "woke" which means different things to different people?
Having read both essays I don't see them necessarily in disagreement. pg criticizes the performative and orthodox nature of some social justice activists' behavior, however it doesn't seem that the author's behavior here is performative at all.
Perhaps we should just avoid these terms like "woke" and just say what we mean to avoid this societal dissonance? I feel like decent rational people can talk past each other depending on how they have been exposed to the term.
If they’d named “wokeness” to be “kindness” or “considerate”, then there would be people who would still have found a way to be “anti-considerate”, and mean it as a “good” thing.
In some circles, someone being gay or trans will always be a sin, and non-whites seen as “lesser beings” (both their views not mine). As it stands, these people vote more consistently for the same party and in larger numbers.
We should hire the right people for the right job, but let’s be honest, in cultures where the majority perceive such minorities in disgust through lack of education and bigotry, they are unlikely to hire them regardless of whether they were better fit the job or not.
DEI should have been left at a reminder checking your own biases. Instead in many organizations it spiraled into minority preferential hiring, and that caused a backlash, and rightly so.
Where do we go from here? Who knows. My hope is that we find kindness and consideration for each other, but since the incoming administration has experienced such success from beating the anti-woke drum, I fear that it won’t be such a nice ending.
>If they’d named “wokeness” to be “kindness” or “considerate”, then there would be people who would still have found a way to be “anti-considerate”, and mean it as a “good” thing.
"If we name our religion the Religion of Peace..."
This line of illogic has been memed for years: https://imgflip.com/i/67qfsz
Graham's essay refers to Bud Light sending a trans influencer promotional beer cans as "woke". I don't know how that's "performative and orthodox social justice activism".
My current way of thinking about it is that we should tolerate communities that we find weird. People who cross dress are to me as weird as the religious people or the overly enthusiastic magic the gathering players. Should I hate them or discriminate against them? No. Should I let them force their community rituals on me? No as well.
I don't like someone telling me "God bless you" as much as someone forcing me to pretend they're a different gender.
Wokism was a movement against discrimination, bullies, and such. Not a movement to force you to adhere to specific communities rules
> someone forcing me to pretend they're a different gender
What is it specifically which you don't want to do? Use their preferred pronoun?
In this scenario, who is forcing you and how?
Many examples of people losing jobs, becoming the object of online mobs, etc for refusing to use preferred pronouns.
Men participating in women’s sports.
Men entering women’s spaces like locker rooms and bath rooms.
Men imprisoned alongside women, with predictably horrible results.
We can treat trans people with compassion, but they are not entitled to change our culture and trample common sense without slow, careful examination. Now that we’re returning to sanity on that front, the data aren’t looking very good.
Interesting contrast. This essay is self-indulgent and the subtext is "I'm important". Paul Graham's essays are economical and the subtext is "the reader is important".
But the Appcanary was not a bad idea, isn't website monitoring a lucrative market (see New Relic)? Too crowded?
It's complicated isn't it? A business doesn't care about you. It doesn't because it can't. Business doesn't have thoughts and feelings, business is clinical. Business is nothing more than the collection of processed and systems crafted to work together, facilitating the exchange of value between 2 parties. The problem is with the 2 parties part. The 2 parties part, that part very much does have thoughts, feelings, and emotions, those two parties are made up of humans. Bobby Sue just wants the alternator working on the car so they can go to a family funeral and mourn. Jerry in accounting at alternator inc's going through a momentous life shift, spiraling his whole world into a new framing, changing everything. Sally in design is just trying to feed her kids. And while these things matter none to the business technically, they matter deeply to the humans involved. It's complicated because business doesn't, shouldn't, and can't have feelings, however, business activity is indeed made up of people, and they most certainly do. There is always a risk of being too cold and focusing only on the bottom line, or becoming so caught up in individual needs and emotions that you lose sight of the basic structure that keeps a business functioning. Booby Sue needs to mourn, and Jerry needs stability for his life change, Sally has kids. And so, there is some empathy to be found for people deciding fundamental things for their businesses, it's not easy to know when to be clinical in look at the business, especially knowing it's comprised of a collections of humans, organized, into a company. Care too much about the outside, the business fails, care too much about the inside, the business fails. These are not easy things, the trick is to avoid hostage situations, and so rationality and intellectual honesty is key when framing these discussions. I expanded these thoughts here: https://b.h4x.zip/dei/
I disagree with your axiom that businesses shouldn’t have feelings. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a business that feels it should treat its workforce kindly and ethically and recruit a diverse set of people.
How can a business feel that? You mean a founder? a ceo? the investors? The laywers? People who are running business at $500MM+ arr have 4 things to consider distinctly, with their own lenses and frames: The business- It's model, it's operations, defined processes etc, every monday this report comes in, it is read by this functional area, it's converted into this insight, the insight is used, the consumer is delighted, more money comes in, the cycle continues. The humans involved are relevant so much as they must be able to do the task, who the literally are doesn't particularly matter, it's just a resource to allow a cog to spin. The company - the people inside the business. The organizations - how the people are assemble continually. The market - customers etc.
If you observe the business "feeling" - done correctly, what you're observing the outcome of an evaluation process that decided it functioned more competitively in a different mode. (The best world class employees are in Spain, lets make our HR more diverse in it's language) A business cannot, should not, and does not, have feelings. The only place ethics technically come into play are in the context of law.
It's nuanced, but it's important, without being fully fleshed in your framings, things get muddy. Businesses are systems and processes that fairly and adequately serve the parties involved while hedging out individual humans.
So I found the author to come across as a sincere and thoughtful individual, but when I went over to actually read PG's essay on wokeness, it didn't seem to have any resemblance to what was described. I wonder if the author actually read it, or just read enough to see that it was not pro-woke and decided that was all they needed to know?
One way to think of him is a wealthy person unaccustomed to hearing "no" that wants to say whatever they'd like regardless of the social collateral and writing an essay complaining about an empathy zeitgeist. Make no mistake, a person with thinking so fixed and undeservedly confident in ideas which he has a woefully limited understanding about will just as soon tell you to to rename your preferred pronouns as they would your company.
Earlier in my (now long) career, tech didn't feel political at all (just a bunch of nerds trying to figure shit out). Nowadays, it feels really weird to associate things like cryptocurrency with "tech bros on the right", etc. It all feels very unnecessary, but I suppose humans have a natural tendency to divide into camps as a survival characteristic. Whatever the case, The United States has certainly at a stage where it feels like tolerance for others is at a low point--at least as far as my historical memory serves--and the country seems far less welcoming than it has in the past to a variety of cohorts which will affect the makeup of the work force. The general politicization of the tech industry makes me less excited about continuing as an engineer, which is sad, because it's always been a discipline that I've really loved. It feels like "hate politics" are oozing out of everything these days, and I don't see how that represents progress of any kind.
There’s just more money in tech than in 2000s, so the most interest is mostly coming from financial incentives rather than general curiosity. That just puts extreme pressure for it to be politicized.
Thank you for the breath of fresh air, and helping reduce the echo chamber that hn can be sometimes
Didn’t we agree no more politics on HN?
If Trump getting shot doesn’t make on HN, I don’t think Trump announcing his gender policy should.
> I’m still not sure what pg thinks “Wokeness” means.2 I know for a fact, that for most people – including many of the people he hangs out with – it just means “left-wing thing I dislike”. I got the impression that he thinks it’s bad, and that companies should purge people who are too woke. Maybe I’m being unfair to him.
The funny thing is that Paul Graham has a framework for thinking about these sorts of things, which is explained very eloquently in "beating the averages". He calls it the "Blub paradox".
Blub is a hypothetical programming language that is roughly average in terms of expressive power and abstraction. The Blub programmer can recognize languages that are inferior to Blub because they lack some important feature that they would find it difficult to do without. On the other hand, they can't recognize the merits of more powerful languages very easily because the features are unfamiliar and seem like "a bunch of abstract nonsense invented by ivory-tower academics" that have limited real-life application.
I think the same thing works for social views. It's easy for someone somewhere on the spectrum from might-makes-right brutishness on one end and perfect wisdom, justice, and harmony on the other to know when they're looking down. But someone who is more "progressive" than they are will usually appear indistinguishable from someone trying to impress their friends with how "woke" they are.
I think this comes into play in elections. Voters in general seem to be more willing to vote for someone more conservative than they are than someone more liberal.
This take seems to project a massive amount (of negative falsehood) onto Paul Graham's essay. As I read his essay, Paul Graham does not care one wit about the gender (trans or otherwise) of an individual. He is explicitly criticising those who create arbitrary rules (e.g., the term LatinX) that don't actually serve society but instead serve as virtue signals.
If you are competent, you'll be able to find employment. Yes, discrimination exists, but if there is an abundance of talented trans people, someone is going to exploit that talent pool (by hiring) in an efficient market economy.
Frankly, the author seems a bit egotistical. Being transgender has nothing to do with being woke. People like Paul Graham criticising wokeness are not criticising transgenderism. His essay is not about you (and nobody reading his essay should interpret it in anyway as being against you).
The industry has become very unsettling, mean, and malicious. For 20 years I have warned people about the old "we are changing the world" mantra and that the people leading that chant were "evil", and therefore "change" would not be aligned with good... and here we are. Remember kids. Change and progress are extremely subjective.
Can't help but OP might have been better engaging with PG's Wokeness article itself (it's full of holes, and probably one of the weakest he's written), than talking about what they think the article said made them feel.
Ironically the Wokeness article does what most people accuse "wokeness" of doing, predetermining its conclusion, and then shoehorning in a bunch of loosely connected facts and phenomena to support that assertion.
It's not a direct criticism of the PG article, the OP is examining a broader cultural phenomena right now. PGs scribbles were just one example.
> Ironically the Wokeness article does what most people accuse "wokeness" of doing, predetermining its conclusion, and then shoehorning in a bunch of loosely connected facts and phenomena to support that assertion.
This basic approach underpins the pop-business and some of the pop-science industry. Plus much of self-help. And a good chunk of popular political books, of course.
It’s a winning approach, lots of folks read that kind of thing and nod along, are glad they paid money for it, and recommend that others do the same.
Even the “good” books in those genres are often guilty of it :-/
Motivated reasoning, cheap rhetorical tricks, and half-fake but digestible and uncomplicated history/facts are how you “win” the war of ideas.
I like the shape of your prose!
It's interesting to see how tech bros are slowly sliding to the right. The first thing I ever read from Paul was his thing about lisp, and I almost instantly disliked him. There is an intense ego that radiates from his ilk. You see a similar thing with some small business owners. Owning and running a business gives them a feeling of superiority. They feel that they are affluent thanks solely to their own efforts (and perhaps some negligible work from their employees), and seeing that others are less wealthy they conclude themselves to be superior [1]. I think it's an inevitable fact of capitalism that the people who rise to the top are the ones who are greedy, who confuse profit with virtue. It's really no surprise that they are easily influenced by the winds of fashion; you don't get rich by taking a stand.
[1] Footnote 12, https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html#f12n
You may enjoy “Dabblers and Blowhards” from IdleWords, if you’re not already familiar with it.
https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Reading that helped me come to terms with how most of the time when I read PG essays I was a lot less impressed than everyone else seemed to be, and often (any time the topic wasn’t narrowly tech or maaaybe business) his writing struck me as actually bad—not well-reasoned, not convincing, and giving an impression of his being poorly-informed.
When I experience an author everyone else is praising that way, I wonder if I’m the moron. But, sometimes, maybe I’m not…
Thanks, a very good read. Made me chuckle a lot. I've always found Paul's obsession with being a "hacker" rather annoying.
> tech bros are slowly sliding to the right
I see many people confidently and incuriously throw this idea around, meanwhile many of the tech bros are saying “no, I haven’t shifted all that much , the left just went crazy”. [1] I’m not sure which claim is “correct”. Probably breaks one way or another on an individual basis. But it does seem like we should probably give people some credit for introspection versus mind reading.
[1] The following cartoon has been shared by many and distills the idea well: https://x.com/swipewright/status/1462114108535312388?s=46&t=...
If the OP struggles to reconcile their perception of PG before and after discovering his differing beliefs, that’s neither PG’s fault nor anyone else’s.
This reaction reflects a broader cultural issue that PG himself occasionally comments on. It’s an unfortunate symptom of our times to misattribute personal frustrations and resentments—born of an often unfriendly and unfair world—to solely external causes like a conspiracy of bigotry and malevolence.
In reality, such feelings often stem from an unrealistic internal denial of the natural (painful) "othering" of outlier behaviour or identity, something that can only be mitigated through education and maturity, and pragmatic reasonableness on both sides.
It cannot be solved by the hectoring, bullying, self-pitying, or other toxic behaviours rightly associated with the declining “woke” movement, which the OP seems to criticise PG for opposing.
> It cannot be solved by the hectoring, bullying, self-pitying, or other toxic behaviours rightly associated with the declining “woke” movement, which the OP seems to criticise PG for opposing.
This sounds like the criticisms of MLK, Jr. and other civil rights activists for always stirring things up. People who want change tend to stir things up.
That being said, I think you exaggerate about the toxic behaviors of the "woke" movement. Certainly, you must be referring to online, because I can't think of when I have ever experienced any of that offline. If you're talking about Twitter, then I guess I could believe it, because that place is toxic as hell.
My sympathies to the author. I’ve had more than a few moments of disillusionment myself.
But it’s always better to be aware and disillusioned than unaware and happy.
I'm so mad at people like PG. They are actively helping turn the US into a right wing tech oligarchy and at the same time complain about "wokeness". Let's say I'm not surprised, just a few months ago PG called Musk a political centrist!
All the best to the author!
Didn't downvote you, but I'm not sure there is anyone in the American VC class that shared the harrowing plight of Palestinians as much as Kamala-voting pg did. Not to say he does it alot, but in the VC feeds that I normally check out once in a while it's virtually non-existent. Hell, Musk even attended and applauded Netanyahu's speech in Congress.
...By that metric that would make pg a radical leftist.
You know what wasn't on my bingo card for 2024? Paul Buchheit being red-pilled harder than Paul Graham.
> Kamala-voting pg
Oh! I didn't know he spoke out against Teump and endorsed Harris: https://x.com/paulg/status/1851200055220306378/photo/1
That's a pretty strong statement. Hats off!
Since then, PG seems to have gone silent on Trump. Instead he decided to post that essay about wokeness, right after major SV players publicly sucked up to Trump. Didn't he - or the people who read the draft - realized that it would make people believe he joined the MAGA camp? What happened there?
I think Musk called pg a retard and released the right-wings trolls on him by doing so after pg pushed back on Musk's UK interference when he shared a UK poll showing a dislike for Musk across party lines. He's stated his preference for Kamala over Trump on multiple occasions ("I don't agree with xyz, but on the whole Trump is worse." being the gist of it). Right-wing trolls also went after him after this anti-woke essay, claiming he was late to the party. though he had been consistent on that point for quite some as well.
> when he shared a UK poll showing a dislike for Musk across party lines.
Love it! But all of that doesn't really explain why he went silent on Trump and decided to publish that essay at probably the worst time possible. I know it is consistent with some of his past essays, but the optics are terrible. What was he thinking?
It’s infuriating how fast the masks have come off with the tech elites.
They were up on stage today with better seating and vantage points than the hard-working civil servants and diplomats who actually care about making the world a better and more peaceful place.
People like PG need regressive policies to keep the gravy train running because the hacking startup thing works less and less over time. Everything you can solve with a computer has been solved. All that’s left is oligarchs consolidating left and right.
Zuck, Cook, Musk, and the rest need to fuck right off.
PG is just another member of the .01% who is an exploiter of labor. His founders who grind and eat ramen to survive are just individual dice rolls for his portfolio.
I know which side of the class war I am on.
This made me unreasonably annoyed, not from the author though.
>The mentors applied a neat and very effective trick: they believed in you.
It's crazy to me that the LeetCode interview style is still such an aberration compared to other jobs that yield potentially much more money
Do you want to be a Software Engineer at this company? We don't trust you, the previous company could have let you in under the radar and you could secretly be a terrible engineer.
Do you want to run a SaaS and make us and yourself a bunch of money? Welcome aboard, we trust you completely once you're in. Just change your company name to fucking Oracle, ha ha ha.
This industry is such an imbalance of misplaced scrutiny, and certainly more so when they get into political stuff like wokeness.
If you're pg rich, just shut the fuck up.
> the reason why conservative women are so mad about trans women is because they don’t want to share washrooms with the sex slave caste.
I would like to see more of the HN caste engage with the very notion of a caste system, but I can't immediately think of a way to do it that also accommodates the spirit of HN—which I value—that dictates we focus on technical subjects. Perhaps the techie workforce angle is the only good faith approach.
Are you the "ordinary people" he was referring to in a recent tweet @ Musk?
Link to the essay in question: https://paulgraham.com/woke.html
I met PG once when we went to visit him for some office hours for my YC startup. I was a late cofounder so I hadn't been part of the program. During the conversation I said something, he looked and me and said "I have no idea what you just said", then turned back to my cofounder and kept chatting. o_O
> I’m still not sure what pg thinks “Wokeness” means.
So then what is it about his essay that you find so upsetting?
The wokeness essay was long, hard to process, and still vexes me and makes me wonder if there were any specific triggers involved. One of the parts that most leapt out at me was the question of what would activists worry about after the Iron Curtain fell? Most of Europe both east and west have health care integrated with their social fabric, so that seems a likely target. And that subject is especially problematic since Romney put the Heritage Foundation market based universal health care access in place in Massachusetts which means that there is no longer any political or philosophical basis for fighting so called "socialized medicine". But instead of extending health care to all the problem is the wokeness which might lead us to conceive of such a thing in the first place?
I have to say that this is a very well written piece. The story in the first half does a good job of showing the author's personality and making him seem very relatable, at least if you are a typical HN reader. And it's a good story and didn't have me thinking "get to the point", especially since the title doesn't make you expect anything more than a good story.
Then halfway down, he drops the words "I'm transgender now" and you start to realize what he/she is really writing about.
If the article started there it would have lost a lot of people. Instead with the first half it gets you invested and you stick around to read the rest of it.
PG's essay about wokeness, on the other hand, didn't really accomplish this. In fact it kind of did the opposite: came on strong and imprecise at the beginning and became more measured and precise towards the end. And thus it probably lost a lot of readers toward the more "woke" end of the spectrum like this author.
Hard agree, the writing here is exceptional.
I like the article, but one doesn't need to meet pg once to get to know what he is.
You can just read his tweets (x's?) and he, like many VCs or higher-ups in SV doesn't give a huge importance in how other humans feel, just in his kids/family/relatives.
So overall, he doesn't care about how you think or feel.
If he did, he wouldn't write an essay on a touchy topic without making a big disclaimer.
By reading him tweet for sometime you'd realize the kind of person he is, and he isn't somebody that is there to support others or something, or has threaded prejudice or huge issues in his life.
The deepest essay pg has written that touches the "They don't like me" point, from all I've read is his thoughts about nerds/geeks, after all we get bullied! You can't compare being a nerd to being transgender, or a victim of racism, or xenophobia. It's very different.
He just doesn't have studied, or suffered enough to understand the perspective of a "woke", then he wrote that article. AI engineers would say the problem with pg's llms didn't have enough training data ;-)
There are two key aspects here: the nature of work and a critique of woke narratives, which some argue deny recent developments by framing them as a simple desire for acceptance. Specifically, transgender individuals are seen as being elevated through diversity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, with accusations that these efforts sometimes prioritize activism over qualifications and invade female only spaces that are there for a reason.
While I understand the personal challenges you’re navigating regarding identity and humanity, it’s important to maintain boundaries between personal matters and professional life. In Silicon Valley, the focus is on achieving ambitious goals that deliver exceptional results, similar to the performance expected in professional sports. Success depends on everyone concentrating on their work, regardless of personal beliefs or identities. Therefore, keeping personal issues like sexuality and the woke religion separate from the workplace ensures a productive and diverse viewpoint inclusive environment where all qualified individuals can contribute effectively and help companies thrive against odds.
The essay wasn't a criticism of the changing definitions of gender/race/power etc.
The essay was a criticism of the activist tools used by 'woke'. The difference between:
"Hi! I am transgender."
and
"You will acknowledge me as transgender."
He doesn’t want to let people at a big NGO give their own opinion on J. K. Rowling: https://x.com/paulg/status/1866497580466942269 Says it's Orwellian.
So he also seems outspoken, by your standard. He couldn’t stop at “Hi! This is what I think about J. K. Rowling...”
A lot of this comes down to the difference between freedom of speech and platforming. I’m sure we’ll still be arguing about it in 2050.
>A few days ago, Paul Graham published an essay on “Wokeness”. I skimmed it. I couldn’t finish reading it, it made me too upset.
…
>I’m still not sure what pg thinks “Wokeness” means
Hmm
The point he’s making is that Paul did not explain what he thinks “wokeness” means in a coherent way. Which is true.
How could she know if she didn’t read it.
The point she's making, the author is a woman.
Paul most definitely explained what he thinks "wokeness" means in a coherent way. The author has an malformed opinion on a piece he claimed to not read in its entirety.
>We returned something like 40 or 45 cents on the dollar to our investors.
>I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015.
I wonder if that means he's better at losing money now?
I'll just say it must suck being precisely in the crosshairs of a political proxy battle. The truth is, neither the left nor the right really give a shit about transgenders but use them to rile up their bases.
First, the brief "woke" movement which was soon taken by the right and extrapolated to the extreme. It's the same tactic used by the right for any issue - when I was a kid it was "if gays can marry, then they will want to marry their pets."
They take whatever social progress has been made and push it until the concept annoys >50% of people then say "that's what the left wants."
But I can't get behind the left's approach of highlighting and siloing every sub-group. It just simplifies division and is counter to all the American "melting pot" concepts that actually worked over many decades to integrate immigrants and normalize differences.
I don't know where all of this leads, but it certainly doesn't feel like progress is ever made or even really desired, only a cycling of hot button issues to distract everyone.
It’s not really a left- right issue, as far as I’m concerned. It’s people with empathy v those without.
I dont think transgender are in the crosshairs of a political proxy battle. The issues is that many people feel disgust and hate over the idea of transgender. And whenever they become visible, they lash out and react.
>I’m certain he wouldn’t be rude to my face, but he might quietly discriminate against me, say no thanks. He might not even think of it as discrimination, only that I don’t have what it takes.
>I’m better at my job than most. I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015. None of that will matter.
IMHO, jumping to conclusions just like this is a big reason why 'going woke' isn't a healthy mindset for someone to hold. Stating that none of it matters is exactly the same thing as saying "I can't do it"
> IMHO, jumping to conclusions just like this is a big reason why 'going woke' isn't a healthy mindset for someone to hold
This is not unique to "wokeness" and is in fact much more clearly expressed by people who are "anti-woke". Many folks just can't handle things that don't fit neatly into their (unexamined) categories about the world.
They'd rather destroy that person or thing rather than reflect and improve their understanding of the world.
This feels like a pretty shallow reading of the article and you've fallen into the trap - described in the article itself - that "woke" is "some left-wing thing that I don't like". Whatever your views on trans issues, I think this article deserves a more thoughtful answer.
Will you agree with the author's viewpoint that "none of experience" matters if one is trans?
My reading of the author's viewpoint is that there are a lot of people in leadership positions in the tech world who would have previously recognized the author's talent and supported them, but would now form a negative opinion of them, regardless of their experience. These people would no longer give them the opportunity they gave them previously.
I think good leaders recognize people like the author simply have an additional life burden that they both choose and need to fight against and uphill. Additionally, those fights will ebb and flow unpredictably, possibly becoming too much of a burden for them at unpredictable times. If this is what you mean by negative opinion, then I agree. But I really don't think good leaders will take it out on them personally or hold them back to the point where they choose fighting inner trans issues over their business and success.
That’s what facing structural oppression feels like.
You can have the right skills and competency and mindset and disposition but will be looked over because you don’t fit the norm.
It's hard to prove that this happens to any given individual, because employers aren't mandated to announce why any person was "overlooked". One might be quick to blame "structural oppression", racism, sexism, or any other -ism or -phobia, but that doesn't necessarily make it true.
I agree with this somewhat, however, facing structural oppression is very different from deciding if a journey simply isn't worth starting. The mindset and disposition you speak of is or is not inclusive of assuming oppression will fully control one's overall success and happiness at a company?
Yup but still a poor attitude to have. I feel this way often times as a white male in tech, that they would rather hire literally anyone else if they can add some much desired "diversity" but I'm sure you would disagree that this is the case. Better for me to try anyways and have the best possible outlook even if I believe the cards are stacked against me.
>I feel this way often times as a white male in tech
Wait, you feel like you face structural oppression as a white man in tech?
Could you explain what challenges you face as a result of your gender identity and race?
The person you're replying to mentioned it in the post you quoted:
> "they would rather hire literally anyone else if they can add some much desired "diversity""
He feels like his applications are automatically deprioritized in favor of minorities.
I'm pretty sure the hiring numbers still show white men have it easier than all other groups. Even with "DEI" policies.
I'd be interested to see data that suggests otherwise.
He’s saying, for people who take Zuckerberg, Trump, and Paul Graham’s statements as permission to discriminate against trans folks, their experience doesn’t matter. The author is not giving up, they’re saying that essays like Paul’s make the world worse for them, for no good reason.
The irony is I too dislike nagging, hollow, corporate DEI exercises. In the abstract I was glad they existed[3] but the insincerity was palpable
Footnote [3] is: A small minority of people really do need to be taught how to be kind.
The author thinks probably thinks that fairly obvious fact is some harmless premise, but I suspect he knows well enough having been through YC and in the community of American business that this is not an accurate description of how DEI was implemented in parts of corporate America and beyond. In many companies, colleges, and government agencies, DEI initiatives were implemented in a way that assumed everyone had to be taught how to be kind, were differentially guilty or prone to be guilty by (sometimes externally assumed) group association of their birth or early childhood of certain offenses, and were preferentially treated to work placements, promotions, etc.
It was more than just "hollow" in many instances. It was blatant witch hunting that ruined careers and personal lives via internet virality. If PG's greatest offense in fighting back against this was an obtusely chosen word like "woke", that's pretty minor.
I’m also a transgender woman and while I agree with the author on many points (like sharing washrooms with the sex slave caste) I think we can rely on YC to find talent and support it regardless of what race or gender it’s associated with and in defiance of possibly sexist or racist VCs.
"why go out of your way to remove them" in principle, it's fine to have them. But really, they are just a symbol of the fake performative substance free dei culture. A reminder of it. Transgender employees should not be discriminated against, should have all the protections and respect like any other employees. But do we really need tampons in mens' bathrooms, really?
It seems similarly performative to remove them, especially in the context of the election/Zuckerberg's signalling. Yes, adding tampons to men's bathrooms was largely performative and less substantial, but the same applies to removing them.
Agree. Zuckerberg is a really unpleasant weathervane in my personal opinion.
If someone was born biological any male and is transitioning and still has periods, it seems useful, so why not?
how many people like this did meta have who had this issue and also had no access to a tampon, so that having it in mens' bathroom specifically was really important? what if I am a forgetful guy and I have socks with holes in them and I forget to buy new socks. Should meta bathrooms stock those socks? at some point this just becomes a bit absurd, no?
Why does it bothers you?
I suspect the author should be worrying more about what his wife really thinks than what Paul Graham thinks.
This isn't meant to be a snarky attack or insult - his relationship with his family and loved ones matters a lot more than an investor he once met and has nothing to do with anymore.
> What is a woman, exactly? I don’t know.
A woman is an adult human female. What is a female? Humans, and all mammals, the species is divided in two. A female is a member of the half of the species that has a sexual reproduction strategy of producing eggs (large gametes) and gestating those eggs after fertilization inside the body. A person is a member of one or the other half of the species based on the development of the body from conception -- a woman who developed primary sexual characteristics is still a woman even if she is infertile or has her breasts removed. A male is a member of the half of the species that has a sexual reproduction strategy of producing sperm. A human man cannot turn into a human female, we do not have the technology to make a man produce eggs.
> I just want to be treated with respect, and kindness. I don’t think I’m asking for much.
What I am asking for is not being forced by company policy or code-of-conducts to lie about reality. Requiring me to call someone who was born with a penis, and who has sired children a "she" is telling me to say that 2 + 2 = 5. The "they" pronoun is also obnoxious because it creates really confusing sentences. Using ze/zir is tolerable.
A woman is an adult human female, or a person who identifies as such.
In other words, there is biological definition. Then there is malleable social terminology. We can acknowledge biology while also accommodating who choose to - or need to - identify differently.
If we can't accept that, then my next question would be: what do you expect someone who is gender dysphoric to do? What do you believe the appropriate course of action is for someone in that situation? What would you expect or appreciate if you were a person in that situation?
The odd thing is that I don't recall pronouns being much of an issue before recent (2016-onward) political tribalism on transgender matters. Transgender people are not new, they existed previously and people by and large seemed to be able to refer to them by their preferred pronouns without all of this digging-in-of-heels around "I WILL REFER TO YOU BY THE PRONOUNS ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR BIOLOGICAL SEX".
Genuinely, how hard for you is it to call a person what they want to be called. What difference does gender make in the workplace even?
I understand it's hard for you to use different pronouns, but it's probably much harder for the person who feels like they don't identify with their gender assigned at birth.
> Requiring me to call someone who was born with a penis, and who has sired children a "she" is telling me to say that 2 + 2 = 5.
It's more like someone telling you to call them John and you call them Tyler instead. It's literally just a word.
If it's just a word and makes no difference then there should be no issue with using "he" to refer to any and all individuals of the male sex.