”Recently, talking about the incident to the New Yorker, Tanuja said, "A number of e-mails got sent to my VP, to the head of HR, to our chief diversity officer, to our CEO directly, claiming that the talk was creating a hostile workplace, that people felt unsafe, that the speaker was not qualified to speak on the topic and several other allegations." She also claimed that in tech companies, including Google, discrimination based on caste was rife and that tech company needed to talk about it.”
Congratulations America. Now the ”felt unsafe”, ”hostile environment” etc. woke newspeak is used to protect the asses of the people who want to discriminate while victims get smoked out by these useless clowns that are called ”diversity officers”.
They likely were, but with different connotations. They're now applied to much less dramatic circumstances.
E.g. the dictionary definition of "safe" (because "unsafe" is basically "not safe") is:
> protected from or not exposed to danger or risk; not likely to be harmed or lost
I would be hard-pressed to find a reasonable way that someone giving a talk on castes would expose the listeners to danger, risk or harm other than perhaps feeling a bit uncomfortable. I don't think feeling a bit uncomfortable would qualify as a danger, risk or harm 40 years ago.
Likewise, I don't think having a civil talk about discrimination is "hostile". It's uncomfortable, sure, but I don't think that rises to the level of unfriendliness or antagonism (unless they're publicly shaming individuals or something like that).
I don't care for the term "woke newspeak" because it tends to invoke people who are mocking the underlying feelings. People are welcome to feel however they want, and I respect that. I do think it undermines their own goals however, because it reads as hyperbole to me, which leads to wondering if hyperbole is used so heavily in other statements they make. A "Boy Who Cried Wolf" situation, if you will.
What I don't care for is diluting linguistic terms in an effort to create parallels with people in much worse situations. To me, calling this "unsafe" or "hostile" detracts from the experiences of people who are genuinely unsafe or experience hostility, e.g. domestic abuse victims, or victims of discrimination.
Those certainly existed. But they don't say much on their own. What is considered hostile or unsafe is very subjective.
For some people direct language is hostile but for others don't feel taken serious by reserved expressions that evade a point. It often far more depends on the disposition if it is received as hostile or not.
I believe the criticism of woke refers to the certainty of declaring terms as intrinsically hostile. Blacklists or Gimp come to mind. But it is just a lack of understanding that criticise these words and try to change them. I think the vanity of those complying here is hostile and that they lack integrity and this is a problem in our industry. The same lack of integrity will have of course more significant negative effects than not using certain terms.
Accusations of victimization is a widely used strategy to deflect discussion of caste discrimination. And one common tool for that is the caste reservation system in India.
Hacker News has intellectual diversity, meaning that people who espouse shibboleths you find repulsive are still allowed to post as long as they are civil. And likewise.
This has been the case for a while. I've posted videos on here of white supremacists literally saying white people are a "superior bloodline", only to be met with "both sides" pedantry and apologetics.
Part of this is because engineers tend to take devil's advocate positions as a matter of due diligence, but the other part is because of the metaphorical smoke that is this article and countless others showing systemic bias issues in IT companies.
> I've posted videos on here of white supremacists literally saying white people are a "superior bloodline", only to be met with "both sides" pedantry and apologetics.
Interesting. I'd like to read those threads. Can you post a link, please?
As an aside, you know that all of our entire comment histories are browsable and searchable, right? I couldn't find them.
Unfortunately you can also see a more extreme example of this from the person who was just banned in this thread:
>...These threads don’t exist and never have. The real whites that get attacked just say that they want their own country and culture to exist.
Me and the person making allusions to parler are probably just troubled by seeing these patterns in a community that at first glance seems egalitarian(and probably is compared to many others).
In a Twitter thread criticizing the slavery endemic to Dubai, an Omani woman who lives in Germany - after defending slavery - told me using woke jargon that as a white person that I (she assumed I am white based on my profile pic) should never criticize any PoC cultural practices whatsoever under any circumstances. IIRC, she might have even told me to "stay in your lane".
With sincere love and respect to all those among us who want to right the wrongs of history and feel that anything other than full and total commitment is failure... "woke" is a motte-and-bailey doctrine with internal contradictions such that it cannot help anyone who is not already relatively privileged. Discussion of these contradictions is precluded and foreclosed a priori by its fundamental tenets. It was conceived of by elites, is propagated by elites and used by elites to maintain status and control.
I wonder if we should coin the term "Brahmin fragility" - I assume this same behavior, if demonstrated by white people, would be labeled as "white fragility".
Congratulations America. Now the ”felt unsafe”, ”hostile environment” etc. woke newspeak is used to protect the asses of the people who want to discriminate while victims get smoked out by these useless clowns that are called ”diversity officers”.