What are some stories of progressivism gone wrong in implementation?
I am always curious about these kinds of situations.
for example, I live in Canada and (iirc) in 2021, there was a discovery of unmarked graves (I think) near a church that used to be a residential school for the indigenous children at the time.
given its closeness in time to the George Floyd protests, it sparked a discussion up here regarding our own failures of how to do proper truth and reconciliation with the remaining indigenous community.
my university graduation was also around that time, and the university wanted to jump on the bandwagon of appearing to be woke. their attempt at this was to have a former student of a residential school come and speak at the event about her experiences at the school. forseeably real sad stuff. you can't help but feel sadness hearing it.
Then, we had to sing the national anthem of Canada.
I have never stopped finding it funny that whichever genius was tasked with planning the schedule for that day, decided the most appropriate thing to do after hearing about the lengths that the church and government of Canada tried to go to to "stomp the indian out of the child" is to proceed to sing a song celebrating that government. You can kinda make an argument that we were singing a song to celebrate the ideal of Canada, which is a country that is about always trying to do better but from my perspective, what it felt like was they had a template of what a graduation ceremony was like and just decided to shoe-horn in that lady at some point in a pre-existing template.
One other funny story I've heard (I think from an indigenous comic who was a guest on an NPR podcast) was he relayed a story about how during covid, when their work went remote and had meetings on zoom and the DEI was gaining more and more popularity at the time in corporate environments, their bosses best idea was to do land acknowledgements on zoom..while everyone was at home. He had a whole bit about it that was quite humorous and I can't really remember but it was hilarious.
So, this isn't a specific example, and this may be (very well will be) controversial. I have a history of essentially playing "devil's advocate" where I try to understand the other side of an issue, and having people taking my words to mean I fully support or defend some cause that I don't. So this post was actually pretty tricky for me to write. I've spent probably four hours on this, no joke. But this has been on my mind recently, and this post and some of the comments just brought it to the forefront again.
So before you read further, take a moment to really, really think on the following question:
Can you name any influential male figures who specifically speak to men with positive messaging about being a man?
Someone being male and encouraging general positivity does not count. I love Markiplier, but he doesn't specifically speak to men, he speaks to everyone. Same goes for if they're specifically addressing, say, Asian boys, or gay boys, or trans boys, or any other qualifying adjective in front of "boy" or "man". Try to think of a significantly popular man speaking directly, specifically, to any person who identifies as male, and offering them support and encouragement and general gender positivity centered around that male identity.
It's been on my mind since this article about a publisher focusing on books oriented to the male experience. It made me realize there isn't much media that directly and specifically addresses the male experience outside of those pushing toxic masculinity. Most media treats cisgender men (especially white men) as the "default" demographic, and thus doesn't address their experiences as men specifically the way they do with female, LGBTQ+, neurodivergent or POC characters. Male characters are typically assumed to be relatable to everyone, and you can often swap their gender and it won't cause a major change to the story. As I noted in that linked discussion, there's even a writing exercise where you swap a male character's gender to female, and then if you determine it changes nothing, just make them female.
There are so many examples of characters who are considered good role models in part because of whatever minority they belong to. Strong female characters who can stand level with or even surpass the male cast, POC characters from races that typically only receive token representation or stereotypes in media, neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ and disabled and all sorts of other characters who normalize the idea that people can be different and still successful... Even if it's not a core part of their character arc or directly addressed in the story, just having those backgrounds as part of their identity can encourage real people to celebrate those aspects of themselves too.
For a lot of male characters though, the fact they're male is incidental and has nothing to do with them being considered a good role model. Well-written female characters can become feminist icons. Well-written male characters are more often role models for everyone, not just men.
And outside of media... I can't really name any significant figures who regularly address teen boys or young men with positive messaging. Pretty sure I've asked this question in the past somewhere, because I vaguely recall looking up names to find Twitch streamers or Youtubers who didn't even hit the one million subscriber mark. Basically, not as prolific as people pushing toxic messaging like Joe Rogan or "alpha influencers". The closest I've got off the top of my head is Dad, How Do I? on Youtube, who started his channel to share the typical dad life lessons to people without fathers after his own father walked out on his family. Even then he seems to generally address everyone, but he does specifically encourage men to break the cycle of generational trauma to be good fathers. (Tip, maybe save that link for the end. I found it towards the end of editing this, and it was a much-needed palate cleanser since he's just a genuinely wholesome dad.)
Overall though? Support and encouragement specifically geared towards men feels pretty barren.
This is on top of a plethora of spaces that specifically celebrate and accept minority demographics. Boys meanwhile have... Actually, I was going to say the Boy Scouts of America, but then I remembered and confirmed that it's now open to all genders. They dropped "boy" from the names and are now "Scouting America". The girl scouts, meanwhile, accept transgender girls, and based on my research (there are many sites for specific or regional girl scout troops) accept nonbinary kids and even transgender boys on a case-by-case... but can still exclude kids who identify as male. Side note, that link specifically mentions it excludes "boys who identify as male, regardless of their assigned gender at birth" so... yeah, there's conflicting information on whether boys can join. It definitely seems situational, unlike Scouting America clearly stating girls are eligible to join the Cub Scouts.
As an important note (and this is why I specifically added that disclaimer at the top): historically, male-exclusive spaces were absolutely bad and deserved to be torn down. The vast majority of them, including groups founded today, were founded with a misogynistic basis. The exclusion was rooted in misogyny and encouraging the mindset that men were superior to women in some way. Those were gender barriers that needed to be broken down and overcome.
But now, there aren't really many spaces specifically open to men that focus on positive aspects of being a man, either. All these groups pushing sexist ideals have been torn down, but instead of replacing them with spaces that focus on support and encouraging the best, men are often left with... nothing. They're just lumped in with literally all of humanity. The fact that it's apparently socially acceptable to have Girl Scouts, but not boy scouts? It can add to a subconscious narrative that boys don't deserve male-exclusive spaces even though girls and other demographics are free to specifically exclude them, and that having something specifically aimed at men is a problem that needs to be overcome.
And that mention of the subconscious narrative brings me to the biggest issue with all this: internalization.
Some of the messaging that is directed at boys boils down to "don't be an asshole" or explicit reminders that they have privilege that others don't just by being a boy. Neither of which helps since they basically reinforce the subconscious idea that being male (especially a white male) makes them automatically bad in some way, unlike the ever-positive messaging they see actively directed at other demographics... Which helps explains why so many boys and men get swayed by toxic right-wing ideology: they're among the few voices directly telling them they're good because they're male.
And I want to note that I've seen this targeted negativity in the wild. I remember a post circulating on Tumblr along the lines of "I'm so depressed, said the white cishet boy" clearly meant to insinuate that a white, cisgender, heterosexual boy has no reason to be depressed due to their privilege. Thankfully every time I saw it, it was accompanied by reblogs calling out how depression doesn't discriminate. However, the fact that sticks with me is that there are people out there who genuinely think that way. And those people can be vocal and downright nasty about it.
So for some boys, they'll likely hear that targeted negativity about their gender with barely any positivity to counterbalance it. They'll hear the generic messages telling everyone to be good, and to love themselves... but still see caveats specifically aimed at boys. They'll regularly see clubs aimed specifically at girls, at black kids, Asian kids, LGBTQ+ kids... It doesn't need to be that overt. I'm sure plenty of you are familiar with how easy it is for people, especially kids and teens, to internalize the smallest bits of negativity.
What I'm getting at is that, somehow, through no malicious intent, the increase in inclusivity ended up somehow unintentionally pushing another huge group to the side. It sounds ridiculous, but somehow, men are now being very specifically and explicitly excluded. There's a "male as default" mindset that means that there's now very few spaces specifically for men while many specific spaces exist for other demographics, and very few people who speak directly to men, as men are lumped in with literally everyone else.
And here's one of the biggest problems with all this: this feels almost impossible to talk about without spurring accusations of sexism or being against inclusivity.
I spent way too much time editing this post because I know it is so easy to interpret this to mean "inclusivity is bad, society is sexist against men now". I felt like I had to constantly defend myself and wrote this with a largely defensive mindset because I could already predict the potential fights and arguments, even cutting out some parts because I felt like people would end up focusing on those more than the overall point about this gap. I feel compelled to note that I am an asexual woman, because I feel like some people will assume I'm a man just for talking about this. And that makes me wonder, how can a MAN talk about this without being accused of misogyny? (Probably very, VERY carefully.)
Again, just to make this clear one last time: I am NOT saying progression is bad. I am NOT saying society is suddenly weighted against men and favoring minorities, like so many men claim.
However, there IS a growing gap in terms of representation and messaging aimed at men. It wasn't made with malice or even intentionally, but just as a side effect of fighting and deconstructing age-old male institutions. Deconstruction and fights that were necessary, mind you, but we didn't replace them. We just left empty voids in their place, and the problem with voids is that they never stay empty.
Right now, the main people who seem to acknowledge and fill that void are the ones pushing the most toxic messaging. People naturally seek out voices that validate their own experiences, so any guy looking for specific reassurance that being a man is good and it's okay to be proud of being a man has very slim pickings. And the people who feel a need to actively seek out that sort of reassurance are the ones most likely to swallow the toxic rhetoric of Andrew Tate and others of his ilk.
I hope this all makes sense. Again, this is something that's been increasingly on my mind since... last April, apparently. So I have a lot of thoughts on it that I hadn't put down into words until now. There's still more, but it's now 3:30 am and I'm about to crash, so I'm going to hit "post comment" now because I just added another two paragraphs on my... what, third, fourth go-over? Yeah. I think I got the biggest point across though, but just in case, I'll say it one more time: we somehow, ridiculously, have developed a gap in representation and voices specifically geared for men, and the only ones trying to fill that gap seem to be the toxic manosphere influencers and right-wing nutjobs pushing sexist (and often racist, and other flavors of bigoted) ideals.
So I ask you, once again: can you name someone who speaks directly to men about the male experience in a positive way?
Globally there are so many little things, but I don't save any references and links and mostly try to forget them. A particularly funny and emblematic recent one: Germany has been having serious issues with sexual assault in public pools, most often done by immigrant men from north Africa and the middle east, and it has been going on for a decade now.
Obviously the right solution here is to spare no expense, carefully consider all the options and... do a poster campaign (specifically in Cologne, mentioned in the link above). However, to not be offensive we have to make it really subtle and avoid the topic at hand as much as possible, because theoretically anyone can assault anyone. So most of the drawings in the campaign depict white people assaulting minorities, including an overweight white woman groping a black amputee teenager in the pool (sorry, couldn't be arsed to find better quality). To check all the woke stereotype boxes, the artist is an obese white woman with neon dyed hair.
Now a personal one. A friend of mine is an economic consultant focusing on regional development (so basically teaching in less developed countries on how to support small businesses, develop important infrastructure, practically use foreign aid etc.), now in his early 60s, who spent a few decades working on USAID projects, among other things. I have to give you his personal background here for this to make sense:
He and his colleagues grew up under communism, where the whole society functioned on the basis of "keep your head down, don't complain and pretend to agree with and support the regime". If you did anything else, you were punished: moved to an undesirable job, moved to an undesirable place, your kids were prohibited from attending higher education or even a decent high school etc. Being competent and having opinions was almost comparable to being a political dissident if it was in a field in any way related to politics and society.
They were lucky to study and get their degrees in departments that functioned really well despite the above problems. Thanks to that they managed to get opportunities to study further abroad after communism fell and were later picked up by a western businessman who started a company with them and taught them further.
They moved to the opposite of what communism did, to something they were all seeking: no bullshit business with high demands on competence and knowledge work and not a lot of ideology, it brought real results, helped gradually chip away at some of the bullshit in post-communist societies, and was also rewarded accordingly. This was the dream, despite the fact that obviously it was also quite hard. Their political and social opinions are heavily formed by their experience with ridding our country of a dysfunctional regime and successfully transitioning to what is effectively a social democracy and capitalism that brought fast growth and freedom.
USAID development programs work really well in general, but gradually over the last 25 years or so they became infested with progressive activist types. People in their 20s who are the opposite of "no-bullshit", they know very little about the actual work being done by the (US-based and local) professionals hired by USAID and see their position not as a supporting one but as a controlling one.
Now imagine you're a 60 years old guy with this type of background, focus on competence, no bullshit, hatred for anything that reminds him of soviet style communism, pretense, ideology etc., you have an impeccable record in the quality of your work over the last 25+ years and zero issues with your behavior ever, work with people of different backgrounds... And suddenly a bunch of 20 something bureaucrats who have achieved nothing of significance in their life are telling you that if you want to enter a tender for any more USAID jobs ever, you have to complete a long mandatory sensitivity training, something that almost nobody around who's doing actual work believes in, there's little evidence that it helps anything, but also most people don't dare speak out and instead pretend that it's normal. These people seem to think that their job is just as important as those doing the actual things that USAID was made for and in fact make relations with the developing countries worse.
This all felt to him like 1st of May marches with signs celebrating the communist regime - mandatory ideological pretense competely devoid of actual meaning or sense. I have never seen him so righteously angry as when this happened, I was mildly worried he was going to have a heart attack. This may sound like "boomer angry he has to read about how to not harrass women for a few hours", but realize that this whole thing is the antithesis to the very core of his motivation to do this line of work.
It ended well, they refused to do any sensitivity trainings so vehemently and with such a good track record that they got an exception. But the long term and pervasive development that led to this really soured their opinion on the US as a whole.
And then it ended badly, USAID was dismantled, but that's not a story of wokeness, because despite my dislike of wokeness and its pervasiveness USAID as a whole was undoubtedly a positive force very advantageous for the US.
edit: a small funny one I just remembered. My friend plays in a swing band that references king kong in its name, because you know, he swings around on one hand and is big and they're a big band that plays swing and the name sounds fun. They were booked to play on an international festival some place else in EU and provide music for some lindy hop (dance) teachers from the US. The teachers demanded they change the name of their band because anything referencing apes or monkeys is clearly talking about black people and is therefore incredibly racist.
I know that there are sadly still some racist football hooligans in Europe who make monkey sounds on black footbal players, and I also know that the "actually Americans are the real racists!" sometimes said by le enlightened europeans is not exactly standing on firm legs... But not a single person around here would see the name of their band and think "oh, they must be talking about black people!" and in this case, yes, them automatically thinking about black people when they see king kong does seem quite racist.
Fortunately in the end the festival couldn't afford my friend's band, so the dilemma was sorted.
I'm having a hard time squaring your story with my own experience with USAid.
I worked on and supported USAid project from 2010-2019. Similar to your friend, I didn't work for USAid, rather a third party that fulfilled RFPs. While there was a high level of bureaucracy, it was never more than when we worked with the National Science Foundation, The Department of Defense, or The National Park Service. I do want to validate there were many, many stupid boxes you needed to check to meet the requirements to receive funds; one of which was sensitivity training. We had to keep our current, it was frustrating. But so were a whole slough of other ones including data security, expenditure processing, reporting protocols, etc. If you are a semi-functioning human almost any of the mandatory federal trainings are an exercise in depression. I assume these were in place because something catastrophic happened and this was the response of that fiasco. Data was lost, someone embezzled funds, someone was sexually assaulted. That this training was a bridge too far for your friend, and not any of the other, feels telling. Not that he was a harasser or anything, but that this is "woke" ideology because it focuses on what is acceptable behavior. My dad often says "he's oldschool because he is old" and I think this applies here. The training is annoying, but to say this is "the antithesis to the very core of his motivation to do this line of work" is..odd?
Also, the description of the younger cohort of USAid folks seems ungenerous at best. Many of those positions are not particularly well paying, and they often require passion to make up the gap. Sometimes that feels like "progressive activist types", but often it's who will accept working 60-70 hours a week for $60k a year. Someone where impact of work matters more than paycheck. But never in my whole time working there would I say that it made the working experience worse, other than sometimes there was an expectation that I would be as responsive as them. People were great at figuring out how to make the most with as little resources as possible. There was a high degree of professionalism and rapid support when I was working in the field. Their project also tended to have longer sustained impact than similar ones we'd do in partnership with big corporates (Google, Adobe, Trimble) or NGOs. I'm talking a decade of impact vs a year.
And all of that got dismantled because it was painted as woke and wasteful. It's hard not to read the heavy slant that you've wrote this with. That I'm supposed to be sympathetic to his lived experience (life under dysfunctional communism) but then not to the lived experience of the people he worked with. To read the context of his issues and see "no-bullshit" as anything other than cantankerous and hard to work with. His experience is really subjective. I hear he had a bad time by the end of his career, when his beliefs were no longer mainstream, and that's a bummer. But to use that as an example of how "progressivism has gone too far" and just skewer the younger generations that work at USAid, I couldn't disagree more.
Unfortunately I cannot go into much more detail as the pond is not that big and I don't want to provide too much identifying information. I agree with some of what you say but disagree wholeheartedly with your conclusions.
We're not Americans and I'm not sure how many other US institutions he's worked for - some, but it may not have been any of the ones listed and it was a relatively small minority of his work, so I cannot make this comparison, so I'm going to assume you're right, but I don't think it changes anything.
Yes, I agree. Some seemed dumber than others and the amount got bloated over the years, the focus on things like sensitivity training was more recent than others and more reflected in the attitutes of new people employed by USAID, which was also in conflict with the culture in some of the countries USAID operated in and that created friction, therefore it was more visible.
I simply disagree here. Data security is a problem that is much easier to define and create measures for that are objectively backed and functional (although often quite annoying) and their functionality can be somewhat objectively evaluated. Policies like sensitivity training are based on vibes and culture shifts more than they are based on science-like approaches, formed on falsifiable hypotheses. Their subject is also much more personal - it doesn't feel like an annoying expert is telling you how handle xxx technology he's an expert on, it feels like an annoying activist is telling you how to behave. This, together with the fact that nobody (around the areas and projects he worked on) seems to like them or believe that they work but everyone feels like it's necessary to keep their head down and pretend they're fine, is what is quite triggering. I empathize with that despite being much younger and growing up after communism.
None of this is related in any way to whether they actually do a good job or not.
I agree that from what I know USAID development programs worked really well despite my complaints and what happened to USAID is a tragedy for both the US and the recipients and it's absolutely idiotic how it happened.
This would warrant a detailed response, but sadly I don't have the time. He's not cantakerous and hard to work with, you can't be that in a job where about 50% of your work is dependent on communicating with other people, whether it's learning how to help them, getting data from surveys and interviews, teaching them or building local networks, and simultaneously be successful at the top of your field for over two decades.
I agree that simply "disapproving where mainstream culture has shifted" on its own is very subjective and doesn't mean that the culture shift is wrong, though I think I provided more reasoning than just that. But the opposite is just as subjective - new is not better, not even when it has a progressive label. Things get worse all the time, even with good intentions. Also do realize that this development of mainstream culture is a bubble that's been recently happening in a portion of American and western European society, but not really elsewhere, it's not a universal thing. And generally when you try to build relations and project soft power over someone, it's a good idea to realize and respect this.
Also of note, I received a private message from someone confirming they've seen a similar experience to my friend's.
I just replied to another comment and I'm going to reuse some of it here.
I hear you, I don't know your friend and I can only make assumptions about how you're conveying it. He is part of an organization that accepts funds from the US and is likely acting as a representative a US soft power initiative. As part of that there are expectations, in the same way where if I was deployed on a USAid project I would be expected to follow whatever guidelines there were from the host country. In Pakistan it was no physical contact with participating women - not creepy stuff, I'm talking about handshakes and the like. That's weird for me, and something I would disagree with morally if a woman requested one, but when I was in country I wouldn't even think about breaking those rules. Same goes for making religious commentary in any of the very religious countries I worked in. Same goes for refusing to eat meat for meetings or rituals, something that was a requirement for vegetarians at our organization to do if they wanted to join certain projects.
I'm having a hard time understanding why sensitivity training would be such an issue. What I described above are expected social behaviors, something akin to sensitivity training. And as I called out before, for it to be "the antithesis to the very core of his motivation to do this line of work" that's such a hard line for something that is already expect and now just codified along with a shitty webinar. Don't dismiss views. Don't make racist comments. It may not be scientific, but it's the expected protocol. Same with how I need to learn about the reimbursement program or indirect vs direct billing. Not all trainings are scientific, I would argue very few are. They just convey agency standards. If he is acting as a representative by leading or supporting a US soft power initiative, then way he behaves reflects on the how the US will be perceived.
Now obviously there are some times where it is helpful to brake the rules. The bring whiskey and cigarettes to grease the wheels when you're with local partners. Pay for the operators of a potentially adversarial country in cash not check. And like your friend I can do that because I'm not USAid. But they can't and there is the expectation that I'm not either. Even if it makes things work better. A bit of wink wink nudge nudge, you know? But to expect all the employees to understand why or accept that breaking the rules is helpful would be wild.
So to me, if he's working with USAid, and getting paid by USAid, it's weird to have a tantrum about this specific training. It may be a cultural bubble, but if US culture has shifted and part of getting a rewarded proposal means you have to play ball, just the same as if I want to win an RFP from the Chinese government I need to agree to their cultural standards. I did that as part of a Spanish NGO and I'll say the cultural expectations for that project were more stringent. Your right, I don't know your friend, maybe he's great but it's such a weird hill to die on. And a big jump to being a policy that is damaging to USAid.
To my calling out the part why we're getting an influx of "progressive" employees, I'm explaining why those people tend to be the most visible fucking up. I worked as boots on the ground for a decade. I know the archetype your are referring to, and it's called being green. I whole heartedly agree that it's important to be objective when in country and follow protocol that's been in place - or at least leave it the fuck alone until you understand why people have decide to do it that way. Top down fixes rarely work and it's absolutely a real thing when people come out and start wagging fingers in completely unhelpful ways. I have no argument that it doesn't happen. A whole spectrum of folks do it. In my experience it happened with the most junior, overeager people. I posted the part about attracting "progressive" candidates because that is who often take those positions - because the pay and expectations are wild unless you have a real hunger for it. I don't do it anymore because I burnt out. But I'm saying that seeing an influx of "progressive" folks, making up a larger percentage because of a changing economic landscape, who are also the newest additions to a team is going to skew someones perspective. The youngest need to fail on a few of their projects before they become capable and understand why things happen the way the do. It'll sound stupid, but checkout the new recruits in Band of Brothers, it's true in any industry/deployment where there isn't really a way to learn without doing. But to then turn around and blame that on progressive policy or sensitivity training?
You're getting plenty of upvotes, so maybe I'm a minority here, and I'll ease off of my commentary of your friend. Considering the work he did, I'm sure we'd have lots to laugh about and commiserate on. It's a weird thing to work on projects like that, and because of that I'm pretty defensive of the folks at USAid. There aren't many people who I feel like would get that period of my life and because of it I feel a real kinship with them. Broadly they do great work, like you call out, and also catch what I would describe an unfair amount of flack.
I can give you a similar story from the opposite angle. I work in a government adjacent field in the US. I work in an environment similar to what you're describing. All very technically skilled professionals, focused on doing the job to the best of our abilities with zero political bias. We don't get into politics whatsoever if we can help it because it makes what we do harder.
Recently, as a part of the US administration's ideological purity testing, we were forced to spend weeks rifling through documention for anything mentioning "race, diversity, equity, trans, transgender, LGBT, queer, etc.
As you can imagine, there were a lot of "false positives". Race would return documentation about "race conditions" or "race to finish this project", trans would return "transfer" or , "transition infrastructure" and so on. It took days and days to sort through.
Three people who worked for the government showed up at our office. The oldest one looked like he was maybe 24. They had zero experience in our field, likely just graduated college, and had fathers that were someone politically important.
I watched people with 40+ years of experience sit in a hot seat getting grilled by these kids for hours about how funding works, whether the work we do benefits black people over white people, how many hours we spend on DEI, why certain projects get approved and so on. They were totally out of their depth, but needlessly adversarial anyway.
The whole thing was a massive waste of time, pretty demoralizing, and frankly kind of embarrassing.
Ideological purity testing is becoming way more of a right wing activity than a left wing one, at least here in the US.
The closest I've seen is when I was in college, I distinctly remember when a "PoC" event said that Asian-Americans were not welcome because "Asians are white-adjacent". Which was kinda a bruh moment. Didn't get any outrage or coverage, either.
Common story with Jews and Arabs too. Legally, they're both white in the US, but they obviously face heavy discrimination in some places.
Egyptians' racial identity has been a matter of debate for a very long time, and I'd argue they're a good example of why racial categorization is so flawed.
Adjacent: I've argued that lost in the affirmative action debate are underprivileged Asians. Asian Americans are significantly socioeconomically outperforming other groups, yes — but the distribution is very bimodal. There's a cohort of well-educated, professional class Asian Americans, but there's also a significant cohort of working-class Asian Americans: the ones who run Asian restaurants, nail salons, laundromats and dry cleaners, and so on. They are doubly hurt in that they lack privilege but then also get penalized for the privilege they are presumed to have. Their children are penalized in university admissions, and government social programs don't cater to them as much as they do for other PoC groups.
It's one factor why working-class Asian Americans lean Republican.
Yeah i'm aware of at least one person from chat circles who feels they were passed over for some college in California because they were Asian American. They were NOT under privileged to my knowledge, but obviously it still fosters a lot of resentment when you bust your ass to do everything possible and then get essentially told "We have too many of your kind".
I don't totally agree with the takeaways they espoused from the experience, but it's hard to sit there and say "well no not for you" to one group but not others.
Isn't this the same situation with working class white people as well?
The whole theory behind affirmative action is that a group as a whole is underperforming economically, thus, their underperformance is related to their membership of that group.
If Asians as a whole aren't underperforming, but some individuals still are... Aren't those just normal economic problems?
Like, there are a lot of poor white people too, but white people as a whole aren't poor compared to other racial groups, thus we don't relate individually poor white people as being poor because they're white. Why would it be different for Asian people?
The idea is that white people have systematic advantage in the system - they have the political power in the country. While that doesn’t mean that there won’t be poor white people, systematically the mechanisms of the country do not disadvantage white people.
Does that apply to Asians? This is the same country that worked Chinese railroad laborers to death in California, passed a law called the “Chinese Exclusion Act”, put Japanese Americans in internment camps, and literally owned the Philippines as a colony for half a century.
Do Asians do well because the system favors them (with almost zero members of the political class being any Asian ethnicity, from congress to presidential to the Supreme Court), or despite the system?
Well Asia is adjacent to Europe, so I guess theyre not wrong.
I heard that having Irish background has only been folded into “whiteness” in the last half a century. Which, based entirely on sunburn risk, completely baffles me. Based on historical stuff, however, makes a lot of sense.
Once you realize that the term "white" has little, in reality, to do with skin color, and more to do with political power, it starts to make more sense.
Irish weren't white until they were. Same with Italians, same with Greeks, same with Germans at various points.
Whiteness (and race generally) has always, always been a slippery categorization tool, intentionally flexible to create and adjust in and out groups.
I've told this story before elsenet, but this question reminds me of it, so I'm reposting it here:
So [the company I previously worked for] was loudly pro-queer. I've applied to several places that weren't transphobic, but this is the only one I've applied to where it wasn't even a question I had to consider. In the end I started to find it actively exhausting, and when job searching after that I looked more for companies who were more quietly supportive, like "just consistently call me Emily and move the fuck on please".
We had a group called something like "the future is female", open to non-men generally. One day the person running that group decides she'd like the name to be explicitly nonbinary-inclusive, and proposes some new names, and in explaining her reasoning, says something about "female" being unnecessarily exclusive, and that some transphobes use it in an exclusive way and it'd be nice if someone looking at just the name could see that it's explicitly inclusive. We all agree this change is good, the group is renamed, and everything is fine.
Later, another person (often privately ridiculed for being over-the-top supportive of us while clearly not having done the research), who writes a lot of our company announcements, is writing a company announcement about this change. She latches onto that last part, horribly misinterprets it, and writes something to the effect of "we're abandoning 'female' because it's a biological term and we want to include people who identify as women but aren't biologically female".
So I reply-all, and call this out as a very weird thing to say, and explicitly state that Well Actually, As A Trans Woman, I am cool with being called female and do not consider it to exclude me. She quickly backpedals and apologizes, and we all move on.
But that incident has stuck with me, because it's a demonstration of how easily a morally neutral term like "female" can accidentally become demonized. Nearly everyone else at that company was ready to go along with this surprise redefinition, and probably start calling out their friends for using the word "female", because they are all Loudly Supportive and actively want to avoid even the appearance of being on The Bad People Side of any issue.
And then we lose another perfectly valid word to fear, and also label a bunch of people as transphobes for no reason, and alienate a bunch of people who otherwise would've supported us, and everything gets worse for everyone involved. (Except the bigots. They just had language normalized in their favor again.)
This is one of those things that is starting to become an active problem. Not because these sorts of clubs shouldn't exist, they do serve a very important purpose. However, because they are exclusive by design, it leaves nowhere for the men to go. Well, except into the arms of a rightwing that will actively embrace them and foster hostilities.
My daughter has no problem finding a wide variety of STEM clubs and programs. My son has far fewer options, especially at their ages. How much outrage would there be if I started the Boy's Code Club, for boys 8-13?
Part of the problem, at least for me in my dadpants, is that we segregate kids stuff by gender far too early, when it shouldn't even really start being a concern until closer to high school.
I (of course) have no solutions in sight. It's not an easy one.
I'm generally for allowing (and even encouraging!) men to attend groups like this and just laying out a clear set of behavioral standards that they, like everyone else, need to follow. We all generally benefit from men understanding more about the struggles others are going through, and anyone who comes solely to disrupt the group (which a non-man could just as easily do) can be dealt with the way you deal with anyone who violates basic etiquette/the basic standards you've set for the group.
But I'm also transmasc, which puts me in the fun grey area where groups that define themselves as being open to "non-men" tend to try and tie themselves into knots over. Obviously I deserve a place in discussions about gendered violence and misogyny and other such things, because I both experienced them in the past and currently experience them. But of course this is completely orthogonal to whether I decide the label "man" is one that describes me, and groups like these love to insist that including trans men but not cis men magically doesn't invalidate trans mens' identities for... reasons. Either make a group that is specifically for women (including trans women and anyone else comfortable with the label "woman") or broaden it to include at least all queer people, and ideally anyone who wants to participate in a group focused on gender and/or queer issues. Imo it is almost never the best practice to have groups that are defined as "non-men" or "anyone but cis men".
Yeah, I think rules like this are generally very heavy handed, are unnecessarily hostile, and cause way more problems than they solve.
Black clubs don't need to have rules that white people aren't allowed there. White people are usually more than welcome to attend a black club. It's just that the culture in the club exclusively caters to black people, so that's who shows up to the club for the most part. Sure, a few white people go, but they don't take over, and they're not a problem.
I don't think there's really a danger of men taking over women's discussion spaces. My wife goes to a female centric book club, which is technically open to anyone, but no men have ever shown up, because the culture of the club just doesn't cater to men. They don't have to turn themselves into knots about explicit rules about who is and is not a man. The group's culture just naturally filters towards women.
Set the culture, and you get the demographics you want. If someone is being disruptive, deal with them on a case by case basis. It really doesn't need to be more complicated than that.
Well said. The answer to patriarchal contructs is not to invert them, but to dismantle them.
This is especially hard when bad actors enter a culture of inclusivity then make it difficult to remove their toxicity.
I mean. I'm glad you as a trans woman feel included by a group called "The Future Is Female", but as a non-binary transmasc, I definitely wouldn't assume such a group is inclusive of me without other very obvious signifiers that it was (such as a website that explicitly said it was inclusive of those who don't consider themselves female), so assuming the group was indeed intended to be more inclusive and not solely focused on women, the suggested name change by the person running the group seems completely reasonable. It seems weird to conflate that with the second individual's weird misinterpretation or to "losing access to a useful word."
But perhaps I'm just sore because demonizing reasonable switches to gender-neutral language (particularly in healthcare) have been such a right-wing mainstay.
Ciswoman here. I'm also not too comfortable with "The Future is Female" either — but I'm not sure I'd be happy with any alternative name, either. I'm broadly pretty uncomfortable with anything that makes me feel too self-conscious of my gender when, in my opinion, that's way down the list of traits that make me me. I would stay far away from this program or any other like it.
If they implemented something like this at my workplace, even if I didn't join it, I'm not sure I'd really feel comfortable working there any longer. It would mean that gender is whole a thing now, and my bosses and likely a lot of my coworkers are now openly thinking about it and categorizing me by it.
I know everyone can see your gender and it's not exactly a secret, but to me, it's a little bit of a private matter — kind of like height or breast size: Yes, I know everyone can see it and probably has an opinion about it, but I'd rather not be constantly reminded of that, especially in what is meant to be a professional environment.
I think having groups to talk about inclusivity and queer/gendered issues is extremely valuable, especially if it doesn't exclude anyone from the group based on their identity. I tend, for instance, to avoid groups that exclude cis men even though I'm not one, because groups that exclude cis men but allow trans men and cis women are making generalizations about who I'm in solidarity with that I don't agree with. But I don't think it's inherently a bad thing to discuss gendered issues at work, especially in industries where there is a strong current and/or historic gender bias, and a lot of groups that do this even inclusively began as women's groups. I try to thus be charitable to names that are more explicitly gendered when the group makes it explicitly clear in other respects that it's inclusive.
I respect that you want to avoid engaging with gendered stuff and not to have your gender be a big deal. But for me, my gender both isn't always visible and has a pretty big effect on me in ways that I think groups like these can discuss in worthwhile ways.
I think the only way an inclusive space like that at work could be bad is if it becomes (or is percieved as) a different form of the 'good old boys' meeting.
The risks of that are low, unless it's specifically excluding cis men.
I don't know who coined this, but I love the phrase "All yall are welcome, but you gotta act right." It sums up what should be the default state of membership to any social event.
I don't think the point was that the name change was the bad move here. The leader's intent was to find a more inclusive term so that it would be more obviously open to nonbinary people, and mentioned some transphobes use the term "female" to specify cis women. Side note, this is the first I've heard of this, and I found this reddit discussion that expands on it a bit.
The problem is that the person making the announcement interpreted that reasoning as "the term 'female' excludes trans women, so we're ditching it". Also it sounds like she might have missed the part about how they wanted it to be nonbinary inclusive, based on the "we want to include people who identify as women but aren't biologically female" bit, which would still exclude nonbinary.
The bigger problem is how that one misunderstanding could have ended with dozens of people at the company concluding that "female" is an insult. It assigns a new, negative meaning to a term that should be totally neutral. People who have limited understanding but want to be supportive will likely spread that misunderstanding by "correcting" others or warning them not to use that word. Ideally it won't spread too far, but it can cause some serious relationship damage from fights with friends or family who find the concept of the word "female" being transphobic ridiculous.
Worst case scenario, it devalues genuine arguments against transphobia in those people's minds because they'll remember fighting over the word female. They can point to that specific fight—whether to others, or just in their own mind—as proof that transgender people and other non-cisgender identities are just being silly or stupid.
Yeah, what @CannibalisticApple said. Everyone involved, including me, was on board with the name change itself. I include it only as backstory for the actually bad part after it.
I've edited an extra sentence into that paragraph to hopefully make it more clear.
Ah yeah I think it is a bit clearer now!
Oregon Measure 110 liberalized drug possession but the implementation lacked adequete treatment infrastructure to compensate. Public drug use became rampant, and OD deaths surged. The measure was reversed with bipartisan support in 2024.
Minneapolis Police Department was pledged to be dismantled following George Floyd. Although the dismantling wasn't done, it led to a mass exodus of police officers, which in turn led to a massive upsurge in violent crime. This was also overturned and to repopulate the police force, officers were offered signing bonuses up to $7000.
Gender Recognition Reform in Scotland was passed in 2022, leading to stronger self-identification privileges for trans people. It was quickly abused by Adam Graham / Isla Bryson, a convicted serial rapist, who demanded and was allowed to serve his/her sentence in a women's prison. It led to the resignation of the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and probably set the cause of trans rights in Scotland back by several years due to resulting public mistrust.
That claim made me curious, so I decided to look up whether it was actually true or not, and found this from the the Cato Institute:
Did Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Increase Crime or Overdoses? —Separating Short-term Spikes from Long-term Trends
A lot of data is being skewed by pandemic dips and post pandemic equalizations (or ups and similar normalizations). All you have to do is zoom in on a timeframe and you get all sorts of weird outcomes and can claim basically anything especially with the lag in national data on things like crime, mental health and substance abuse.
But the messaging is that crime is up, substance abuse is up and it's all the libs fault.
(An aside but the current "cattle ranchers are being killed by huge drops in the cattle futures" is one of those. It looks bad zoomed in, but ignores huge increases and is already normalizing. )
Yep. As the saying goes, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Another example of that which I still see regularly, that genuinely pisses me off, is when local news orgs report on local crime statistics, but rather than presenting any concrete numbers they use percentages in order to make increases sound far more scary and dramatic than they actually are. E.g. Saying "Knife attacks in the city are on the rise, up by 50% compared to last year!!!" When the reality is that there were only 4 knife attacks the previous year, and this year there were 6... which at those low numbers, any relatively small raw number increase or decrease is basically just statistical noise, not indicative of an actual trend that anyone should be concerned about.
Defund the police was always one of my most loathed campaigns on the left. The original pitch; abolish police departments entirely, was obviously unworkable.
It was then the target of a widespread sanewashing campaign where the message was "No no no, we don't want to get RID of police departments, we just want to redirect some of their funding to social work!" Which isn't true at all. The earliest platforms for defund the police were what it said on the tin.
Even so, the second proposal is also unworkable, as we've seen where it's been implemented. Yes, increased social services, social mobility, reduced housing costs, and more equitable education reduce crime. This is well researched and not controversial. That doesn't mean you can suddenly slash police funding and headcount, fund some social workers, and pretend you're making your city better.
Those social improvements have LONG lead times. A decade+ in some cases to see the benefits. If you're policing at 50% or what you were in the mean time, crime will go up. Obviously. That's not a nebulous, theoretical concept either. Real people will die, be assaulted, get raped, and get robbed as a result of those policy decisions.
Like, yes, unjustified police violence is a problem, and it needs to be addressed with training, reform, and consequences. Is potentially preventing one or fewer unjustified killings by police per year worth doubling the murder rate though?
I think a lot of people on the left have the problem of pretending that the world would be a perfect place if only X policy were different. There's this idea that if only we had good social services, good jobs, good housing, we would no longer have a crime problem. The problem is that solving those problems is very very hard, and the whole premise isn't even true to begin with.
I think the broader issue is that there are an array of perspectives within any movement. Like you said, some genuinely want to abolish the police - particularly the earliest, most vocal parts of the BLM movement. And it trickles down from there with varying degrees of "radical". Largely it's been an unhelpful umbrella for how do we reimagine the way in which policing and duties that fall to cops is enacted and structured. You're right.
I think most people would agree that the police have gone too far and we've provided them with too much funding, so they stand under the "defund the police" umbrella with everyone else, with all their little caveats, because who else it taking up that issue? I'm under that little, annoying umbrella too with my own little grab bag of hopes: requirements for individual police insurance, external review of incidents of violent behavior with agencies that are not incentivized to turn a blind eye, transitioning of funds into programs like the Baltimore's Safe Streets, and a reduction in the militarization of our forces (and the budget that allows them to do so).
Reactionary politics never work, which is why Minneapolis ended up how it did. But aren't many folks taking up the fight to change policing. Like Mayor Brandon Scott isn't out there chanting "defund the police", but I'll bet good money he's working with those who are. And they are seeing really, really good results. If you have a better umbrella than "defund the police" I'm all here for it. For now, I'm under there with my little bag of caveats.
I don't think the latter is necessarily something everyone believes in. Personally, I agree with the idea that the police do a bad job in the US, but I think we should fund them more. How many government agencies operate better once you cut their budget?
If you look at police officers per capita, the US is not particularly high amongst developed countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers
Germany has 1.5x as many police officers per capita as we do. South korea nearly has 3x as many police officers per capita.
One common complaint is that police officers are too quick to use deadly force in the US. That is true, and I think more police officers would help. In many cases, the times where deadly force was used was a single police officer who felt threatened. If it were instead, say, 2-4 police officers in that situation, deadly force may never have been used simply because of the numbers advantage. In the UK, police officers are trained to get backup before engaging in a situation for this reason.
Police officers in the US should be a professional force - they should be highly paid, but also kept to high standards, with higher pay as the carrot to get high quality employees. That, too, comes with higher budgets. We should heavily train our police officers as well. That, too, comes with higher budgets.
The problem is that many police officers compensate their pay with the sadistic ability to bully the populace. That shouldn't happen; we should pay enough to get people of integrity to join the force, and we unceremoniously fire those without integrity.
Another problem is that they're poorly trained. Too many times law enforcement reaches for deadly force too early, or infamously reacts to social problems completely inappropriately.
I have a really hard time believing the police would get better in the ways we want them to if we reduce the amount of money they have further. It'll only exacerbate the problem.
It is always worth pointing out that the history of police forces in the United States goes back, in many if not most places, to slave patrols. There's also the Supreme Court ruling that police offers do not, in fact, have to "protect and serve" their communities.
In many of the cases in the United States where a police officer murdered a person, the police did outnumber the person they killed. One notable example is George Floyd, whose murder initiated much of what we've been talking about throughout this thread and elsewhere in the USA. He was one guy, and there were at least two cops there; one stood by while another murdered George Floyd.
Cop shootings aren't much different - it's very, very rarely one cop against one (or more) other people. It's often multiple cops shooting to kill. Look up "Killology", "On Killing", and David Grossman. They aren't being trained to subdue perpetrators, to capture people. They are being trained to kill people via military conditioning. And due to the way military equipment finds its way into the hands of local police forces, we now have police trained with military training, and increasingly equipped with military equipment, to do what ... bust someone for drug dealing?
I live in a small-ish city, and our police have at least one MRAP. A few years back we had a protest of several folks living on the streets camping outside of our local government building, protesting sweeps and mistreatment. The police responded by posting snipers on nearby rooftops and threatening violence.
I don't know what the answer is, but the answer in my opinion can't be "just keep doing what we're doing, and give them more money to do it."
I don't know if it's particularly useful to draw conclusions from the fact that institutions in the US formed in support of slavery.
The entire US was built on slavery. Any institution that existed during its beginnings played a large hand in supporting slavery, from the census, to the supreme court, to the US Marshalls service and so on.
I think we're a lot better off examining those things as they exist today and weighing their pros and cons rather than how they started.
Secondly, policing is extremely complex, so it's hard to say whether most people want more or less police funding. What most people actually want is to feel safe. Whether they're primarily concerned about safety from criminals or safety from police depends on a whole lot of life experiences and factors about their lives.
In your example, the police department you're talking about likely received that MRAP for free. A tiny police department with 20 officers and virtually no budget could have an MRAP if they wanted to in 2010. The federal government handed them out like candy.
I think most people in a town would rather have 40 uniformed, friendly police officers that are engaged with the community, run foot patrols without harassing people, and respond quickly to calls than 20 officers and an MRAP that they routinely use to enforce warrants. The former is far more expensive than the latter though.
I don't think it's necessarily the budgets that are the problem, it's what those budgets are used for. Well trained, well disciplined officers that are routinely put through and held to de-escalation standards, that are incentivized to make contact with their beats and get to know people, and who you generally trust going to for help are much more accepted all around than guys who run around with t shirts and bullet proof vests carrying ARs, sealed away in unmarked SUVs and who routinely beat up on people.
The budget isn't really the factor in which one you get. Civilian oversight and good governance is.
Things exist as they do today because of how they were formed, and the reasons behind their formation. I don't think we can, or should, separate what police is today from what it was intended to do from its inception.
People want to feel safe. But we need to ask ourselves who feels safe when the police are present? The answer is going to depend on who you are, how you are profiled, where you are, your local police force, and so many other factors that are directly informed and influenced by the history of the region.
I once wondered why my area, demographically, had so few people with Asian ancestry and/or from Asia when compared to the major metropolitan areas that are a few hours north and south of me. On the one hand, there's an obvious answer - those are major metropolitan areas, of course they'll have more people and have more "critical mass" of sorts. But still, sandwiched between them is my city, with less than 1% of its population being folks identified through the census as Asian or Asian American.
Turns out, where I live had the largest KKK rally in Washington state, once upon a time. They also enforced the Asian Exclusion Act and forced everyone of Asian ancestry out of the county. Even though the city I live in self-identifies as "liberal", "progressive", "left-leaning", etc. ... it doesn't really matter, because of the history of the area. Hell, the city only formally apologized for its enforcement of Asian exclusion a few years ago - nearly a century after the fact.
All of this is to say, you can't just say "we're better now, we're different, times are different" when you're only a couple of generations out from segregation, and the effects of policies from centuries ago are still being felt today, actively, by everyone.
You say well-disciplined officers are put through training and held to de-escalation standards, despite the fact that the de facto training manual for so many police officers has been "On Killing". Many police officers aren't trained to de-escalate - they are, in fact, trained to escalate first. Of course it varies from cop to cop, and region to region, but on the whole the police are not simply a force meant to protect people. Legally, the SCOTUS has said they do not have to! The police are there to enforce laws, not to serve and protect.
There's a lot of room for improvement and for change, and I don't claim to know any of the answers. What I do know is that something needs to change, and simply throwing more money at it, isn't it. Civilian oversight and good governance are great ideas, necessary ideas, that fall short without cultural change and legal change that would require cops to stop shooting first.
This is often repeated but incorrect: most police forces in the US trace their origins to European police models (particularly British) which themselves have long histories since time immemorial when humans began forming polities and began differentiating between politically legitimate and illegitimate violence.
As soon as a law is laid down, the question of how a polity enforces that law (ultimately through monopoly of violence) is answered with some sort of police function.
You'll kindly note the caveat that I said "many if not most". Most might be too far, but many does not feel inaccurate.
The United States is a big place, and policing did not develop from a single point outward. It developed, as you've said before, when people began forming polities. Colonial police forces may have had their origins in European/British police models, but the same can't be said of everywhere in the United States. There are police departments whose origins were those slave patrols.
Slavery was legal for a very long time, and is arguably still practiced today; refer to the prison population and the overrepresentation of Black people in prison. If slavery was legal, then enforcement of that law - of slavery - becomes a police function. Vis-a-vis, slave patrols - based on this definition - can be considered police functions.
I think we're actually aligned on what we're hoping for. And this is a great example of why "defund the police" is a bad umbrella.
I don't want to cut overall headcount for people addressing issues in a municipality and I don't want less funding for that issue. I want less headcount and funding strictly for policing: people walking around with guns looking for crime. Right now, where I live at least, our police force pays reeeeally well. It's not an issue of compensation, rather of culture.
I also don't think they are poorly trained (in that they don't get it), I think they are just trained poorly (in that we pay out the nose for horrible training practices). My cousin became a cop in 2017. He was eager to tell me about how he was trained. What do you do when there are 2 on 1? You shoot them. What do you do when a perp grabs your tazer? You shoot them. What do you do if you're being approached from behind? You shoot them. What the fuck. He had shot and killed 2 people within like 4 years. We train our cops, just to react violently.
So I think what a police officer is needs to change. And funding is one of the few tools we have to do that. Give part of the funding to other groups - not called police because they are literally not policing - who reduce crime without the use of violence. Check out what they have implemented in Baltimore. There are some really cool programs that they come out of all the defund mess and are doing good work.
Relevant portion of a PBS documentary on American policing from a few years ago. Shoot first, ask questions later.
Motte and bailey tactic, whether used knowingly or unknowingly, is something you start to see quite often once you learn about it. It's very popular for defending extreme views of all kinds.
Part of it is also the "We must do something!" mindset, believing that immediate action is necessary and its results cannot be worse than doing nothing. In combination with the above it leads to shitty policies with shitty side effects - which I guess is the whole point of this thread.
I haven't really kept up with that since I'm not an American, but the very first actual explanation I heard was to defund the police to move money and responsibility to social services for social and civil issues, and create a new organization or organizations that don't already have a bunch of corrupt people entrenched in the system for criminal issues.
That way the people with guns can focus on issues that require people with guns and people without guns can tell teenagers that their music is too loud
And theoretically it shouldn't even be municipalities' primary function to fund and provide jobs and housing either but to foster the environment for the private sector to create them. Crime is one important dimension: it makes an area less desirable to do business.
Yeah. These things are all interrelated and you can't address one without addressing the others. In a vacuum, it's easy to say that the police dealing with someone in the midst of drug psychosis on a street screaming at people is violating his personal rights to express himself. What about the rights of everyone who lives and visits that city to experience a day outside free of fear though? What about all of the businesses in the area being forced to shut down because of a lack of customers willing to deal with that environment? What about the city workers who still need to clean the streets and collect the trash who need to deal with that at work every day?
The no policing method sounds much nicer on paper than it does in reality, especially if you live in a place in close proximity to others. For some reason being anti police is seen as a virtue in many leftist circles, and I can see how leftist theory got to that conclusion, but ultimately the core principle of the left is one of collectivism. You cannot have a working collective environment without a way to deal with problems that disrupt that environment. They should be dealt with compassionately, but the dirty work of walking a beat, keeping the peace, and deterring people from harming others still needs to happen. I get really exhausted when I have to repeatedly defend that seemingly obvious point in some circles.
I kinda love that you picked a drug-fueled psychosis episode as your example for policing here.
For me personally, I think “armed forces responsible for law enforcement” is about the last person I would want to deal with that situation, especially in the US where they seem to have a horrible reputation for escalation and murder.
Give me paramedics, or a nurse, or a social worker, or a firefighter, or even a gentle giant gym bro passerby to talk to the person and defuse the situation and bring them to professional help before you send a cop that way. Maybe a cop on standby in case things get violent, but not as the first point of contact.
If someone is holding a local business owner at gunpoint, that’s when I want cops involved. If someone is mugging people at knifepoint, that’s when I want cops involved. If someone is punching pedestrians on the street, that’s when I want cops involved. Cops in the US as they currently exist are great for violent crime, but so poorly equipped for anything else.
I guess when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so I can see the allure of thinking police are the answer to these kinds of situations exist. I know healthcare is in such a bad way in the US, so I’m not surprised at this way of thinking, but there are other/better options for everything that’s not a crime.
This one pains me still, because these things will keep happening, and do each case justice, probably require individual review by the authorities to decide where a person should be placed to serve their sentence. That being said, Bryson was isolated in the women's prison and afaik despite TERFs summoning this banshee to limit people's gender expressions legally, this has not lead to anything bad. I do think keeping people that have been convincted of sexual crimes against women out of women's prisons is probably a good idea.
Genuine questions - do you apply this standard to men too? And where do you put the cis men and women who sexually assault and abuse other cis men and women, particularly since this continues to happen in those same prisons?
Because I understand the intent, but it sounds like the issue is an inability to (or disinterest in) keep prisoners safe while in state custody.
Prisoner safety has, best I can tell, always been a "do we have to?" situation.
Which is the point I'm making.
But I genuinely want to know the poster's opinion, because if we only "care" when it involves trans people*, we don't care.
*I am not taking any stance on the mentioned individual's identity. I don't know anything about the case or the person.
And I genuinely appreciate you asking this question, because it has broadened my horizon! It would be a lie to say that I was thinking of anyone else but trans people when I wrote my original comment, which is absolutely not okay.
Prison in general is a terrible place and I think too many people think that because it is a punishment, we don't need to care for prisoners, especially in the US, but really in a lot of places outside of Scandinavia, where the states have taken the correct path and focus on rehabilitating criminals into society rather than punishing them and then also brandmarking them forever.
Rehabilitation always beats punishment and should be the main goal of any justice system not just because it is more humane, but also because it's just better for society in the long run, and to rehabilitate people they need to feel safe. But you're right that I could have been smarter and poked it from the same perspective that you have, but I appreciate that you wrote your comment, because you have made me wiser.
I really appreciate you using my comment to think about your worldview, and I'm humbled to have made an impact like that.
I am a firm believer that if the state takes custody of people for whatever reason it should be responsible for their safety and well-being, both physical and mental. We fail on that in nearly every way from foster care to incarceration.
But this is also why I don't think we ever have to focus on "women's safety" or "what if someone lies" or just trans folks in general for having the audacity to confuse our gender binary.
If we were actually keeping inmates safe, it wouldn't really matter. And if we only used prison to isolate the people that are truly unsafe to be among society for the amount of time necessary, we wouldn't need to figure out how and where to hold so many people of any gender.
But even in the meantime, IMO the focus should be on the basic human rights of incarcerated people to be safe, not the danger to them from a very small minority. (There's no where near this panic about the number of sexual assaults by guards for example!)
Which this was all me rambling, I'm glad I was helpful :)
Just to affirm, rehabilitation being the main goal of a justice system was my opinion already when I wrote the original comment. I just didn't apply my own worldview and sought a bandaid solution for a specific and also incredibly rare problem, which, like you correctly point out, wouldn't be a problem if the focus was not for prisons to just be concrete boxes where people wait out their sentences, but actual facilities where the state pays great care to its inhabitants and also prepares them for when their sentence eventually ends and they are released back into society.
Oh for sure, I didn't think you were pro "let them rot"
I just tend to ramble on about these topics, and I'm reading a book that touched on rehabilitation (lightly) so it's in my head.
We send cis women who commit sexual crimes against women to women's prison.
Improvements need to be made overall, to treat incarcerated individuals' safety more seriously, these can be reduced / avoided regardless of what kind of people are targeting what other kind of people. Just .... Make it not possible for people to be hurt by other inmates or staff. Easier said than done sure but we have some very obviously low hanging fruit available that needs done.
I agree that prison needs to be made safer for all inmates. But treating trans women differently from cis women doesn't actually accomplish this (and in fact puts those trans women into an absurd amount of danger even compared to the already dangerous landscape of prison). If anything, they're a scapegoat used to avoid actually improving things in more fundamental ways to make things safer for inmates in general.
Taking Tri-Met to work at the Bullseye Glass Factory in Portland the final year of me living there in 2022 was nothing short of a rough awakening that the decriminalization of drugs was a bad idea.
I used to see people nodding off and hitting foilies right as strollers and kids alike walked past. It became part of the reason I left that beautiful city. I do hope when I visit this coming summer I’m surprised by the difference since, but from my friends still there, it hasn’t much :(
How about regulations as it relates to cars?
With CAFE standards being so strong, as well as general safety regs on passenger safety, cars have gotten ever bigger, which has helped them evade gas mileage standards. With this stuff, we no longer see stuff like small passenger cars, but huge SUVs, with limited visibility and a heavy reliance on technology to comply with strict regulations. Pedestrian deaths were declining until 2009 and now, with data from 2023, they're up 78% from then. Then you have stuff like the push to EVs (I'm not anti-EV), which are heavier (=more deadly), but also significantly more powerful, with the ability to accelerate even faster. But also even with non-EV's, we have all these technologies such as accident avoidance which makes people complacent, thus further increasing crash incidences between cars, as well as pedestrians.
The idea was to make cars safer and get better gas mileage (though I'd argue we're not even seeing that, when we had cars in the 80's and 90's easily hitting 30MPG and sometimes even up to 50-60Mpgs) through strict regulations, but we've only made them more expensive, complicated and deadlier than ever.
There's a funny soundbyte from Trump signing the recent EO about loosening CAFE, where he says he went to South Korea and saw subcompact cars that were "very small and very cute", and you're "not allowed to build" them as his justification. I have no doubts this will be a negative for the environment, where American car manufacturers will address none of the concerns you mentioned out of laziness and no motivation for innovation, and that this will drive zero market interest in small cars. As a car enthusiast, though, if he convinces even one brodozer-driving MAGAt to march to a dealership and buy a kei car I will laugh. Hysterically.
Honestly I think that blaming CAFE standards for large cars is evading the bigger, harder to answer problem. EVs are actually a pretty good example. They don’t burn gas so they are not subject to CAFE (to my knowledge). But as an example, my Chevy Bolt is unnecessarily huge (it’s practically the same size as the SUV variant!), and in spite of only needing some 60KW for freeway speeds most of the time, it peaks all the way at 250KW. It’s way more power and size than most people need for no practical reason. No, the real reason is simple; the US has a macho car culture. There is an arguement to be made that CAFE encouraged companies to market those beastly monster cars which nurtured the current culture, but no advertising campaign can change everyone’s mind: it has to have been something that already existed in peoples’ hearts. I seem to remember a lot of media from the 80s talking about Japanese cars being desirable in spite of being small. American cars basically have always been big, more or less.
Regardless of if you agree with me, I think it’s pretty clear that the real issue isn’t with CAFE, but from a lack of stronger legislation.
The small car was on the rise for a long time. Just anecdotally, look at the variety offered in the late 2000s. You had the Honda Fit (dead), Kia Soul (dead), Ford Focus (dead), Ford Fiesta (dead) and on and on.
Yes, you can say Americans have a penchant for big vehicles, because we definitely do, but when you have CAFE standards that say your small car need to get 60mpgs, whereas your large SUV can get by with 20mpg, coupled with conflicting regulations about how the car needs to be designed to meet crash test standards, as well as technology required in it, it just doesn't make sense to make a small economy car that costs you $40k to build, which no one will buy for that price.
This isn't conspiracy, this has been widely reported on and is well known amongst car enthusiast's.
People can't buy small cars even if they want to, because it simply doesn't make business sense for automakers to manufacture them due to excessive, scatter shot regulation.
But European cars have also grown over the years, and as I understand it do not have the same regulatory pressure towards larger vehicles. And European cars tend to be made for the European market, so I wouldn't imagine the American market pressures would affect the European ones so much.
Small cars still exist (perhaps that is a difference) but the rise of SUVs and unnecessarily large cars in urban/suburban areas is still pronounced, just like in the US.
By and large, the majority of large European cars are built specifically for the US in the US.
These generally aren't sold in the European market. This holds true for the Asian brands as well. All of them have the exact same regulatory pressure if they wish to sell their cars in the US market.
Ah, I see the confusion, I'm talking about the increase in size in cars sold to the European market, not European brands per se. Like I (and you) said, cars sold in Europe are typically not the same models sold in the US, which means that they should not have the same regulatory pressures. Despite this, the trends are similar on both sides of the Atlantic.
There is some amount of sellers looking at the money that the US manufacturers are making pivoting to bigger, more expensive models as the only options has boosted their margins and wanting to replicate that. In very many places, a car is either a real or perceived necessity, so manufacturers have realised they can raise the floor price and they get less bad PR if they fine you physically more car in exchange
Ah, ok, I see what you mean. If I had to venture a guess as to that, it's still related to US regulation in addition to market consolidation. You have a handful of automakers who own all the different brands and essentially build the exact same car, but badge engineer it for different markets. You had the advent in the last 10-15 years of the "Global Platform" (note that this is just an example with Subaru, all the automakers are doing this now), where cars aren't really bespoke things anymore, but simply variations from a base design. Just as an example, you have something like the Toyota Highlander and the Camry that are identical under the hood, ditto the new Toyota 4Runner and Land Cruiser.
I can't speak much to European market cars, as I really only follow what's happening in my own region. But if I had to make an educated guess, it would be this.
Possibly, although I'm sceptical. My impression here is that most people buying SUVs have plenty of choice of other cars, but want larger ones because they feel safer — you're higher up on the road, you're more protected, and if you've got children in the back, it feels like the car will have more structural integrity to protect them.
Unfortunately this is an arms race. SUVs are safer (in some, limited crash scenarios) for the people inside, at the expense of being much more dangerous for everyone else.
It's a tragedy of the commons. If everyone drives SUVs, we're all much less safe overall. Crashes are more likely, and when they occur, they're far more likely to be fatal for pedestrians or other drivers.
I can’t speak for The Kia and Honda models, but the Ford models had horrendous reputations. The focus in particular I had people saying it was a “disposable car”. The Soul and Fit were also really weird looking, so I don’t really know if they’re great examples either.
I’m not saying CAFE isn’t part of it, but it very clearly isn’t all of it. If we want to end monster trucks taking over the roads, we need to overcome the cultural causes first. That is how we get the legislation that covers the holes that CAFE leaves open.
Compared to what? If everyone was driving the Makigai MaiMai P126 then the cars that you see as normal would be really weird looking.
Personally, I think a lot of big cars are really ugly. The Range Rover Sport looks pretty good but what's up with the FJ Cruiser??? what's up with four-door pickup trucks?? They all look really weird to me but also they look ugly
Everyone gave the Pontiac Aztec shit, but it looks basically the same as every contemporary SUV. Probably less ugly.
Really weird looking isn't necessarily a qualifier.
That said, despite the Honda and Kia being better cars, the Fit was killed off in 2020 vs the Focus in 2025. The Focus did have some reliability issues with the Automatic transmission in some years, but generally was regarded as a decent car, ditto the Fiesta.
I'm also not sure how either is weird...they're standard hatchback designs, like the Golf, Mini, Matrix, Fiesta, Aveo, Sonic and pretty much every WRC rally platform. It's a widely preferred style of car, over sedans, in Europe and Asia.
Did the US ever get the Picanto? It's super popular where I live and the new generation looks great.
I see a lot of them around where I typically would have seen Yaris's or Honda Fits. They seem to be a really strong choice for subcompact buyers now. I hired one in the UK when visiting and it was like Mario Kart (in a good way). Plus the visibility and manouvrability made me, a sedan driver, very jealous.
I can't believe the US killed off the Honda Fit.
Never heard of the Picanto!
Yeah, it's sad we have no more small cars. I have a 2013 Fit Sport Manual I special ordered that I really love. I dread the day something happens to it and I need to "upgrade" to something more expensive and less easy to repair.
I wanted to buy a Fit when my old 04 Civic died...in 2021. So I ended up getting another Civic, and I was shocked at how chonky it was compared to my old Civic. The 04 model was clearly a subcompact. The 21 model, just a compact. Maybe even bigger.
And yeah, I remember when the Focus did become a reliable car. I was actually surprised reading about it and hearing that it was decent.
I have a Fit. The car is so small I get a discount rate when I take it on a ferry. I try not to think about what options will be available when I need to replace it.
The depressing thing is that that's not really true. Advertising can't make everyone want something, but it can make people want something.
When the iPod came out, hard drive based mp3 players had already been out for years. They weren't as small as the iPod, but the iPod didn't really do anything radically new. Except for a brilliant, well funded ad campaign. Everyone wanted an iPod. I wanted one, and I didn't even listen to music that much.
This happens constantly with all types of products, many of which aren't even very good.
With a big enough advertising budget, you can get people to want virtually anything. All it takes is paying someone they look up to, crafting an ad campaign that speaks to their values, or fashioning a group identity that people want to belong to, then tie it to a product. You can literally conjure that desire out of thin air. Can you convince everyone? No. You don't need to convince everyone though. You need to convince some people who will take the identity you crafted for them and run with it. Those people will influence others, and pretty soon half of the vehicles you see on the highway are massive pickups with empty, never used beds.
American cars aren't big because Americans want big cars. Americans want big cars because American cars are big. The cars are big because they have better profit margins. Then, of course, the reason they have higher profit margins is because of policy.
I didn’t know you could see your usage like that. Have you ever driven it up a really steep hill?
Watt meter on an EV is basically the equivalent to a tachometer on an ICE car. I used to drive up fairly steep hills daily for work and I would see it go in the 80s or 90s.
I would label that phenomenon as regulatory capture.
It's the opposite.
Regulatory capture would imply loosening of regulations, whereas most car regulations these days are driven by the State of California with CAFE standards. CAFE is a progressive program that has been pushed further and further onto automakers, making it ever more difficult to make a profit on stuff like small cars, because standards are so strict as far as MPGs required, safety features required, etc. Some standards are good and we've seen a vast improvement in stuff like occupant safety, smog emissions, etc. but CAFE and California in general have gone too far with it.
There's a big loophole in regulation that helps manufacturers avoid the true point of the regulation (reducing emissions). Yeah, the manufacturers would rather that all of CAFE be rolled back, but the current situation was pretty friendly to manufacturers in the first place.
I mean, if you had to have a contracting license or equivalent (delivery, group transportation, etc) to purchase a "commercial vehicle" we wouldn't be having this conversation. There is a huge loophole in that any truck* is not subject to those laws. You could also just change it so that you need a regulated commercial license to purchase a CAFE noncompliant vehicle. It's a frustrating but relatively straitforward policy change. We're regulating like it's the 80s.
*SUV, compactSUV, HUV, Van, Minivan, etc...
Not sure this is really in the same vein, but I'll share it. At the small non-profit where I used to work for a long time, the organization was seeking a new employee for the membership department. This was in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests. I'm not sure how we got this candidate, if they just applied through regular channels or if they were suggested to us, but we did end up hiring them. I was not involved in their hiring, nor got a chance to meet the candidate beforehand. Which was unusual since staff were often given a brief opportunity to meet a promising candidate.
Anyway, the candidate that was selected was a young black woman. Relatively recent college grad. And my CEO, a white dude, was very proud of this moment. Look at our organization! We're fullspeed into DEI!
Nevermind that I, an Asian guy, was on staff. Plus our senior admin assistant is a black woman. Our then-director of membership was Puerto Rican. Our then events planner, a friend of mine, is European; like born and raised in Europe. Plus our Latin American recruitment director was from and based in a South American country. And women are like 2/3 of the staff or so and some are in senior leadership. I'd say that's pretty diverse!
But whatever, I'm not against more diversity in the workplace. It's an international organization, so it is important, IMO. Plus diversity of viewpoints from various backgrounds is always good. Monoculture is not good.
Except it became quickly evident that this young lady was not a good fit. Even simple stuff like putting mailing labels on envelopes was, at times, a struggle for her. No matter how many times she was shown how to do it. Ask her to put together a list of like names and addresses in Excel and you'd get some just...weird, nonsensical spreadsheet. Like there was no order to it. Several people on staff thought she might be on the spectrum, especially because of how she spoke and acted. Which is another type of diversity, right? Neurodiversity. Was that known beforehand? Was that another reason she was brought on? No clue; the few people involved in her hiring, including the CEO, act like this was a total surprise from how they met her in the interviews.
Anyway, it got to the point where she was more hindrance than help. My friend, the European events planner, eventually became the membership manager and became her boss. And my god, the patience she had with this young lady. But it got to the point where our then-newest coworker wouldn't be given anything to work on. She'd sit in her office just watching anime on her phone all day. Which also frustrated people because she was being paid to do nothing. Some people busted their ass, 50-60+ hrs a week, including my friend, and here was someone getting paid 40hrs/week doing fuck-all.
The CEO was not blind to this. It got brought up to him several times, in private and even not really private conversations, that perhaps we should let her go. And he knew it. But I heard him say, more than once, "I can't fire a black woman! I'm a white man! How would that look?!" primarily referencing himself, as opposed to the organization. Which is also weird, because the like second person he fired at the org was a black woman back in like 2016. Not because she was black, but because she did shoddy work and had a poor attitude, which everyone knew. But I didn't hear him talk about race when he did that.
Anyway, this woman is still there, 4-5yrs later. She's doing some actual work these days, and even well at times, I hear from my friend who's still there. But it's still not at the level that's really needed. There's a lot my friend has to do herself because she can't give it to her subordinate. It wouldn't get done properly and my friend would just have to redo it.
Interestingly, the CEO got fired a few months ago. Not because of this...but I have my suspicions that it's not not because of this and other poor hiring decisions (my replacement is also a shitshow). Regardless, the org's "DEI hire" outlasted him!
I do think hiring for diversity purposes can be a good thing. But it shouldn't be the only thing. Still need to have the skills and drive and all that. And certainly neurodiverse folks -- if it was known this woman was neurodiverse beforehand -- can be very capable. Just as much as any NT person. Maybe more so. Not trying to paint with a wide brush here.
See, when I read testimonials like this, all I can think of is that the person/people involved in the hiring process don't understand what DEI is.
Diversity during the hiring process doesn't mean "just hire person of X race/disability" it means "when presented with multiple people capable for a given job, you should give priority to the more diverse hire." The rationale being that minorities struggle to get the same jobs as the majority due to systemic discrimination, so this can help level the playing field. But they are still supposed to be competent workers.
I suspect whoever hired this person was just heavily misinformed about what DEI is, which isn't surprising, given how much money certain organizations spend on said misinformation.
I think you're right, and I think this thread is a really interesting and important topic because of that: when good ideas hit the real world we're going to end up with a whole lot of unintended consequences, well meaning but incompetent implementations, and outright malicious attacks designed to discredit the underlying ideology.
It's often hard to discuss that because people are (entirely reasonably) on high alert for that malice and misinformation, and I think there's often a bit of well meaning reluctance to talking about negative outcomes for fear of giving ammunition that can be twisted into those false narratives, or for fear of being wrongly seen as one of those people spreading misinformation under the guise of "legitimate concern" yourself.
But if we've got spaces where people are engaging with enough good faith to put those concerns aside, it's actually very valuable to see where things are coming undone in that gap between ideals and reality, so that we can fix those implementation problems before they end up undermining the ideals themselves.
As a somewhat related aside, I do agree with @sparksbet that maybe a title change could help with that signalling.
This explanation was actually really helpful for me, thank you.
I’m autistic and sometimes struggle to understand how I’m being misunderstood because when people get offended they shut down and stop talking.
I understand what DEI is and how it works in the hiring process as you described, what I never understood is this apparently common misconception.
I accidentally offended my black friend one time because we were in the middle of a layoff/reorg and they took her away from my team as I was training her even though we desperately needed the help and I was upset about that, and the topic somehow came up in conversation with a new hire that I now had to train up all over again because they took my friend from my team and moved her to another team, and she was suggesting the move was entirely her decision and I was like no, they moved you to keep you from being laid off because they like you. Which is facts, because I liked her, she was really great. How she took it, now that I understand the common misconception, is that I was suggesting she was a DEI hire.
That happened like ten years ago and I only just now understood. Thank you
Gosh I would be curious to learn more about this young woman.
It sounds like that thing I've heard about how people on the spectrum have this thing about "enough spoons" or something. Then again, I have another friend who is ADHD so bad that sometimes I have to supervise her as she does desk work cause she finds the internet so inherently distracting but alot of her responsibilities require the use of the internet so she sometimes needs me to somewhat monitor her to make sure she stays on task. I gave up trying to understand why she has so much trouble staying on task a while back.
For the longest time I assumed she was just being childish and lazy but she sent me enough articles backing up her experience for me to give up and say "OK, maybe you are not being lazy but I still dont understand what is going on that you can't just stay on task :sweat_smile:"
As someone who also has ADHD, let me try and illuminate what is (probably) happening in her brain.
Imagine that, while you are trying to work, you have other people constantly popping into your office and refusing to leave until you talk to them, or do something for them, or otherwise divert your attention. You cannot ignore them because that would be rude. This is sort of what it feels like with ADHD.
At least my experience with ADHD is that my brain is constantly, and I do mean CONSTANTLY, chattering at me to "go do this other more fun thing" or "what if this random thing happened right now?" or "<random topic change here>" etc. It takes a ton of mental effort just to keep redirecting yourself back to being on task. Like you constantly have little gremlins pulling you away from what you should be doing.
It's exhausting. And frustrating. I have recently decided that I need to pursue medication because it's getting harder and harder to fight my own brain just to do my work.
I'm not lazy, I'm just constantly battling my own fucked up brain chemistry.
I'll add (and this is just my experience, ADHD manifests differently for different people), at times, forcing myself to focus is almost physically painful.
In elementary school, we had this common handwriting task every day: you had a workbook, and you were supposed to copy text from it into three separate sheets: A wide ruled yellow sheet with guides for letters, a wide ruled green sheet without guides, and finally a normal ruled white sheet.
Once you filled all three sheets, you could do whatever you wanted until the end of the period.
I wanted to fill those sheets. I tried so hard to do it and stay on task. Every time I forced the pencil into my hand and started writing, this gnawing, aching pain would fill my head and chest. It was this draw and pull to stop doing this boring thing. It almost feels like holding your breath underwater. You know you can probably force yourself to stay under a little longer, but it becomes increasingly uncomfortable and even painful, and you know, no matter what, you won't be able to hold out for too long.
When I finally stop doing the thing, I get a wave of relief and then daydream or stare out the window for fifteen minute.
In that whole year, I never got past the green page unfortunately.
I'm medicated now, which helps a ton, but I still have lesser versions of that feeling when I have to sort my emails, fill out forms, pay bills, and so on. Ive gotten better at forcing myself to do it, and I can do it way longer without feeling like I'm suffocating, but that tendency is still there for me.
Ooof, yeah, this one hits. The fact that it feels so much better to stop doing the thing even though you know doing it was beneficial and you actually want to get it done, and feels so much worse trying to drag yourself through it even though... objectively it's fine? And there's no actual reason for it to feel that bad? But for whatever reason it just does.
That's the sentiment I hear always that I feel like I am just incapable of understanding.
I also like to just watch YT all the time and just watch guilty pleasures on there, but I also know that I am an adult with responsibilities and if I want to be successful, I have to stop and take ownership for how I spend my time. So I might sometimes get distracted by YT for like 5-15 minutes, but then my brain wakes up and goes "wait a minute, you know this is a bad use of your time" and I change my behavior accordingly and it works. Talking to my friends, she apparently also gets that "wake up" moment but doesn't change her behavior accordingly which is where I have given up understanding why that's so hard for her.
I suspect I have ADHD (undiagnosed and untreated because I can't make myself jump through the required hoops). I'm more the hyperfocusing sort than the easily-distracted sort (I don't really experience boredom or anything resembling internal "chatter" that a lot of people with ADHD describe), but it ultimately amounts to similar behavior: I have a hard time prioritizing.
I completely get why you don't understand it because I don't understand it myself. It feels like it should be easy to switch activities, but I just can't. It's like trying to move a paralyzed body part; you're firing all the right neurons, but nothing happens.
When I'm focused on Task A but know I need to switch to Task B, I can't stop thinking about Task A. They're basically intrusive thoughts that aren't under my conscious control. Even if I do successfully pull myself away from Task A, I can barely do Task B because I'm still thinking about Task A — and I'm feeling frazzled the whole time. But if I just give it to the hyperfocus and devote myself to Task A until it's complete, I feel great. I'm in the zone. It's better than meditation.
My hyperfocus can be a good thing. It means that whatever Task A is, I can fully immerse myself in it and do it exceptionally well. As a general rule, my employers love this about me and like assigning me all the weirdest, most complicated tasks because they know I won't take any shortcuts; I'm going to bash my head against the problem until it breaks. But I'm useless at anything that resembles multitasking because I end up obsessing over just one of the tasks (even if it's not that complex) and neglecting all the others.
I did very well in school and I do very well in the workplace (so long as my supervisors make good use of me), but my private life is a completely different matter. I have a hard time maintaining routines and establishing habits. I'm always neglecting the majority of household tasks and my personal needs; if I'm on a vacuuming kick, for example, the floor will be spotless, but everything else will be in shambles because all I can see is the floor.
One of the worst aspects of my hyperfocus is that it feeds into itself. For example, being sleep-deprived makes me far more likely to hyperfocus, and hyperfocusing makes me far more likely to experience insomnia. If I do break out of my hyperfocus tendencies, I can usually only maintain it for a week or so until, inevitably, something throws off the delicate balance. As soon as I eat something that doesn't sit well, get woken up in the middle of the night, have menstrual cramps, etc., I'm back to self-soothing by overthinking, and it's a lot of work to get myself back on track again.
The best metaphor I can give is imagine if you got that "wake up" moment, but about things that really do not matter while you're in the middle of any productive task. Or (and this is the part is insidious for me personally) about things that are important but aren't the thing you're supposed to be focusing on right now but you know you will not necessarily have another such "wake up" moment later when you don't have something else to be focusing on and thus you very well might completely forget it. And then when you switch to working on that other important thing, it can just as easily happen again.
Distractibility like this is, luckily, the symptom of my ADHD that medication has most consistently helped with in my case. But it can also make it more likely for me to get similarly focused on less important things and not getting that "wake up" moment in the middle of it at all, so I have to be proactive about it. Granted, not getting that "wake up" moment at all bc I'm focusing in on what I'm doing (whether it's important or not) has always been a bigger problem for me than pure distractibility -- different symptoms can be bigger or smaller problems for individual people with ADHD, there's variation there.
And that's not even touching on the symptom that, for me, is much more severe, which is trouble initiating tasks even when I know they're important and am sitting there beating myself up about not starting them. Medication has helped there too, but therapy is also a big part of learning to deal with that.
How about this flipside of the distraction issue?
Have you ever found yourself asleep on the couch or at a desk, thinking "I should go to bed", and kind of amazed how long it takes for your body to follow that thought? ADHD isn't just the intrusions, it's a diminished capacity to take those thoughts and decisions and actualize them. So sure, "this is a bad use of my time", "I have to do that chore", "I sat down to do that, not this" will come up, but then...what? do you immediately switch modes? do you finish up the 'task' at hand? do you want to, but just...it doesn't happen?
Don't expect logical explanations for fundamental differences in neurology, I guess is my advice.
The issue is that, yes, we get that guilt of "I should be doing something else...just 5 more minutes" and then 5 minutes gets lost in the shuffle of other squirrel brain moments, and next thing we know, it's 2 hours later.
Like I said before, just a constant barrage of chatter. It doesn't stop just because "we should be doing something else" comes through. It never ends. And even if we get up and do the other thing, our brains are still trying to get us to go do something else the whole time.
Constant. Never ending. Chatter. Interrupting thoughts, distracting, coercing to do something else, guilt, dread, all at once, all of the time.
It's not fun.
Oh and on top of all of that, because our dopamine systems are all messed up, we don't get the pleasure of a job completed like a neurotypical person. We just get a single breath of relief that it's over and then dread that we will need to do it again...so we can't even count on the reward afterwards.
Or even if we do start, other things sidetrack us too. Here's a good example of what happens even when we go to do the "productive" thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fYg5hSgtug
There is certainly a curiosity about her. I think everyone wants to know, but how do you ask someone that? "Hey do you have autism? Are you on the spectrum?" What if she doesn't know that? Did we just call her, to use a possible pejorative, "autistic" to her face? That's pretty messed up. So it just goes unsaid. At this point, I think most people have simply accepted that the situation is what it is. And to just play to her strengths, the few she seems to have in a work environment.
As far as ADHD, I have several friends who have it. Confirmed cases and I think they're all on various meds for it. But I have one friend who I think might have it worse than the others.
He was telling me once that he needs reminders for his reminders, for his reminders. When he tries to remember that he needs to put something into a calendar or like on a post-it note, it could go two ways: either he just forgets to do it, or does it, but then forgets to look at said calendar or post-it note. And even if he does see the reminder, it can be gone from his mind moments later. He's tried all sorts of things over the years.
I was just like, "Holy...how do you function??" And the truth is, he only sorta does. He got let go from a job, because he couldn't show up to meetings on time, or missed them altogether, or would start the day late. Because he got distracted. He unfortunately never disclosed he had ADHD until he was getting "the talk." His boss supposedly told him that he wished my friend would've mentioned it beforehand, that he would've worked with my friend. But it was too late.
I think he's gotten better through different meds and finding a better therapist as well. He does have a job again that seems to be going well.
I actually hired him as a contractor at the non-profit to automate some really tedious work for us. Saved our team hundreds of hours of work. The other side of ADHD seems to be the ability to hyperfocus. And boy did he when I asked him to work on that project! Think I had to tell him to slow down so we could pay him for his time. I wanted him to take my position when I left (it's a chill enough environment that I think he'd've been alright), but I got overruled while interviewing. Instead, they hired the other shitshow over there. Sigh.
I've had a couple of people on a couple of different occasions say that to me. I don't think there was any particularly negative intent behind it, and I certainly didn't take offence, but I guess perhaps that very matter of fact interpretation of the question has something to do with why they asked in the first place...
As an autistic with 'autism and abnormal psychology' as a special interest, I have actually lost (what I thought were) really solid friendships because I implied that they might be on the spectrum. The only fight I've ever had with my best friend (of over 10 years, who was around for and supportive of my late in life dx) was when I mentioned I thought he was probably autistic. He was livid. Triggered, if you will (and I will, because that's exactly what it was. I'm still not allowed to bring it up after several years). The internalized ableism can run real fucking deep for some people, and I have had to learn to keep my mouth shut way more than I'd like to (because ohmygod it explains so much, it helps so much to know and have that context for oneself, and it's so fucking obvious to me. YOU'RE PEGGING MY SPECTROMETER OVER HERE, LET ME HELP YOU).
I've also had the opposite response, where my casual chatter about symptoms and tells and just like, interacting with someone as though they already knew they were autistic was really helpful and they sought out meds and therapy about it. I mean, I also probably said the words "you're autistic" at some point, so it's not just a matter of subtlety or lack thereof. Some people just have really big feelings about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I do that autistic thing where I say exactly what I mean in plain words all the time and its a dead giveaway to anyone that knows even slightly what autism looks like. So I just assume everyone around me knows. Its not a protected disability, so I don’t disclose it.
To clarify, not all people with austism do this, but its common enough that its become an austism stereotype.
Wokism isn't worth worrying about. At its absolute worst, it represents a collective interest in empowering people and making them safer. It's not really a problem when people "abuse" the tolerance. I think I could hold this line against any of the examples so far posted in this thread - I am very sure that woke is great and I'm sticking to it, gang!
I dont think any of us here are arguing that wokeism is worth "worrying about"
My work banned any terms that included the words "master", "black", "brown" or "white" which led to some strange renamings. Instead of black and grey days (where some activities are restricted), we now have blocked and restricted days. Trouble is, most of my coworkers are ESL speakers, and they don't know whether blocked or restricted days are more restrictive. The new names are ironically less clear to some of my African colleagues.
Since "brownout" is clearly problematic, they can only refer to "low voltage events" which is wordy without much benefit to the professionals that have to plan around brownouts, particularly in developing nations.
I'm not even going to start on the HR trainings or land acknowledgements. My Cherokee family hates them.
We had a similar effort on our branch naming schemes, changing "master" to "main"
A squick script to update the default branches on the server and then told everyone to run a git command on their locals and we were done in an hour. I spent like 20 hours of time dealing with people complaining about it.
I hated that. I still have my github set to make the default name for that branch to master.
To me, it's like saying the "master" in master's degree is also racist. Not every use of master has racist connotations.
I see most of these changes as a good thing for clarity, especially for ESL folks. Another tech change was to change black/white list to deny/allow list. A lot of the original phrases weren’t incredibly clear or descriptive, they were jargon.
also like, while the initial switch is a(n incredibly minor) pain, there's no benefit to using something like "master" over "main". "Main" is clearer and shorter.
Hmmm, you're not wrong. and I think I would have been far more OK with the change if github had done real substantive changes. Like if they announced the change along with publishing hard facts as to their employee diversity and lay out how they will be improving in real ways, I think that change would have bothered me less. I would have thought "you know that master had no racial connotations in this context but if you are doing actual things too then let's just take the win I guess"
But you are just going to do this small performative change without doing anything real substantive work? I hate pretend.....I was going to say "pretend woke" but it seems that word rubs alot of people on this site the wrong way so I don't know another shorthand for "socially conscious mindset" and google gemini had no synonyms that I think really capture it so :shrug:
"performative" is the term that would capture what you're intending.
Does this diversity report count? I’d say it’s an account of honest effort to improve.
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered.
Not disagreeing with you at all there. I have no real opinion on the matter because it is just a magic string for my pipelines as far as I care. It was just decided as such by The Powers That Be and it was easy to change.
the one thing I will say I liked being changed was the master/slave crap on Jenkins. especially given the slave gets killed when it is no longer being used to run a job. The subtext there could not be ignored, at least imo.
but the github thing felt like that scene from American Fiction where the white liberals were all patting themselves on the back for being woke and "listening to black people" when the scene was clearly showing them ignoring the perspectives of the only black people in the room.
I'd be curious if that change in master at github also came with actual changes in diversity with regards to their leadership team and etc.
So while I don’t care about the charge at all from a moral standpoint I was one of the people who was NOT good at git at the time and spent a day figuring out why some stuff wouldn’t work and ended in the tried and true “fuck it I’ll just copy everything because I didn’t even know about he .git file”.
More of a fun anecdote than anything
I think getting rid of the term "master" in a vacuum is sort of losing the plot.
I can definitely understand situations where the "master/slave" dichotomy was done away with though.
Like we don't really need terminology that explicitly reference horrific human rights abuses. I always felt a little uncomfortable with it even back in the 90s.
Every instance of the word "master" was automatically replaced in most documentation throughout the company. Led to some weird instances of documentation magically becoming out of date. Hopefully someone can figure out that documentation in the future...
So this is one of those things where there is a very narrow band of rationality between two different flavors of discrimination. So please forgive me if I stray too far one way or the other.
After apartheid in South Africa there was various reconciliation projects with a wide range of efficacy.
Can you give a couple examples ? I understand if it's too touchy and I should go look it up myself though, thanks for bringing it up
Holy crap. I was drafting this out and life got very hectic, very quickly. Must have hit post on my phone by mistake.
Its a bit longer because theres a lot of context that most people won't know.
So the project I wanted to pay attention to was BBBEE (Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment). This was the big step up from the placeholder BEE initiative set in 1994.
This was a project that had the best of intentions. Primary one being that formerly disadvantaged people would be the priority recipients of government business support. At the same time the country did not want to chase off the existing white businesses so they were also given a pathway to equity and could be eligible for the same benefits. They just needed to demonstrate meaningful proportional representation in the companies structures.
The problem is that on a national scale, its very difficult to fairly assess each and every business and needed metrics. They developed a scorecard and rating system.
Now we only got to see the worst form of this project because of our esteemed former president, Jacob Fucking Zuma. Nalson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki were disappointing in that they were unable to meet the high expectations while preserving monied interests and still skimming a little off the top. But there was at least an attempt to keep things going. Not with our boy Jacob.
We moved from general BEE to the far more involved BBBEE around 2005 and it only come into effect around 2007/8. Zuma brute forced his way into the presidency in 2009. And let's just politely say that he was not acting in the national interest.
Jcob (curses upon his name) Zuma is very much a parallel to Trump and there is so much to tackle there. Right down rallying youth movements behind bullshit causes, to being under the influence of foreign business and stripping government departments and infrastructure for parts. Its a whole series of essays on its own and its been partially documented by the Zodo Commission of Enquiry into State Capture. This is a dense read but a very valuable (and expensive) lesson that no one outside South Africa thought was worth paying attention to. Generations of opportunity were stolen from under our nose, but that just Africa problems. Not something you'd see in the first world.
The BBBEE system was not perfect, but still a policy written by Intelligent people with solid justifications at the time And it was reduced to a quota system.
Now is whe the touchy part that I disclaimed with previously comes in. This policy only really applied to businesses but we believed it was everywhere all the time. Suddenly, if you didn't make it into university or get a job, it's because of BEE. If you company lost a massive government contract, it's because of BEE. Decline of inner cities. Falling education standards. Service delivery protests. Infrastructure being stolen in broad daylight. Potholes. Rolling blackouts. It's all just BEE.
Yes, we were being governed by a con artist and his chronies. But he was only there because of BEE. We doing the angry DEI rants before it was cool.
Even amazing public servants were removed from office to facilitate looting and it was masked as a BEE initiative.
Over the 2010s there was an entire industry around mathematical manipulation of ones business to get to Level 1 status. At it's worst, you could just give a cleaning lady a fancy title and score points. And it wasn't a big secret. I believe my mom and aunt were a "directors" in my dads business for female representation.
This prevalence of manipulating numbers combined with the, new national reality, open corruption and the very obvious social decline; you can imagine what some some people tried to scapegoat to push various agendas.
And that's when you started to see the whole, "it was better under apartheid" narrative spinning up.
Because the blame game is so easy: The wrong people were in charge and bad things happened. Same way you can see the sorry state of many black areas that were racial dumping grounds compared to the former "white only" areas. Black people had every advantage over 30 years and they couldn't keep the lights on and the streets clean.
The reality is that when 80+% of the population gets equal rights, there is going to be unilateral impacts. And unfortunately the country was only really geared to service a tiny minority of population. While we had world class cities and infrastructure, it could not keep up to the scale of development and it was only exaggerated under Zuma.
From here the BEE debate spins into extremism in every possible direction.
On one hand there are people saying reconciliation was not nearly enough and we need to expropriation of land and assets for redistribution (I knew someone in uni that genuinely believed it was just about to happen and he could graduate, get his land and live in peace.) The other is that apartheid was better, in that power was focused on people best suited to use it. Another is that the state should leave everything to the private sector and "let markets decide". Or we nationalize everything. Or we should be moving completely away from big business interests and focuse entirely on rural and black communities. Or we just split up the country entirely. Of black people need to get revenge (and this sentiment was a reality and did result if several horrific farm murders. But it's not nearly the "white genocide" some people make it out to be.)
This is just my single view on what happened. There are people that definitely benefited from this initiative. There was most likely deserving people that were considered for a role because of BEE. And there could also have been the reverse where the program was manipulated and the wrong person was put in place. But the discussion doesn't deal in spesifics and edge cases.
"The program started, things got worse, program bad." That's how a lot of people saw it.
I added so much context around this because nothing happens in isolation. I didn't touch on major banks being implicated in devaluing the currency. Or the Gupta Family and the Sahara Business Empire and how they were taken down by a wedding. Or KPMG and SAP not just being complicit in State Calture, but willing participants. Or that time the president was accused of sexual misconduct and he just said that it was okay because he took a shower after. We let that slide but it really came back to bite us.
After George Floyds death there was a lot of discussion around "anti-racism", and one of the big public commentators who emerged from that was Ibram X Kendi, who was a scholar of African American studies. His book, "How to be an Antiracist" was one of the most popular at the time regarding the subject.
Admittedly, I didnt read the book. I read some articles about the philosophy and didnt think I liked the idea, but reading a whole book about something I wasnt into just to prove to myself that I wasnt into it felt like too much work.
However, other people who were not me bought and read the book in droves, and the guy became very popular and raised tens of millions of dollars to continue his antiracist research at a new institution he founded called the Center for Antiracist research.
Unfortunately, within a few years the institution was forced to undergo layoffs and reduce staff despite producing very little published research for their efforts. The CAR was shut down after Boston University opted not to renew their charter and Kendi left for a new position elsewhere. This also coincided with a general petering out of support and reduced visibility for "anti-racist" ideas in general.
Personally I think its no big loss, but it is a bit sad as far as being emblematic of the broader issue of people moving on from the George Floyd controversy without having really made significant changes in response.
This sentences confuses me, If they are not being productive and producing very little published research, doesn't it make sense that they were forced to undergo layoffs? Or you are saying that the very little published research indicates that they are understaffed and needed more manpower instead of less?
I am not really sure if it's good or bad that the CAR was shutdown. On the one hand, America could benefit from more institutions that seek solutions on how to tackle systemic racism. On the other hand, I feel like whenever I hear black activists and protestors talk about "How to be an antiracist", I got the impression they thought negatively of the book because all it was proving useful for was as a way for white liberals who wanted to claim to be woke to add it to their reading list to prove their woke bonafides rather than having any real impact but I also did not read it so I have no idea.
If you didn't read the book, you shouldn't be making claims about it, imo.
But I specifically didnt make a claim about it. I make it clear I am relaying the claim I have heard from people in a position to make such a judgement.
You should read the book! It’s a good and thought-provoking read.
it very well could be but I struggle to get through my reading list as it is :sweat_smile:
also, I tend to read only memoirs from interesting people (Trevor Noah, Malala, etc) so I think a book like that might be too dense for me anyways.
I prefer to watch youtube videos on such things from people I trust.
I was recommended to read the book by the very sorts of people you're claiming would have denounced me for reading it. You really should read it, if only because Ibram X. Kendi is a good author with a compelling viewpoint.
I'd say this is representative of any issue that becomes a "hot topic" that then ends up fading out of the collective visibility or favor. It's not like the issue didn't go away, we're just not funding it anymore. The same can be said for climate change. It's not that climate change ended in 2024, but the funding levels domestically plummeted so most of the organizations that were working on "solutions" have disappeared. The exception is where sunk cost is too high for investors, where legacy groups maintain (TNC, Gordon Betty Moore, etc), or where companies hit profitability through other markets (i.e. Planet Labs).
Federal spending will always lead the market, because many things only work if there are "free" funds to pay for the initial R&D and cover non-profitable initiatives (as not every good thing makes money).
The order in which federal funding was focused post 2020 was as follows:
Identity and DEI: 2020-2022
Jobs training and infrastructure: 2021-2023
Climate change research and solutions: 2022-2024
Defense and Military: 2024-current
If you want to make real change it takes big dollars. Kendi was no different and it is a bummer that his work wasn't just cut, but reversed.
Could we perhaps get a title change on this one? I don't think we want Tildes to be a place where people use the word "wokeism" unironically, nor do we want new users to get that impression from our front page.
Does that mean you dont think or refer to yourself as "woke"? I do. I thought thats common to do with people who lean progressive.
I refer to myself as "transgender", but the word "transgenderism" is almost exclusively used by conservative reactionaries trying to denigrate me and fear-monger about how my right to exist and make my own medical decisions is ruining society. I don't unironically refer to myself as "woke" (as imo doing so would be cringe af, like referring to oneself as "sexy"), but "wokeism" is similarly used almost exclusively by conservative reactionaries trying to denigrate the concepts they believe the term "woke" represents and fear-monger about how they're ruining society.
I just want to highlight this as a really good analogy!
I speak more about this in another comment so I won't repeat myself but I guess Jon Stewart unironically calling himself woke helped me get to a place where I feel comfortable doing so myself.
It depends a lot on the context (I probably wouldn't have a problem calling myself "woke" around my conservative family, but doing so among other progressives would feel weird), but regardless, the addition of "-ism" adds a further perjorative edge that is not present when just using the word "woke" on its own.
oh, I was distracted and misread your message a bit, sorry. you are saying your issue is specifically with the addition of "ism" at the end of woke. :shrug: I wasn't really thinking about it much when I wrote the title tbh, I just already had the word progressivism so I guess I was thinking in terms of "isms" is all.
but sure, in daily practice, I rarely (if ever) use the word "wokeism" but I dont think I feel a particular way about it tbh.
Just like "antifa", there's no unitary ideology attached to "wokeism". Rather, it's a conservative propaganda shibboleth that can be used to mean any scary out-of-context quote or activity the chattering classes can be be stirred to rage about.
I don't view woke or wokeism that way, especially since it was a black woman who originally created it.
is it being hijjacked by the right-wing? sure. but I prefer to reclaim it.
However, it seems that use of that word on this website has rubbed quite a lot of people the wrong way (which I am surprised considering I thought my post made it clear I am a progressive person) so live and let learn I guess?
As I noted before "woke" was a term used since at least the 1930s by Black folks. While it was popularized outside of Black culture during the BLM movement, it was not created by anyone in particular.
Are you thinking of Erykah Badu whose song included the "stay woke" chorus? I just don't want misinformation spread.
Here's what she has to say about the term now fwiw.
Reclamation doesn't happen without work and pain. And I'd argue it's Black folks' word to "reclaim" but even so, if you know you're "reclaiming" you have to also know that you'll get perceived as questionable at best by many whose experience with the term is negative. Same with any reclaimed word.
It shouldn't be a surprise. And if it is I encourage you to read the work of those who have reclaimed other identities and terms before continuing without that info.
"Woke" was originally a term used by progressives, which is probably where you are deriving the meaning from, but over time people opposed to progressives latched onto the word and started using it as a derogatory term and have overused it so much that it is now taken as derogatory by default for many people.
I wouldnt think its really worth changing a title over, that seems rather tone-policing to me. But the votes show that lots of people found it concerning, so it is what it is.
I am aware that there are people attempting to co-op the word, I occasionally watch Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Triggernometry and a bunch of other reactionary "old-school liberals" who never got over the attempts to "suppress free speech" during the George Floyd protests.
But I think I assumed that actual progressives still don't shy away from that word and are pushing back against liberals who have convinced themselves that wokeism is the death of western civilization.
It's not really shying away from the word, it's the issue of demonization of every word that leftists/progressives use on one hand including "woke", and the overuse of it by liberals who don't actually follow through with progressive causes.
Originally (since the 30s or so) it was a term Black folks used specifically about clocking racism and staying safe in the face of the dangers of white America. When it spread in the era of BLM and the protests it got diluted in some ways but also it was a broken promise in others. And as is often the case, the original users dropped it as it became mainstream (or occasionally still use it but rarely in mixed company.). It's only been used briefly, really by the wider culture. And it was nearly immediately turned into a perjorative.
Now, perjorative or performative it really isn't used by the left that often. I don't say I'm woke. I try to be the definition of "woke" but I'd rather express that in different ways. But there's no point in using a term that was about one thing, is now used to mean about 3 others and mostly used as an insult. The people who know know; the people who don't will need a different explanation anyway.
IMO the biggest failure of progressive rhetoric is failing to follow through and only ever taking small steps, rather than the big ones. People are very quick to compromise their ideals when it isn't their rights they're sacrificing.
I see. You and I are a bit different in that approach. I have no problem saying I am woke, just cause personally, the moment I have an issue saying I am woke, I feel people like Christopher Rufo have won. but instead I just (when the situation calls for it) clarify it as real woke and not "twitter woke" to make the necessary distinction for people who think of the generalization embodied by this meme when they might think of what "woke" is.
I never had an attachment to calling myself "woke" in the first place. They win because we don't follow through with progressive action, regardless of the language used. If they tried to force me to say I was "same sex attracted" rather than queer or bi or pan I'd not be losing that battle. "Woke" has been abused by the centrists/liberals as much as the right and I'm happy with it returning to the purview of the Black community as much as they would like.
Also that meme is a real person who was upset by Trump's inauguration and was protesting. I see far greater harm in ceding that there's anything wrong with that person, or with being a fat, femme "purple/blue hair" person with a septum piercing. That's some bullshit. I'm not saying you're doing it, but it happens far too often. Those are also people.
I think my PoV is the attempt to turn "woke" into a negative is a successful attempt to make people feel embarrassed for caring about social issue or social justice. Just my take obviously but I think that's where I land on it.
well TIL I learnt the backstory behind that meme. I always assumed someone was protesting outside a college campus about something and someone managed to snap a picture of them while they were trying or something.
The people in memes are always people with stories.
Woke was never crucial to me, and it wasn't "mine" to begin with. I'm choosing not to sound like I'm bragging about how enlightened I am (wouldn't call myself that either) and just do the thing. That's all it is.
What would you suggest?
I think just removing it and leaving "progressivism" gets across the point of the topic sufficiently well.
Done.
This whole topic feels like punching down.
Interestingly, I read it as the exact opposite: looking at the fuck ups by people in positions of relative power who are going through the motions and missing the actual point of progressive policies, rather than anything aimed at the people those policies are supposed to be helping. I actually see quite a lot of value in understanding how these things go wrong, because that's a crucial step towards avoiding the same mistakes.
And yeah, I didn't love the original title either, but that's primarily because of the potential for misunderstanding. I think it's actually pretty positive that we're in a space that's safe enough to assume the correct intent on the wording, and discuss the practical failings of otherwise-positive policies without descending into mudslinging about the policies themselves.
I'd love if that was true, but most of these are reading like blaming progressive politics for damage to "good institutions". Which has mirrored the general sentiment towards progressive policy from general population and mainstream media forever, but it's sad to see here.
Progressive politics are capable of doing damage. Just like every other form of politics. People are human, not perfect, and their ideology does not preclude them from being corrupt, or much more often, ignorant/naive.
Being a movement often based in moral stances the details can be left out, and it can be problematic, and I think if you're serious about establishing progressive policies you have to identify and be realistic about where failures have occurred or bad faith committed in its name.
I related heavily to V17's top comment here because it's a story I've heard variations of (and witnessed much minor version) throughout my life. Not even getting into the touchier stuff like communism, but simple things like "UN workers arrive in local population, think they know how to do everything better than them, fail when they find out things people who lived there have known for years"
To be clear this was not always the case (anyone who had a "oh god we were fucking stupid" story always spoke highly about overall progress), but many people with "boots on the ground" so to speak will gladly tell you how quickly ideological movements will sabotage themselves due to being unwilling to deal with the reality. This is NOT unique to progressive stories, and I think it's problematic that everyone assumes any criticism is a all out attack or denial of their values.
In my personal case, it's quite the contrary. I don't think you get anything to succeed unless you take a very cold analysis of your failures and flaws, and have a real solution for that. Addressing people's concerns, especially those who have been bit before, is SO important to putting them at ease. Attacking them for criticism/concern does much the opposite.
I agree progressive policy can cause damage. My issue isn't with that. Read how things are written, they are just mean. If I wrote "a bunch of cousin fucking conservative retards" I'd probably rustle a few feathers. Otherwise I don't really disagree with anything you said.
I worked as boots on the ground for a decade. I know the archetype your are both referring to, and it's called being green. I whole heartedly agree that it's important to be objective when in country and follow protocol that's been in place - or at least leave it the fuck alone until you understand why people have decide to do it that way. Top down fixes rarely work and it's absolutely a real thing when people come out and start wagging fingers in completely unhelpful ways. I have no argument that it doesn't happen. A whole spectrum of folks do it. In my experience it happened with the most junior, overeager people. I posted the part about attracting "progressive" candidates because that is who often take those positions - because the pay and expectations are wild unless you have a real hunger for it. I don't do it anymore because I burnt out. But I'm saying that seeing an influx of "progressive" folks, making up a larger percentage because of a changing economic landscape, who are also the newest additions to a team is going to skew someones perspective. The youngest need to fail on a few of their projects before they become capable and understand why things happen the way the do. It'll sound stupid, but checkout the new recruits in Band of Brothers, it's true in any industry/deployment where there isn't really a way to learn without doing. But to then turn around and blame that on progressive policy or sensitivity training?
You just described sensitivity training.
I mean i haven't read the whole topic, but I quote V17's post which I think is a very relatable story to anyone who's met the kind of person who grew up around/lived through that environment. It doesn't come off as mean. Most of these posts don't even strike me as being construable as mean, or at least against the entire movement. A lot of the top ones have some very constructive discussion?
Yeah...because it's outright unabashedly insulting? Maybe i just don't get it, but do you have an example? Hell if you have one, have you reported it? I don't see anything on that level glancing through this, but again i'll admit I haven't read every word.
Yes? I have no problem with it? I don't know how else to say that you might want to re-read what people are saying, because I don't think i've ever implied or meant to imply, I'm against progressive policy.
To be honest I've taken the day and come back to these comments. With some space, they don't hit as bad as my initial read. I'm coming in with a lot of baggage and feels on this topic specifically and when I've heard these arguments in person before they don't come from a place of best intent or objectivity. I'm bring that to this discussion. It still reads as insulting to me, but that may be from my own lived experience. I'll cool my jets.
Agreed. Not a fan of discussions which filter strongly for particular sides of highly contentious issues. If this thread were opening a dialogue (e.g. "what are your experiences (positive/negative) with progressive policies"), then it'd encourage people of all walks of life to express their opinions. If it were a discussion thread on a particular post (e.g. "The New York Times says that DEI is bad for the economy"), then we could respond to the article's thesis and discuss it directly.
This feels like it's one stone's throw away from collapsing into a black hole of bad faith arguments and rage baiting. Framing is important in discourse.
I don’t think that’s true since some of the stories are about mistakes made by management.
With "wokeism" in the title, I think the whole point of this thread is to point a finger at folks that aren't white, and claim their hiring was a mistake.
It's not in the title anymore, and the stories are not all about hiring.
Also, I think it's healthy for us to be able to talk about mistakes made by "our side" on Tildes, hopefully in a respectful way. I was pleasantly surprised that someone was willing to do this, and there are some decent stories.
The TLDR is that no amount of good policy can fix bad management. A lot of it seems either complete incompetance or malicious compliance.
The only policy that could involves workers empowered to democratically fire their bosses.
It does feel like 'build ammo for right wing to claim as the default outcome' for all these policies, rather than exceptions that highlight how well it's working otherwise.
But I think we can all mostly agree that sexual harassment or sensitivity 'training' more or less shouldn't be a thing....it should just be that asshats who would need such a thing get the boot.
I wish I lived in a world where sexual harassment training didn't need to be a think. But I also wish I lived in a world where workers owned the means of production. Unfortunately neither is the case yet. I'm sure corporate sexual harassment training varies in its quality ofc and it's far from a full solution to the problem, but the stuff I took at my last job did a good job making certain lines clear in a way that would prevent a bad actor from claiming they didn't know what they were doing was wrong or crossed a line. It also clarified where the line was to people who might've genuinely just not have known due to social awkwardness.
Yea I get the necessity of laying out the ground rules, which is typically the point of employee handbooks.
My gut says that those the most in need of the training are also the ones that will apply the least of it, and probably only after getting dinged.
Those employees are the ones to whom the secondary purpose of sexual harassment training is most applicable -- helping victims recognize when something won't be tolerated and is worth reporting. Of course, this requires HR to not be incompetent or malicious when it comes to dealing with the perpetrators and protecting victims, which isn't the case everywhere, but the absence of sexual harassment training would only worsen the uncertainty about whether the company is actually going to do anything when you're the victim of sexual harassment.
On sexual harassment training, this may be an implementation thing more than a flaw with the idea itself.
Most sexual harassment training is boring click through slideshow presentations that don't have any impact. When you boil it down though, it's an attempt to enforce a culture at a workplace.
If you have ever worked at a restaurant, you know that the culture there is usually far different than at a typical corporate job. Its not a coincidence then, that when I worked at restaurants, it was extremely common for me to be groped, touched, have inappropriate comments made about the way I look and so on, while in my corporate job, none of that has ever come close to happening. And I'm a man. It's way worse for women at most restaurants.
I'm not saying that that difference is because of the existence of sexual harassment training, but that the difference is because of culture. There are lots of ways to shape that culture, and training is a piece of that. I think there are definitely ways to make that training effective, and part of a company's overall culture, and there are ways to turn it into a boring, annoying check the block exercise.
The fact that we're talking about policy that has passed kind of intrinsically means we're not punching down. In order to pass policy you need political power. Some of that policy will inevitably be flawed even if it was passed with the best of intentions. It's useful to talk about and admit when things haven't worked, not only because things working is better for the people they're supposed to help, but progressive policy working makes the average person far more likely to support it.
A year ago, congestion pricing in lower Manhattan was mostly supported by the residents, but there was still significant pushback. Now, it's pretty broadly popular among everyone but the most entrenched MAGA Republicans.
The reason why is that the policy worked. You can walk around and see it working. It worked because the implementation was well thought out, and people were willing to discuss implementations that didn't work as well as they could have.
When I said "punching down" I meant to imply that it felt like the point of the thread, at its inception, was to point the finger at non-white people and claim that their hiring was due to "wokeism" - a term which has since been removed from the original post.
It seems like the thread has wandered away from that (imo) original intention, which is for the better.
I have a lot of thoughts about the implementation of progressive policies when it comes to racism and other -isms, about what has and hasn't worked - but the framing of this thread didn't encourage me to participate. And given reception to my views here and elsewhere, I'm reluctant to share in any significant way anyway. It's made all the more difficult when I browse mostly on my phone.
My lack of participation with social is my own fault, in the end.
I see the parallel you're making between congestion pricing and progressive policies working, but again - given the original context behind this thread as I read it, I don't know if I'd make a clean comparison to that, with things like diversity, equal opportunity, and other racially-focused progressive efforts.
Sorry, I didn't realize the original title had 'wokism' in it.
My example is of a progressive policy working, but doesn't have anything to do with social justice, so it would have been out of topic with the original title.
@BeardyHat brought a good example that isn't race based progress gone overboard.
What a mean thread.
Even with the retitle from 'wokism' to 'progressivism', this is still full of (what seems like) stories from men in privileged positions making fun of well-meaining efforts to do good stuff, with thin justifications like 'it was management!' to snigger behind their hands. Not many of these stories seem to be coming from a place of kindness, and a lot of them smell like the view from the IT server room.
This, and another thread recently on Tildes about people questioning whether neurodivergent people or people with mental health issues are 'really disabled' has certainly taught me a lot about the userbase.
If not the lurkers, then the ones who are comfortable expressing this stuff. I'd rather know it than not, but it is depressing. If there's any other lurkers reading through this thread with a mix of surprise and disgust, hello.
I am neither a man nor white. I believe it's important to call out nonsensical changes that don't move the needle on real issues or in fact set back progress. I hate hyperfocusing on language instead of people and behaviours.
As an extreme example, I'd prefer a kind grandma that uses (what I'd consider) slurs over a cruel bully that speaks politely.
I think an important part of progressivism (that I haven’t seen explicitly mentioned in this topic) is earnestly listening to feedback.
I feel like a progressive grandma would listen to feedback, and give an earnest shot at using those slurs less often.
If that grandma instead continues to use the slur, or increases usage defensively, then that grandma transitions from being “kind”, to being something else. I think they would cease being progressive, at least.
I'll say first and foremost that perhaps I'm reading the comments here too much at face value - it's something I've been known to misjudge in the past, and perhaps there's genuine subtext intended that I'm missing. But from what I've seen here, by and large, I get the impression that people are engaging in good faith, even if the topic by its nature causes some uncomfortable echoes of so much of the internet where there is more to worry about below the surface.
With that said - fully admitting I could be wrong, but assuming on my best effort that people are largely raising genuine concerns - this reply makes me kind of sad. It feels like a bit of a closed door, an assessment that the people engaging are the bad people, and that you're giving a nod to those fellow good people who are also disgusted by the content.
I feel like I've learned some interesting things in this thread: about the corrupt implementation of equality policies in South Africa leading to people unjustly blaming those policies for much wider corruption; about genuinely well meaning language changes being even more off putting or exclusionary to the people they were intended to accommodate; about people causing harm by fundamentally missing the purpose of the policies and just running with their absurd imagined version when implementing them. I've also just seen a comment below about male role models that looks to be extremely thoughtful, and that I'm going to read in detail after I finish writing this.
And for what it's worth, I've seen firsthand a lot of modern Michael Scott types just parroting progressive words and actions in increasingly absurd ways without stopping to think why - that's never garnered more than an exasperated eye roll from me, but it does make the causes look superficial and foolish. I'd far rather that than the opposite, which seems to be a regressive slide into those same people parroting actively exclusionary talking points instead, but I'd like to think we can look at the situation with enough nuance to understand that both are a problem, even though the latter is much worse.
More insidiously, I've sometimes seen genuine bullies hiding behind the language of oppression to secure a sense of moral high ground over their victims. Some people will callously, deliberately exploit any avenue open to them to gain an advantage over others, and if we aren't careful we can end up in a paradoxical situation where we put in place systems and norms that are simultaneously easy for a bad actor to exploit in bad faith, but excessively difficult to make use of honestly.
I guess what I'm saying is that the core concept of this topic seems an important one to discuss, and even if there's some clumsiness in how it's being handled, even if the jumping off point perhaps wasn't the best, I think it's a shame to suggest that the people engaging deserve to be branded as the kind of thoughtless techbros who perpetuate oppressive structures.
I've been giving a lot of thought on how I can give your thoughtful comment an equally thoughtful reply, but I can't find the right words really.
I read through this entire thread and posted my reaction, and it's one I hadn't seen yet. It's rare that I make a contribution, but I felt the need to in case other people were feeling the same - and judging by the messages and notes on the exemplary tags I've gotten, I think my feeling that I wasn't the only one was correct.
The premise and content of this thread still to me feels cruel. It's like an outworking of the last 18 months of normalising making fun of well-meaning past attempts at empathy now that people have been given license to do so, and now empathy and inclusivity are socially punished by leaders in society.
Again, that is my feeling. And that's really all I can give you. I am really, really tired of being asked to analyze what (to me) reads as exlusionary and 'what if inclusivity is actually bad, though?' arguments from people who vehemently claim they are acting in good faith. I don't know why the burden always falls on people like me from marginalized groups. I don't know why the onus isn't on the people writing the 'argument' or 'criticism' to not make statements that make people from non-majority groups excluded or dismissed. It's exhausting.
I think it's become more exhausting because broadly, again, people (especially people in the Anglosphere) have been given free reign to openly mock 'wokeism'. Maybe there is some real criticism in there, but I think sorting through it has become much more onorous now that the tide has turned against civil institutions and power structures advocating for me, and I - and people like me - are basically asked to justify our existence every day.
This whole thread just feels like a much longer and much more overt version of what I call the Tildes special. Whenever I say something has made me feel a certain way, I'm asked to prove it, and the person promises me, pinky promises me, that they're acting in good faith. It's just that they'd quite like a systemic review from a peer-reviewed journal (only STEM!) that logically justifies a feeling I've expressed is rooted in 'facts and logic', when that is a ridiculous proposition.
I'm just tired and sad, and it's very depressing to see this be the most active thread the site has had in months.
Sorry, it's not a great answer to your comment, but it's all I've got in the tank.
I really appreciate this, and I do actually very much get where you're coming from with that context. I won't claim to really feel it for this thread in particular, it does still read fairly matter of fact to me, but I've certainly felt similarly in other conversations on occasion - perhaps even ones where you might not have thought the same.
We've got literal nazi billionaires hyping up the worst people in society with permission and encouragement to be as shitty as humanly possible to anyone with a shred of decency. Angry and exhausted seems like pretty much the only sane default in response to... the world anymore, and that alone seems like justification enough for feeling despondent as far as I'm concerned.
On the off chance that a different lens might make this thread specifically look a little less depressing: the feeling I get is that perhaps it's active because in general and on the wider internet it's almost impossible to engage thoughtfully on a subject like this without the conversation turning into a cesspit of overt fascism. A mostly civil, mostly thoughtful thread on the topic is maybe a bit of a beacon for people to get irritations off their chest that they'd otherwise hold back because yeah, absolutely fuck joining any conversation where the participants are actually trying to undermine the premise of equality and inclusion rather than just venting about the implementation.
Or maybe I'm being too clinical, too detached, and giving people a pass where I shouldn't be. I'm burned out too, I meant it when I said I don't 100% trust my own judgment on this one, and the last thing I'd want to do is suggest you're not justified in how you feel. Something @chocobean said a day or two ago stuck with me, and it feels like it applies here too, where we're all too worn down by the overt horrors to really deal with anything else: this is yet another way the ultra wealthy has extracted from wider society: they've extracted kindness and decency.
Well said.
-another tired and sad individual
We should read comments with the assumption that the commenter is coming from a well-meaning place. I haven't seen many comments that are problematic if taking that POV. Some of what feels mean may really just come down to how it's framed. For example, you say that some arguments read as
but I don't think most of the commenters would say that inclusivity is bad as a goal. I think they are saying that sometimes, the goal and actual implementation are far apart. @vord mentions how the increase in social groups for specifically girls is apparent but there's a dearth of groups for boys. @CannibalisticApple echoes something similar with the (former) Boy/Girl Scouts. Taken together, I think there's a reasonable question to be asked about whether or not these actions have now harmed an innocent group.
Inclusion should 100% be the goal, but intent only goes so far. Is there not a better way to build an inclusive society? There are many well-meaning individuals that end up causing problems and we should be allowed to discuss that.
P.S. Another thing to consider is that you know you are from a marginalized group, because you are you, but you don't know if the other commenters are or not! Let's assume that they're not privileged individuals that lack understanding. The left is a large section of a wide spectrum and different opinions can co-exist on the same team.
Historically, threads like this often resulted in the departure of various users from marginalized backgrounds. It's a bummer because we've lost a lot of insightful users with underrepresented perspectives. It's always been an issue and there used to be a lot more navel-gazing on these matters, but ever since the massive influx of users in 2023, the general perspective seems to be more homogenous.
I don't think there's anything wrong with exploring issues like this, even if the topic is presented in a clumsy manner, but there's a reason why the vibe is the way it is.
If someone is going to wade into a heated and challenging topic, it's best to do it in a less haphazard way. And if one does it haphazardly, it's best to be willing to eat crow and acknowledge that they fucked it up.
I've done it before - waded into conversations and situations that I was underprepared for, on topics that go certain directions. I've been called out on where I use imprecise language, said something racist or some other -ist. And I take those circumstances as learning opportunities - to do better, to be better.
If these sorts of threads keep popping up, and Tildes continues to shed people from marginalized or underrepresented backgrounds and/or with other perspectives, then it does say something about the "homogeneity" here.
There's a thousand ways for us to explore that issue, but none of them would come close to the ultimate post on this subject.
From my perspective as a casual observer over the years, it seems like Tildes has consistently drawn new users from the same well. Meanwhile, those with different perspectives/experiences tend to fade over time. There have been many users like you and @DefinitelyNotAFae who have passionately discussed complicated issues related to politics and identity. Unfortunately, it seems like they eventually get banned after losing their patience, or they tune out and show up now and again in more lighthearted discussions.
That might not be the ultimate post on the subject. We've been over this countless times. The first post I can recall about this issue is this one from August 2018. I think the site only went public in April 2018 or so. If you dig down in the thread, at the time I wrote an exasperated reply as the reluctant centrist / devil's advocate talking about how far this site skewed to one direction, and how conversations that were deemed objectionable by a few were shut down.
A lot has changed since then. So far, I've only gotten more jaded and cynical, but I haven't tuned out.
Honestly, the site is more diverse and inclusive of other viewpoints than ever, if you can believe it. This thread stands as a testament to that. I'll admit I haven't read every reply, but it seems like everyone has been pretty civil and polite so far. I haven't seen anyone be banned in this thread or ragequit the site, go on to create a federated equivalent site, etc, which used to be the style at the time.
Maybe the fact that those voices are the ones getting banned is telling too.
When I fade out a bit it's because my real life is uber stressful either personally, professionally or in the broad "the world is on fire" sense.
I'm unlikely to be driven off and do my best to follow the rules. I can't promise not to get banned as that's in the power of just one person, but I make it a point not to.
For whatever little that's worth and to the chagrin of whoever thinks I'm the worst this week.
It is odd that the opposite thread I saw briefly was deleted... Not sure why as there were no comments.
Was it deleted or removed? Do you still have a link?
No clue, saw it in 3 cheers, read the initial comment, had to get on a plane, it was gone. Did a search on the web version to try to be sure I wasn't just missing it.
Could not say how or why it is absent.
Do you mean implementations that failed because the reasoning was fundamentally flawed, or things with sound reasoning implemented poorly?
And by progressivism do you mean the philosophy that arose during the Age of Enlightenment that seeks to advance the human condition through social reform, a specific subset of that, or just vaguely anything people who use the work "woke" would describe as "woke"?
I am black. I majored in film. On the graduate level, I was once in a class where they discussed how European festivals were prejudiced against African films. Maybe they are. But France makes like 250 movies a year, and Nigeria makes 1 (not counting no-budget movies shot in VHS, DVD, etc). I'm just guessing I don't remember anymore. But the difference was so immense that it made it very hard to argue that the lack of African representation was a result of racist festivals. I said that. I was chastised by other black people.
That is kinda it in a nutshell for me.
Idk when this was, but fwiw "Nollywood" makes like 2.5k movies a year now. No idea what your standard is for size or quality and how that compares but it's worth noting.
The first official Cannes selection from Nigeria was in 2025.
Where did you find that number? I tried to look it up yesterday as I know about Nollywood, but haven't heard anything the last couple of years. English Wikipedia has nowhere near that number, but it varies a lot from year to year, so their data is probably not great.