Why are the only choices being an athlete or being black? Seems like you’re trying to funnel responses into a rather arbitrary and contentious direction.
I don't know much about her, but Didion's central legacy is based around her creativity and putting art and ideas out into the world. Bryant's life surely has many lessons to teach us, but in terms of legacy he was not someone who could potentially inspire anyone--you have to be into basketball or sports in general for his life to be relevant to you at all, much less a source of new ideas.
Maybe a fitting comparison would be the deaths of a famous philosopher and a famous Christian theologian writer?
i'm squarely with you on this one. the implicit racism and bias is thick here (note the spite and bile spewed in those many kobe posts). while i appreciate didion's work, she's not even a minor blip in literature and history. also compare this to the lack of interest/discussion around bell hooks[0], a black feminist writer who is at least a minor blip in american culture and history.
besides being one of the best basketball players ever, kobe was a tech investor and media producer in the few short years since his retirement from the nba. there are literally dozens of murals all across LA of kobe. he'll also be forgotten by the zeitgeist eventually, but it will likely be decades before that happens.
Shifting perspectives takes time and effort. HN is neither as closed nor as open to discussion as many people would like to believe, one way or another.
What it does reward is sustained effort and a measured approach. I'm well aware that calm in the face of sustained insult is exceedingly difficult, and find no fault in those who don't succeed in this. I'd give the example of James Baldwin's appearance on the Dick Cavett show and response to Paul Weiss's overt racism as one of the finest examples I'm aware of.
I also strongly recommend reaching out to the HN moderators with suggestions or requests (including requests for items for the 2nd Chance or Invited Submissions queues): hn@ycombinator.com
Playing a zero-sum game of pleading off the merits of one issue or person against another tends not to play well and looks poorly. Submitting material you genuinely feel would be of interest and use to the community tends to work better. Often it's possible to leverage an existing submission with another related one.
MLK keenly understood that olive branches need backing by a sharp tongue to cut through comfortable stupor, otherwise minds don't change and bodies don't make way.
issues of intrinsic identity--race, gender, sexuality, etc.--are contentious, not because of those characteristics themselves, but because of the perceived threat to the status of marginally-statused individuals in otherwise higher status groups. that's what implicit bias is, a subconscious vigilance against rising threats principally based on outwardly observable characteristics[0]. it's applied insecurity. people comfortable in their status don't bother to shout down and suppress others.
this is small-p politics. pointing out hypocrisy hurts. it creates cognitive dissonance, it backlashes. but nothing changes without that. pain is literally our built-in evolutionary change agent.
and the challenge-suppression dynamic is playing out right here. you're part of it, responding to maintain the status quo while pointing out a tiny opening far away and in the future, a nonthreatening mirage of a glimmer[1]. other responders feel so marginal and threatened that they've decided to screech back, in defense of their own tenuous position, lest it decline further. this is literally trying to put people in their place (exhibit A: @bsanr's flagged/dead parent comment).
all this from a little comment pointing out commonplace racial hypocrisy. what power that is!
by the way, @dang explicitly declined to intervene for the kobe memorial posts at the time.
merry christmas!
[0]: those outward characteristics are uncritically internalized to represent a nebulously combined physical, ideological and cultural threat (an antiquated evolutionary feature that aided survival millions of years ago but not so much today). this shortcut also serves to lessen cognitive load and the suppressive resistance required.
[1]: i'd delve into the dynamics of why hn won't change just given 'time and measured effort', but this post is too long already.
Status-quoism is inherently repressive in any culture in which existing descrimination exists.
And yes, cognitive dissonance, especially aimed at cultural or tribal identity, hurts. Most people reject it.
I agree with all of those points.
I'm not arguing for status-quoism. I am suggesting what I've found to work reasonably well in promiting my own set of heterodox views, which include some shared by you, here on HN.
Neither the userbase nor the mods will respond well to direct confrontation. Even when they're sympathetic to a viewpoint, mods will act on the basis of how the site will respond to a comment rather than its message or viewpoint.
A recent example is here. I disagreed strongly with dang's moderation (and am still discussing the issue with him), though I see and get dang's guiding rule: the tone is all but certain to generate a flamefest rather than productive or insightful discussion. (That view guides very nearly all HN moderation, outside spam and personal attacks.)
dang's admonition was actually flagged and killed for a time. (It was later restored, though the "flagged" tag remains.)
Yes, it inherently puts all heterodox viewpoints at a disadvantage, and as I argued, the response was to a piece that was itself mindless ideological flamebait. It's really hard to counter the piece without explicitly pointing that out.
You'll have to have "showdead" enabled to see the start of this thread:
I'd made my own rebuttal to the article on that post. I applied some of the methods I've discussed here. No, it wasn't the top comment, but it did pretty well:
The point is that HN is not an open or unbiased field. It does have an establishment bias, and it has the means to serve that. It's not a venue in which direct confrontation is effective. I'm not saying that confrontation doesn't work ever, or that it's not ever justified. Defeating fascism required WWII. And a large part of the fight you're describing is a continuation of that battle.
HN is a venue in which a consistent effort over time does have effect. I'd joined the site years ago feeling myself something as an outsider. For what it's worth, I've had some success in posts and comments. And what I've used to best effect is:
- Repeated submissions of topics I think deserve greater attention. Most of those fail. Much of what I submit that does take root isn't what I'd most hope does. Sometimes I get lucky.
- Find ways of pointing out ... less than robust thinking or belief ... with a minimum of edge. This is one I consider fairly successful, as what I was muttering under my breath was "just think about what you're actually saying here". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133112
- Sometimes, be direct. In that case, I'll lay out my case first, and leave the knife for the end. I thought a few times before leaving the last 'graph of this comment, on balance I'm glad I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29669873
I've suggested you reach out to dang. I've contacted him on your behalf. I do hope you both take up the opportunity.
And good luck, I really and truly mean it. You're tackling an extremely valid cause, and one that I try to help where, when, and how I can.
maybe it's inadvertent, but by hammering on your perspective for how you think change can happen (which i can appreciate but don't agree with), you come off as normative, that we should all think and act the same way. it's brushing aside malcolm for martin, and only martin. but confrontation has a place in the constellation of approaches needed to move groups beyond shallow backwaters. confrontation is an exertion of power; it shifts fault lines. it creates the discomfort required to unlock stupor, the ossification of perceived hierarchy.
that said, i'm not really a revolutionary. i'll drop in a provocation from time to time to keep the sheep vigilant, but i generally nope out of most hn discussions around issues like race and gender. the ignorance, self-serving naïveté, and shallowness of those discussions are as gallingly juvenile as they are unrewarding. this isn't just an hn problem, it's a tech industry problem.
It's more a strategic reading of the landscape. Direct confrontation plays poorly in HN comments, and attempts to do so will be futile.
There's a subtext to the moderator response in the thread linked above: if you do want to engage in direct political discourse, doing so within an article submitted to HN is far more likely to be successful. The submission queue is a more powerful instrument than the discussion thread. Focus efforts there principally. That doesn't mean "don't play the comments". But recognise the limitations, ground rules, and limitations in doing so.
(Review of my own comment history should show the types of confrontation I'm finding generally useful. I usually aim less at changing minds directly than at exposing hypocrisy and/or motivated reasoning, or similar faults.)
Your submission history suggests you haven't been utilising that approach. You might give it a shot.
The submissions queue also affords the option at encouraging others' efforts in the direction you'd like to see. It's also possible to contact HN mods directly (again: hn@ycombinator.com) and recommend posts for the 2nd chance or invited submissions queues. I've found mods quite receptive to this. My practice is to not recommend my own pieces, though that's apparently permitted.
> "Direct confrontation plays poorly in HN comments, and attempts to do so will be futile."
i'd be remiss not to point out how repeating this, the heart of your position, 3 times now comes across as dogmatic, and condescendingly so[0]. observe: there's no one true way. (say that 3 times, even)
note that i'm generally quite intentional about the message and tone of my posts, and they more-or-less land as intended, contrary to unsupported claims otherwise[1]. the path to changing hearts and minds has no single roadmap, and it really is ok if some people get butt-hurt and recoil a bit, even to (what you seem to perceive as) entrenchment.
[0]: e.g., you start with an assumption that i don't understand how hn and discursive mechanisms at large work, and need to be schooled here. but if you want to support transgressive discourse, step aside and support it, openmindedly. not doing so indicates a different underlying objective. this is exactly how the democratic party goes so badly astray on social-progressive issues by the way.
[1]: note also that i don't see downvotes as always bad or even always negative, as you seem to assume.
You're the only person in this conversation who seems to get it, and I just want you to know how thankful I am that you haven't been afraid to express these thoughts. I think that you're right, that the person you've been replying to is wrong, and it's incredibly frustrating that this conversation has to happen. But thank you for being that voice.
Do you honestly think bell hooks would be cool with you lumping her with Kobe, even if he bought her a giant diamond after the fact?
To be clear, it reads like you invoked her name to dog whistle about misandry which would be funny if it weren’t for the way the world is because of the Internet which is because of, yknow, HackerNews type folks.
