by zahlman | 2025-09-29 16:22:48+00:00
> which is about on the same level as vaccines cause autism... but frankly there is nothing useful to be gained by arguing the merits of this kind of stupidity

I prefer to follow the HN guidelines and not use language like that, but the feeling is mutual. (And I can assure you that the ideas you're trying to dismiss as fringe are in fact quite widely supported.)

Regardless, I'll try:

Certainly srid's rhetoric there would not be appropriate in the HN comment section (and you can see a clear difference in style between that rhetoric and srid's actual HN comments). But it frankly comes across that you primarily object to the fact that someone else doesn't like your politics and seeks to prevent such politics from taking root in more places.

And srid very clearly refers to documented and evidenced phenomena: many academics are quite open about their use of CRT, and there are clear connections between that theory and observable real-world policy (in particular, policies that attempt to effectively implement racial quotas while pretending they are not racial quotas), and abundant critiques of the pseudoscience involved. What is here called "neoracism" (not a term I've heard anywhere else) seems to simply mean racism that targets white people (and sometimes Asians; and where this happens, pointing out Asian victims often seems required in order to get anyone to care). This demonstrably exists (the people claiming it not to exist will commonly engage in it, and commonly seek to redefine terms to excuse themselves), is obviously bigoted (on basic principles of morality that children understand), and has clear real-world impact (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...).

Your shallow dismissal of all of this, aside from not being how we do things here, is ignorant of the available evidence. Taking the so-called "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" efforts at face value is a mistake. We are talking here about people who believe that racism is inherent to being white (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22all+white+people+are+racist%22), and invent terms like "whiteness" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_theory) in order to perpetuate harmful stereotypes (leading to additional concepts like "white fragility", "white defensiveness", "white degeneracy", "white space" etc.). It is pseudoscientific because many of those terms are aimed at not only dismissing criticism without addressing it, but holding up the act of criticism itself as evidence.

This is all definitionally racist (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism especially sense 1), but works by seeking to change the definitions (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22privilege+plus+power%22) as if reality itself could be controlled through language (it of course cannot, but seeking to shape thought through deliberate change to language was a central theme in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four).

And it is not just theoretical. People such as (Hunter) Ashleigh Shackleford get paid to give presentations like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWoC90bbsdo and it ultimately leads to stories like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fonTBkjLn3U?t=4m10s .