Comment by bsimpson
5 days ago
There are degrees of good and bad in all of it.
Harvey Weinstein preyed on people. Louis CK consensually engaged in his kink with people who later said they didn't mean to consent but were embarrassed because they wanted to curry his favor. Aziz Ansari went on a bad date, and she gossiped to someone who wanted to write a hit piece.
PG says wokeness peaked with George Floyd. Surely there was priggish stupidity that came from Black Lives Matter (like banning "blacklist" as if it had racial connotations), but what happened to George Floyd was legitimately fucked up.
I'm looking forward to a day when these ideas can be openly discussed. It's not that everything done in the name of woke was bad, it's that wokeness is a dogma that silences discussion. People whisper in cafeterias "hey, can I tell you what I really think," but nobody wants to say "the emperor has no clothes" when your wellbeing depends on it. In the last decade in tech, part of your job was paying lip service to inclusivity. If you date in SF or NY, you'll notice a bonkers number of people still signal a trendy virtue in their profiles, usually BLM/ACAB or Free Palestine/watermelon.
If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma, you'll end up with a bunch of people performing for the dogma, because they need access to those essentials.
> If people worry that they can't keep a job or be invited to a social gathering or find a mate if they question the dogma
And who, exactly, do you think will have to worry about being stigmatized for their beliefs in the next four years? Who will be threatening them, making laws that violate their rights, pointing guns at them? Anyone who spends their time complaining about the targets of such suppression, as though they don't have rights of free speech or association, is doing a bit of dogma enforcement themselves.
I'm not a fan of Floyd at all. Garner was the far better martyr for that cause.
I’ll never understand this. The fact that George was a criminal doesn’t mean anything. Kneeling on him until he was dead was a criminal act.
It's not that Floyd was a criminal. Garner was too though perhaps you can nitpick about degrees. It's a difference in how they were killed. The police were called on Floyd (for questionable reasons, but reasons nonetheless) whereas the police initiated contact with Garner on the basis that he wasn't giving their employer its fair cut. Floyd was killed by a rouge-ish cop who's partner didn't intervene and the system failed to hold accountable. Garner, was killed by multiple cops working together because he didn't just bend over and take it when they confronted him over a victimless crime, basically a summary execution over contempt of cop, and the institutions the cops report to thought this was fine and dandy, until people started protesting.
So yeah, Garner was the better martyr IMO.