Guardian News
14 HN mentions · mentioned in 9 months, 2020–2025
1:54 · 1.7M views · Oct 30, 2019
A Guardian clip of Barack Obama at the Obama Foundation summit saying that call-out culture is not activism and that casting stones will not bring change.
Cited repeatedly in threads on wokeness, cancel culture and outrage as an authoritative voice from the left criticizing call-outs.
14 comments from Hacker News
They show a general bias toward democrats in the article. However, if you look at 2011 and earlier, it does seem balanced. Only since 2011 is there a problem. This aligns with the democrat shift in political polarization. [LINK] >But what if the problem is that Republican voters are the type of people that don’t talk to pollsters? And the few Republicans that do talk to them are unrepresentative of the party itself? If this were the case, then there would be no clear fix I think it's less this problem, a few paragraphs later they self-refute this point. Polling was relatively reliable before 2009. It's something new, and it's obvious what it is. Republicans vote in their secret ballot differently than they admit to pollsters. Why can they not publicly admit their opinion anymore? this video Obama is smart. What I believe happened is social sciences fell on its face. It's unclear to me if STEM excluding social sciences left the field with lesser talent or if the revelations that caused social sciences to collapse bore out STEM. Ultimately this is what spawned jordan peterson. In most cases what he says is just what the social sciences say. The problem is what he says is a tough medicine to take. The democrats would rather stop him from speaking than confront what social sciences say.
This culture, whatever it is, has had a personal impact on me. Many great people that I truly and deeply admired growing up, the reason why I am the person that I am today is because of historical figures. People need to learn how to forgive, look for the best in people and let go of decades old misgivings of a person. They changed the world. They inspired a whole generation. Anything that they did in their personal lives pales in comparison. If you want to go with this route, literally every person's great great grandfather was sexist in 1920s by today's standards. People need to understand the era, the context under which they operated. I am pretty sure my thoughts today are going to be outdated after 50 years. This is a dangerous slippery slope of wokeness that needs to be strongly codemned IMO. It's one thing to raise awareness, another to deflate historical figures because of some shit they said 70 years ago. It is toxic, futile and against your cause. "That's not activism" - President Obama: this video
Casting those who question dogma as the other (conservative or "alt-right", commonly) is an effective silencing and compliance technique. "You're not one of us if you don't stay in lockstep" has a real chilling effect and is doing serious damage to the left. Obama warned about this too, but unfortunately wasn't well heeded: this video It's also intellectually dishonest. Most (all?) of the cited authors are liberals. James Lindsay, liberal professor. John McWhorter, liberal professor. I'm pretty sure Jon Haidt and Paul G are liberal-minded. For random commenters on HN, you don't know what their leaning is nor does it automatically mean disqualification. And it's worth noting that John McWhorter specializes in linguistics and has written books on language and race relations. He noticed the religious aspect of this years ago. Here he is on CNN back in 2015 making the point: [LINK]
this video Obama is a very smart dude. 2 years ago he saw it building and he misidentified this as activism. John Mcwhorter I believe better identified this as a religion: [LINK] As an atheist you see the same pattern often. Here's a hour long video of sam harris and john talking about it: [LINK] This new religion has the christians, muslims, atheists, and others all worked up. It's unusual for a new global religion to form, nothing there to really prevent it. The big difference this time is they got really big while remaining undercover. I guess my prediction as well. You could become a preacher for this new religion, set for life to serve. Just need to figure out how to. If you do try this, make sure you are following the golden rule every day. Make sure you're 100% positivity. Try to merge religions, I'm pretty sure 'coexist' is a big part of this.
“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.” “Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’” “That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.” - Barack Obama [LINK] this video