Speaking as a Jew, the worst thing about it is the atrociously thin font choice. The "If I were a Jew" framing is a little strange (I would never in a million years write an "If I were a black man" essay), but I find myself agreeing with everything he's saying. This was also written 14 years ago, and a lot has changed in the cultural discourse since then. I suspect he wouldn't again use this framing if he were to write said post now.
I tend to think the last few thousand years have given us well-honed antisemitism detectors. I definitely see this as antisemitic.
Would anyone dare to say about literally any other group "If I were x I wouldn't be able to live with myself because..."?
I'm not saying everyone who says something like that 14 years ago should be fired. But a head of diversity?
Addendum: Unfortunately, and very sadly for me, my antenna is also beeping at the fact that every post related to this story is getting flagged to death here on HN.
Muslims. Since 9/11 the West has demanded that all Muslims publicly decry the actions of other supposed Muslims for actions they had no control or influence over. If they don't, they risk being labelled extremists themselves.
Externally, we monitor them because of their religion. They end up on watch- and no-fly-lists for sharing a name and skin colour with somebody else.
I'm not comparing, it's not a competition. It's all awful.
And yes, it's a crying shame HN can't face frank discussions on racism.
I see x=white everywhere these days. Still almost no one calls it anti-white sentiment
Is there unintentional antisemitism in the sense of conflating all Jews with the subset of Israel/Likud/Israeli military/extreme settlers vs. the intentional antisemitism of "all Jews are X"?
How should we distinguish, treat, and respond to this to make such instances teachable moments and interrupt the lack of nuance and/or the othering conspiracy theories/hate?
(I think hate is taught or memetically-acquired in the absence of sane reasonableness and the Golden Rule; and ignorance is the lack of experience, knowledge, or wisdom. The Nature of Prejudice by Allport and Anti-Semite and Jew by Sarte are good reads.)
Seriously, the whole thing is based on this trope that all Jews answer for the failings of other Jews. Yes, we also frequently demand the same of Muslims whenever somebody does something in the name of Muhammad, or an "Islamic" country.
It's racist.
If I say I support Israel, or more traditional terrorism, come at me for that. But this nonsense is racist.
They see Israel/Palestine through this lens, as well as the racial justice issues in the US.
It doesn't take much of a leap to get to, "Jews are perpetuating a global racist conspiracy..."
Sound familiar?
It doesn't matter who reported it if it's true.
You can literally still read the blog post on his blog.
The real question should be why other media would see a verifiably true story and refuse to cover it. It wouldn't be news if it were about the guy serving burgers down the street, but it is certainly newsworthy when it's the anti-racist head of one of the largest companies on the planet being explicitly racist.
>It doesn't matter who reported it if it's true.
The entity reporting on a topic absolutely matters. Trust matters, and history matters. It's unrealistic to say an entire article "is true". That's not a reflection of reality. E.g. a headline or a sentence may be objectively true or false, or subjectively true or false, or misleading, or omitting context, or cherry-picking, etc.
Yes, we should mostly pay attention to the more salient things we have access to, in this case the actual blog post, but the act of criticizing an article is absolutely valid regardless of that.
The doors to the lost and banned is open to all hypocrites I guess if one loves to call to cancel those for past comments and 'crimes'.
Downvoters: Goodness me, don't downvote the messenger.
Past thoughts or beliefs shouldn’t be used to get people fired.
The people that complain there’s a double standard when a minority says something racist about someone that’s white, are the same ones that think you shouldn’t be cancelled for saying things decades ago, and yet they see this type of thing, where a thing was put in writing in 2007, and now they want to cancel him.
I don’t agree with the his statement, but it was from 14 years ago.
If you have a track record of racism, how can I put you in charge of anti-racism?
Could a Jew working at Google approach him and trust he has their best interests at heart?
There must certainly be better candidates out there.
I don't have a strong opinion about whether the blog post in question is fire-worthy - I just think your line of reasoning is often misguided, and wanted to provide the piece that's frequently missing.
Why is it so hard to see his intention? He generalised to them that was wrong , it's like saying black people are x y z. However, the rest of his talk is pretty much true.
Could you say something like that about any other group of people and not get fired?
It doesn't help that the choice of headline wording I've seen on every single instance of this report is, while not absolutely a lie, certainly misleading and clickbaity, and should be changed.
But then, if we say that, we have to apply it to RMS too, don't we?
