I'm not commenting on the actual topic of the post, but "We here in the libraries are world-weary and sophisticated" just tickled me, so I had to seek out more gems. It turns out Duke University Libraries' digital projects team has a blog and the quality of posts is extremely high and worth a browse: https://blogs.library.duke.edu/bitstreams/ – the effort put into each post reminds me of the yesteryear of blogging.
The Library seems to not support freedom of thought/association.
I guess we'll see in 30-90 days what happens (if anything).
I donate a reasonable portion of my profits to FIRE so I guess I'll find out where my dollars go :)
That said they seem to support mostly noble causes so I'm not gonna stop giving them money.
> The Library seems to not support freedom of thought/association.
This is a good point. 37signals has the right to associate with any organization it wants, even those that do not wish to do business with them.
FIRE should do more to punish organizations that make the choice not to associate with others, that’s not what freedom of association means. It’s the right to associate, not the right to choose not to associate.
Freedom is when you get punished for not doing business with an entity that you would prefer not to
There's no such thing as "freedom of thought/association". There is freedom of association, though, which dictates that people are free to choose who they do business with.
I'm not going to get into the ideology, but it's disappointing to see a university, of all places, switch from a relatively small provider to a massive megacorp.
So much good opensource software has come from university funding and university-originated projects and you'd kinda hope that that culture pervades. I guess Duke isn't quite Stanford or Berkeley, though.
Maybe they didn't choose Microsoft To Do as a replacement for Basecamp, but they are using Microsoft products anyway and this is just one individual's to do list for the sake of this screenshot? I just want to state the possibility, because they didn't say anything about their new tool.
I neither know Basecamp nor To Do that well, so I might be completely wrong. But I think Basecamp plays in a different league than To Do, doesn't it?
I have no insider knowledge but I suspect that the university's existing contact with Microsoft already included Microsoft To Do. This department might have started using it because it was "free" (to them) and decided it was good enough at that price point.
This is just one department within the university. It's not uncommon to see small groups paying for some software only to eventually replace it with a site licensed enterprise alternative.
See also: MS Teams replacing Slack at big organizations
Some vendor executives are louder about their opinions than others. Even as they ask their subordinates to shut up about politics and get in line at the office.
It's not like the university is digging into the closets of vendor executives.
Given how late they are to the punch on this, my money is on a recent hire who got really mad about it 2 years ago and found an opportunity at their new gig.
Almost seems gauche, really. Mainstream liberalism has distanced itself from the 2020 moral panic era.
They don't purport to do so. 37signals went way out of their way to confront their customer base with their political takes, and did so not as individual statements of people who happened to be in leadership roles at the firm, but as the firm itself. I don't know that it's going to cost them many customers in the long run, but with respect to the customers they do lose, the saying holds: play stupid games...
We made the same call as an agency, but back in 2018, moving from Basecamp to Asana. We'd used Basecamp for over a decade at that point.
We'd never been huge fans of 37signals or its leadership, but Basecamp was genuinely the only real choice, for years, for a shared workspace between an agency and its clients, so we kept using it.
Eventually, other software just got better at doing the things we needed it to do. Basecamp 3 was not something we, or our clients, liked. We stayed on Basecamp 2 until the end.
Jason and David had always been controversial figures – especially in Chicago, where we and they are based. It felt good not to be validating their egos with our money anymore.
Maybe it's more "within the creative community in Chicago". The Chicago digital creative community felt fairly small back in the early 2000s and everyone kinda had stories and opinions on everyone else.
I always find this kind of "break up post" really cringe. Do they publish something like that every time they change provider for a service? Do they vet every company they deal with to make sure everyone there thinks like them on all topics? Does it go beyond? Do people at Duke check that whoever makes their food, clothes, cars, etc thinks like them on every topic?
This is just a longer version of the "I'm leaving twitter" tweet.
They're pretending to safeguard objective knowledge, and that Basecamp is following some kind of sinister "playbook", while blatantly singing from the woke songsheet, and following the established woke playbook.
- Call it a "discussion" when it's a unilateral demand with only one acceptable, pre-determined outcome
- Give favorable treatment to some groups based on race, demand that others do the same, and adjust language rules and writing style to enforce this top-down
- Try to control the frame of a political event ("mostly peaceful protests") instead of acknowledging the plain reality of arson, looting, crime and murder.
- Completely misrepresent and misunderstand the very real critique that people have against the DEI movement as a parasite on and disruptor of tech companies.
- Pretending to be even-handed and objective while accusing others of "mendacious language of extremists" to refer to a riot as a riot.
It is just never ending projection with these people. They are intellectual midgets who don't understand the first thing about the enlightenment they pretend to defend. They think of themselves as empathetic, well-informed listeners, but they are surrounded by an ideological bubble that runs on gossip epistemology, bullying, forced consensus and shoddy social "science" that isn't.
And it all gets heaped and mashed together into one big pile of crud where race, tech, climate and god knows what else is claimed and defined by them as Good, whereas the other people are doing Evil.
At best they will grant you are "unknowingly" or "naively" collaborating with it, in which case they regard you with self-assured pity and a sense of moral superiority.
The possibility of being wrong does not occur to them and they think they are on the side of civilization.
Good question! A few reasons: this can be done only when the virtue being signalled is the same as one the majority holds in that clique. It's easy in the worst way.
It makes complicated issue shallow, and it is divisive instead of constructive as a method of affecting.
Most importantly, the goal is moral grandstanding, i.e. lifting yourself above others, possibly without any merit.
Good point. I feel people who use the phrase "virtue signal" are usually signaling something themselves. "Well, I think all XYZ people are bums, and I bet everyone secretly agrees with me and just doesn't have the guts to say it!"
I've never heard anyone decry "vice signalling" and surely humans do that at least as much.
One of the things that has always tickled me about this bent of "liberal thinking" is that they generally believe two things at once:
1. people who commit crimes -- even heinous ones -- deserve a second chance and reintegration with society (except, perhaps, for a select few crimes which may not even be especially heinous in the broader context)
2. people who hold unacceptable opinions are irredeemable
Regardless of what you think about DHH's opinions, it strikes me as magnificently childish to cause this kind of organizational disruption because of an opinion. The guy isn't funneling money to Nazi concentration camps. He has an opinion, and it's different from yours. Grow up.
You are implying here that having and expressing an opinion on social policy is worth "holding someone accountable" for. Be careful with that hammer. It feels righteous to wield until the acceptable opinion changes in a way you don't agree with.
Also, this kind of thing may be a net benefit for DHH. It's publicity. Time will tell.
Yes, I agree. I believe accounting for the prevailing attitudes of the times is called "living in a society."
We all do it. Some hills are worth dying on some are not.
I came of age in the technical space in a generation that felt that it didn't matter if you had a secret shrine to Hitler as long as you could code a performant file system. It's refreshing to have seen the pendulum swing away from that extremism. Perhaps because too many of us have borne witness to the monsters taking those performant file systems and using them to coordinate violent attacks on innocent people.
But perhaps more importantly... He's not just espousing an opinion. A chief officer is speaking as an executive of a company. Always.
One of the things that’s always tickled me about this bent of “conservative thinking” is that they generally believe two things at once:
1. Freedom of speech and self-determination are sacred and fundamental rights, and in the economic market that means that everyone is free to make purchase decisions based on closely-held personal beliefs. Private schools have the right to exercise their freedom to make their own curriculum without government intervention.
2. People and private organizations who choose not to buy a product based on closely held personal beliefs that are the wrong ones are childish cancel culture warriors.
Why should you care about Duke’s organizational disruption anyway? It’s a private school and you don’t work there.
Research has a return on investment. E.g., I wonder how many military technologies originated from US private universities?
Conservatives: We shouldn’t send tax dollars to woke private universities who are biased against conservatives.
Also conservatives: We support publicly funded private charter schools because the government can’t be trusted to run public schools efficiently and I’d rather send my child to a religious grade school. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-ba...
I don't label myself conservative. Conservatives also exhibit this behavior, but it is seen as more "socially acceptable" to do this under the banner of liberal values.
To address your point, I am not disputing Duke's _right_ to make purchasing decisions for any reason they like.
But it is still stupid and childish. I'm calling that out.
> Why should you care about Duke’s organizational disruption anyway? It’s a private school and you don’t work there.
Because Duke is attempting to normalize toxic behavior. They think this is going to help. It won't.
This behavior might achieve "compliance" but it doesn't actually move the needle. It's why places like San Francisco appear to support underserved communities, but when push comes to shove they blockade housing initiatives.
This is almost certainly some liberal, white woman's way of looking like a good person without having to risk anything. After work it's back to the gated community!
The difference you’re missing is contrition. Among those advocating for second chances one of the key steps is the party acknowledging the harm they’ve done so as not to do it again.
If this is the bar for “harming your wife’s mental and emotional state”, I bid you the very best luck working through literally anything difficult. And all relationships eventually do encounter difficulties.
Something being uncomfortable and something being harmful are very different.
Cute, they even included a strong punching screenshot of a ticket to “let basecamp subscription lapse” in their new ticket management tool. Reads like someone is very proud of the morally superior decision they made and just spent 4 hours typing up a big pat on their back. Switching from 37signals to MICROSOFT on grounds of morality is actually impressive as far as mental gymnastics go.
I do not love the ideological turn 37signals took after the DEI blow-up. But this piece is as ideological and blinkered as DHH's affirmative action posts have been. It's nice to want things, I know, but: I wish I could have had this piece just as a dry list of ways in which 37signals has waded, unbidden, into culture war topics, without the piece itself staking out the opposite sides of all those issues.
In modern times, leaders are not allowed to have mainstream opinions. The service they're changing to will also have leaders who have opinions that they don't like, they just have larger HR/PR institutions to protect themselves from "problems" like these.
But I'll reiterate a basic fact everyone has in these threads: Duke University obviously has the right to choose their service providers on ideological basis. It might not be smart, but that's another thing.
There is no separation of “it’s my personal blog” when you are in senior leadership of a company. When you’re SLT/founder/owner you represent that company on a personal level.
Imagine buying a condo in Trump Tower and thinking that that you can separate Trump’s personal life away from his real estate business. If you do that in 2023 you have to know that your house guests are going to think about that in some way every time they step foot inside.
Trump Tower is owned by GMAC Commercial Mortgage. Aside from the name, it's entirely divorced from Trump. It's like saying you support slavery because you live in Washington.
The parent comment isn't saying that locating in Trump Tower indicates support for anything. What it's saying is that the vast majority of people will think of the former president every time they walk into a building named Trump Tower, forming an association in their mind with the tenants of that building. It's quite possible that that's an unfair association to make! But the point is that the tenants should know that people will make that association, whether warranted or not. It's the same reason why Disney and Apple are so careful about what they position their brand next to: people make associations, whether or not they're justified.
Featuring the classic rhetoric of: "Have a different opinion from the one true opinion? You're causing harm". It's "think of the children" for upper middle class people with college degrees.
It’s nice they wrote this post, but this seems like a really dumb reason to change project management.
I doubt the harm caused to their users migrating project management is less than whatever harm they think 37signals is creating. So by their own logic, they shouldn’t cause this harm, or whatever.
It’s quite possible and very likely they do. But this post doesn’t describe their rationale and it just seems like a waste of effort.
If I worked there and relied on Basecamp and had to migrate to something new, for these reasons, I would be frustrated. And I would trust my tech org less because they aren’t making decisions to make it most efficient for me to build things.
As a developer, I don’t want to worry about whether my company is going to arbitrarily decide to switch technologies to something inferior.
How would you have enough information to make that statement? Maybe they do have a better understanding. You'd be surprised by the types of people who visit hn. This isn't your fav reddit sub
Librarians in the United States have been moving in a social justice/progressive direction for about the past 15 years. They are also highly online and the community is prone to purity tests and the tumblr-like political drama we've gotten used to in such spaces. This is according to my partner, who has been in the field for 20 years.
I don't know the root cause, but I do know from my own experience that a librarian is a very specific "type" of customer—extremely helpful in diagnosing any technical problem, generally positive and friendly, but God have mercy on you if you step on their politics.
Like, I know people who hate Ticketmaster but still use them because they have no other choice. It’s hard to replace.
How hard is it to replace Basecamp? Alternatives are aplenty. Some might even be cheaper and better.
This is a big reason to carefully manage your image as a company leader. It’s so a big reason DEI is financially beneficial in the: because you aren’t shutting out your best employees and customers by being unwelcoming to them.
Don’t make negative waves and unforced errors that give your customers a reason to explore alternatives.
That’s what I mean though, they aren’t Ticketmaster. They are easily replaceable.
“Initiating churn for no user value” that doesn’t mean anything. Basecamp was acting a fool and pissed off a group of purchase decision makers. And unlike companies like Ticketmaster or Apple/Google/Amazon, their product has a wide variety of alternatives.
I am aware of a company that switched away from AWS to GCP just because Jeff Bezos did something specific that personally annoyed the CEO. There was no significant cost savings and the effort to switch was relatively large.
Oh sorry, I thought you meant TicketMaster is horrible but we must use them. I don’t think Basecamp is horrible, it’s ok.
> Initiating churn for no user value
What I meant by this is that changing tools is work. I do this when it helps me. Making me change part of my workflow is disruptive and I usually do this when it brings some value.
> switching off AWS because Bezos annoyed the CEO
I would probably plan on leaving a company that chose their cloud stack based on the ex-CEO’s actions. That’s a signal of complete stupidity or at least unpredictable chaos. I guess some people are good with this, but that drives me crazy as someone who builds things with tech. It’s a dumb thing to choose tech based on superficial things.
> acting the fool
Some people think this, some people don’t. Personally, I have no issues with what he said but typically don’t really care what CEOs say about affirmative action or whatever. I want to hear from people’s competence areas, not just common prerogatives. I don’t care their favorite flavor of ice cream either.
But buying or not buying their products based on what they say is not a good way to make decisions. As people will say many things over the years and I don’t want to be changing frequently.
> We came to this decision after weighing the level of its use in our organization, which is considerable, against the harms that we see perpetuated by the leadership of Basecamp
What... they speak like DHH is running around raping women and curb stomping people. The dude wanted people to stop talking about politics at work and made it a rule and he wasn't pro-race weighing for college admissions.... so? He's suddenly anti-minority? When in fact it's asian and white people that seem to be discriminated most for admissions.
> Hansson certainly is entitled to his opinion, and to publish his own blog. We are not in the habit of running “ideological enforcement” to ensure “quick compliance” from beleaguered corporate executives or whatever it is that he’s talking about in his posts. We simply have our own opinions and our own blogs, and in some cases, we have good choices available to us regarding the companies to which we give our business.
certainly isn't "[speaking] like DHH is running around raping women and curb stomping people".
And then you cherry pick some of the less problematic issues. Perhaps one more problematic is: "When we as employees of my company spend time mocking and expressing amusement at non-English names and that's disclosed to the public, be clear, my problem is with the disclosure, not the mocking".
> Research and the documentary record show that the protests of 2020 were overwhelmingly peaceful [...] The characterization of these events as “riots” followed as part of a deliberate disinformation campaign by right-wing groups, media’s distorting focus on isolated incidents, and biased framing by political campaigns.
Wait what? According to Wikipedia the damages from the allegedly-not-riots is 1-2 billion. Surely then the most damaging protest (that the record shows is totally not riots) in history.
If you burn over 1,000 buildings in one city, and then 99 other cities have mostly-peaceful protests, it seems weird to launder one with the other. If that's the criteria then the only thing needed to claim something is not a riot is more smaller protests.
Yeah, this is a pot/kettle situation as far as deliberate disinformation.
From Wikipedia:
> research ... estimated that by the end of June, 96.3% of 7,305 demonstrations involved no injuries and no property damage. However, arson, vandalism, and looting ... caused approximately $1–2 billion in insured damages nationally, the highest recorded damage from civil disorder in U.S. history
So 97% of the demonstrations were peaceful -- "overwhelmingly peaceful" is _technically_ accurate, but obviously extremely misleading.
Those referring to these events as "riots", assuming good faith (which to be fair cannot always be assumed), are referring specifically to the NON-peaceful portion that -- while a small fraction of the total -- combined to cause the largest recorded damage from civil disorder in US history at $1-2 billion.
I'm not saying DHH's drawn conclusions are correct, but this is not the right angle of argument against his position.
Eh, ok. This feels like something that’s written with the intention to either get me cheering on their side to some comical degree (good job! Down with the fascist!) or to make me seethe in anger. (what snowflakes! I actually WANT to use basecamp now!)
There’s so much emotional language about violence and oppression.
It’s a library changing todo apps? Not everything is a statement. Vote with your wallet and all of that, but don’t expect people to care?
Despite my ideals (I think) aligning with their ideals, I still find myself annoyed that they want to force me to “feel” something. I have enough things to be riled up about in my life.
I suspect they wanted to change off Basecamp anyway maybe for legitimate technical reasons, but couldn't resist trying to score some brownie points with their sophisticate librarian cohorts.
> We’re not going to address each of the many falsehoods and distortions in the blog posts by David Heinemeier Hansson.
But you had time to write a 20 paragraph post? Sounds like you can't actually debate the merits of the argument. Sounds more like you're being "intellectually dishonest."
Super scummy to drop a very good platform like Basecamp that your whole org loves because you personally disagree with the politics of someone there... Especially when you are spending the public's money. I would never donate to Duke again or recommend anyone go there now based on this.
TL;DR - Duke is dropping Basecamp due to 37 signals policy of people at work focusing on, you know, writing software that provides customers value, while having a policy that ppl at work not be spending their work time on causing distractions with ideological side-quests.
"people at work focusing on, you know, writing software that provides customers value, while having a policy that ppl at work not be spending their work time on causing distractions with ideological side-quests"
The mission of DEI is exactly the opposite, so it should come as no surprise they hate this stuff.
If they are willing to sacrifice education and research on their altar, you think they would blink an eye on killing off productivity software in their eyes created by blasphemous hereticts?
Basecamp has a lot of features built for agencies. I’m sure lots of agencies use JIRA, but basecamp is definitely more focused on that niche out of the box, where JIRA requires lots of configuration.
“Client” accounts that can float across projects with limited access, warnings above text fields about which clients will be able to see a post/comment, files can be updated and a full history is kept with it, Gantt (ish) chart project planning, etc etc.
I also doubt a library would have much use for much of JIRA’s features anyway.
DHH has become the textbook definition of needs to touch grass.
He just can't help himself and his need to share his opinions.
A lot of people feel Basecamp's products are outdated, but many kept using them out of goodwill, loyalty, and just like the company and its customer service. DHH is tanking the one thing they have going for them.
That’s totally valid—you can base your usage of a product on your view of the vendor’s values. So why are so many people blasting Duke’s library for doing the same thing…
The vendor’s stated position is that they are apolitical. Duke dropped the vendor because of what a founder posts on his personal website. People are blasting duke because they think it’s a dumb thing to do. Duke is of course free to do what they want.
If you read the article fully, that was only a small part of the reason. Company leadership demonstrated a repeated pattern of poor taste. In short, racist, anti-worker, and discriminatory toward their own employees.
The comments here from the first hour are depressingly predictable. Just because you don’t take issue with something doesn’t mean someone else won’t.
Brands have always been bigger than their main product. People wear branded tshirts, put stickers on their laptops to show some kind of affinity with a brand.
The opposite can also be true. For reasons they don’t want to use the product anymore, and they want it to be known (they mention they’ve been using it for over a decade).
The reasons themselves have been debated here on the DHH posts themselves, so how about we ask the bigger question.
How can you join the political debate publicly, without risking customers? Or should you risk loosing customers?
How do we talk politics at work? Because sometimes it’s needed.
I don’t have the answers, suffice to say starting from a position of respect and a high-trust environment is important.
Absolutely. This is an organization with a set of values, whose members are thoughtful and highly educated, and they don’t want to help enrich someone whose values they find problematic.
This is what free markets are all about. I’m not going to buy my apples from the market stall with the confederate flag. And Bob Iger doesn’t want his movies advertised next to posts spewing white supremacy.
This ability of the market to moderate behaviour is a good thing. It is, after all, entirely peaceful and non-coercive.
In practice it's not likely I'd be reading their blog, but to answer the question, it would depend on the nature of the blog post. I think it's possible to have thoughtful and well-considered arguments against affirmative action. It's also possible to be a dick, and I'd put DHH squarely in that category. If I thought the apple-seller was a dick, then no, I would not buy apples from them.
To move out of hypotheticals, I was a long-time fan of Kanye West. When it turned out he was an antisemite, I decided I would no longer stream his music. I know each stream is worth less than a penny but I'm not comfortable putting any amount of money in his wallet. When I learned that Adidas was fully aware of his antisemitism and tolerated it to make a buck, I decided I'd be buying Nikes instead.
Every time Musk opens his mouth these days, he damages the brand of the companies he owns/is associated with. That's because it's his choice to speak his mind, and it's the choice of consumers to put their dollars elsewhere. This fact is not new. When you sell a business, some amount of the value is attributed to "goodwill". Musk, DHH and West have all damaged their brands and in the process, diminished the goodwill and thus the value of their companies.
Oh god, I read the whole thread with Bandcamp in mind (I work in music) because of the recent drama and was utterly confused with the replies. Wonder if this happened to others!
If organizations want to use software hosted by people that share their values, the solution is obvious: Self host. There are endless seelf-hostable basecamp alternatives, and I am sure there are people at Duke that would gain valuable experience helping host and maintain such services.
Do you have a refutation to the idea expressed in the grandparent? I.e. that anyone extolling the virtues of diversity ought to be open minded toward people/orgs with views differing from their own?
Want to obtain free, rapid, socially approved intolerance? Just declare something else intolerant. And feel free to immediately become proudly intolerant yourself. This of course cannot reduce the total amount of intolerance in the world, only increade it. But who cares?
Also people who are "intolerant to the intolerant" are, by definition, be intolerant to themselves.
Okay, Basecamp leadership is super duper tolerant. That’s why they made a list of funny sounding non-Anglo names and kept it documented at the company. How tolerant of them!
I’m sure that nobody working for a university would have a problem with that, since basically no professors or TAs or students paying full tuition have foreign-sounding names, right?
I don't think he is intolerant, but here are two instances cited in the article:
1. DHH is against race based admissions. For context, so are 62% of Americans [1]
2. DHH used the term "riots" to describe events following the passing of George Floyd. For context, the term "riot" appears 60 times in the wikipedia article on the topic [2].
What about the thing where Basecamp leadership kept a list of “funny sounding foreign names” in the company?
That should go over really well with the university community where pretty much most of my professors and their TAs weren’t from America originally.
Also, just because a word appears frequently in a Wikipedia article doesn’t mean that the thing it is describing is that word. The word “debt” appears 11 times in Donald Trump’s Wikipedia article but that doesn’t mean he’s poor.
If you’re being serious about it somehow being wrong to find words funny, then do you have a problem with "absquatulate", "bowyangs", "collywobbles", "fartlek", "filibuster", "gongoozle", "hemidemisemiquaver", and "snollygoster“ [1] too? Presuming you don’t have a problem with words being inherently funny, why is it a surprise that some names happen to also be funny? Have you never found a name funny or amusing? How about when Ali G introduced Buzz Aldrin as Buzz Lightyear? Or when he referred to Boutros Boutros-Ghali as “Boutros Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali”. I found that silly and hilarious. How about when Homer refers to his “friend” Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo [2], sorry, but again, it’s silly and hilarious.
One more example: on Family Fued [3] the person whose name was funny found it funny, his family found it funny, and the host/audience found it funny. Do you not laugh or at least see the humour in it?
Last one (promise). This Monty Python sketch [4] has been viewed 30M times on YouTube alone, it’s by the troupe of comedians that the python programming language is named after, and it’s all about people finding other people’s names hilarious.
Regarding “riots” you miss the point. Duke is upset DHH uses the word riot, but Wikipedia also does. So they should be equally upset with Wikipedia.
If your argument is that it’s okay for people bully others over their specifically non-Anglo name, you’ve lost me.
If your argument is that the non-Anglo nature of the “funny names” isn’t a form of xenophobia or ethnic discrimination, you lost me.
I’ve got certain Thanksgiving table members who have made fun of people named Patel for being named Patel and being Indian. That’s racist. That’s bigoted. Nobody at Basecamp was getting on the funny name list for having the last name Johnson (and that name even has a phallic connotation!)
I repeat: the funny name list was specifically non-Anglo.
I was bullied for my name as a kid. It wasn't a very common name and it and it was easily turned into a less than pleasant English word.
I would hate to think that middle school children never grow up and continue to be dickwads as founders of a sophisticated technology platform. Grow. The. Fuck. Up.
The workplace isn’t Family Feud. If people are persistently making fun of your name at work you’ve now got to decide if you fight it with HR or find another job. That’s called a hostile work environment. Family Feud is a semi-scripted TV game show where all the jokes and situations are pre-planned and edited for entertainment. If we are supposed to derive our workplace manners from television then your conclusion has to be that everything you see on Game of Thrones or The Handmaid’s Tale is work appropriate.
And again regarding the Python sketch, if your argument for acceptability in the workplace is a comedy troupe from 50 years ago, you’re gonna have a bad time. Why don’t you write an email to your CEO with the subject line “Biggus Dickus?” Right now. Like you said: it’s hilarious. I’ll make their day and get you a promotion. Let me know how that goes.
Wikipedia isn’t a Duke vendor, and the Wikipedia article for the George Floyd protests makes it very clear that most of the protests were peaceful. We don’t call hockey games “fights on ice” nor do we call American football “kickoff and extra point contest” because most of the game isn’t those things. That’s why calling broadly calling the George Floyd protests “riots” is disingenuous.
Did Fox News ever call the January 6th Capitol attack a riot?
> I repeat: the funny name list was specifically non-Anglo.
Hmm, when I google and click the most relevant result off the top couple, it says: "Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African"
Are you sure you're right about the name list? I'll believe a better source if you have one...
> If people are persistently making fun of your name at work you’ve now got to decide if you fight it with HR or find another job. That’s called a hostile work environment.
This makes me feel young. I'd never heard of Basecamp. At first I thought they were referring to Bandcamp and wondered if they published their university's orchestra recitals on it.
Melatonin due to different sun exposure, that is all skin color is. Once you understand that, I don't see any reason to consider it any more than I pay attention to the callused fingertips of a guitarist.
Cultures are different everywhere, varying across families too. Have you seen how differently everybody raises their kids? That we are used to.
Now there is an argument that what happens if someone's culture is violence, in that case I think it's a legal issue and the legal system can deal with that.
I don't know what else you want to learn. Focusing on these things is not as useful as focusing on increasing the size of the pie, making scientific education as well as the dissemination of scientific news (which has historic low amounts of trust now in the general populace) better and just making the world a better place for HUMANS and other sentient beings. It's really not that hard.
racism is an issue though, and there does need to be a focus on eliminating it. you are right that skin color should not matter, and for some of us it really doesn't. but for others it does. and we need to fix that. it's not enough to explain the problem away. active steps need to be taken to help everyone learn how to overcome it.
there should be no racial bias coming from evolution because mixing of of people of different skin colors is a very recent phenomenon in terms of human history. i believe evolutions influence takes longer than that to work.
and culture? if you grow up in an open community with open minded parents, that's all you need to not learn to judge people by their color. it's as simple as that.
if you didn't have that privilege, then it helps to seek out friends from various colors and backgrounds and let that help you open your mind.
my grandmother grew up with racial bias, and she occasionally expressed that, yet whenever me or one of my cousins brought over an african friend, she loved them, and i hope that one by one it made her realize that her prejudice was based on ignorance.
In this case is waged by "the collective" inside Duke's university against a private business by aligning the decision making parts using ideology and, confessed, done not by utilitarian grounds (features/value/convenience) but purely by also ideological grounds. It's a culture battle becoming an economic battle.
I read the article twice before commenting, not sure why you say I "obviously didn't"
I still wonder the same after you pointed out that chunk - are the people currently in vogue there at the library making decisions on what to carry and what to highlight and what to down-display based upon their ideology stretching?
In fact pointing out this chunk makes it more of a concern.
I personally believe library people have a very important and very tough job, and much like paramedics if you can't do it fairly you should step into a different role.
I have immense love for libraries, and books, and evolving discussions and thoughts.
I even noticed that the author has posts dating back to 2012, which makes me more curious about decisions they may have been involved in since then, and what classes or other ideology may have shifted, perhaps a big shift occurred after 2016 or 2020 - I find it very interesting.
My main concern is that they hold a position of power in the library.
I also believe moves like this tend to reflect on the brand of the school, and those who have said school on their resumes / linkedin, etc.
If this person was posting this as part of their liberal arts dei studies dept it would not be the same concerns.
Anyhow, I did read it - admittedly I paused and eyes glazed over for moments when I got to the part about "protests of 2020 were overwhelmingly peaceful" - and then when they said "We here in the libraries are world-weary and sophisticated."
So yeah - like I said before, "Glad to see openness like this."
as far as "you’re not even going to read the post? To earn upvotes or something? " - I actually believed I'd get more brigaded downvotes than upvotes - and at the moment that rings more true than the opposite.
I'm not on HN for votes, I don't have any way of monetizing them, no one I know knows what hn votes are about.
I occasionally offer another view point to add to a discussion, not trying gather the likes of any tribe. I hope to add a view that others may not have considered before, and I enjoy reading others for the same.
I thought the area of the article that was most interesting surrounded this statement:
> We also know all too well the very worst of what humanity can create, because we collect it.
There was a lot of acknowledgment of not working in anything close to a perfect system. The whole article had a lot of self-awareness that is hard to find in most institutions.
Duke libraries doesn’t have to have a perfect moral high ground to decide to quit using Basecamp. This isn’t “cancel culture,” this is a project management product that is easily replaceable and probably not even that amazing considering the competition it is up against.
Something Elon Musk should probably learn is that organizations consider it to be risky to work with other companies who can’t maintain professional behavior. Having your senior leadership team keeping a list of funny sounding ethnic names of employees is far away from being professional behavior, and that was only one of the unprofessional pieces of behavior out of many by Basecamp leadership.
Basecamp rejects DEI but DEI is all about reducing risk and increasing innovation and financial performance. It’s already been proven as numerical fact that organizations embracing true diversity financially outperform ones that don’t. DEI is a concept that benefits literally everyone. Bigoted buffoons who don’t believe in it throw their money away by alienating employees and customers.
There’s also another saying: trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. I know people who have had one bad experience and refuse to buy another product again. As an example, I know someone who will never buy a Kia/Hyundai again because of the immobilizer scandal. Same deal with VW and dieselgate. It doesn’t have to be a fully dollars and cents choice. This company pissed me off one time, I’m done with them. Again, not cancel culture.
