Idk why so many people are upset or arguing. Sorry to add to the noise but I’m a naturalized citizen here and I feel like USA has so much history of doing better and moving things forward for everyone.
People all operate independently in thought here, but somehow since 1776 they have genuinely pushed society forward all things considered.
Everyone acting out of self interest but in a direction where things get better, objectively speaking, makes it a good society.
It is superior to living under dictatorships, corruption rotted “democracies”, or religious intolerance where the people always lose.
I appreciate the external vantage point, and agree that life across the board is improving and it's tough to retain that perspective in the modern era. Equally as important is remembering that much of the progress we enjoy today was not free, but was fought and paid for in blood. It is also at risk of constant erosion and requires vigilance and consistency to push back on.
I substantially prefer the term "Emancipation Day," as it gets the point across more clearly. Lots of people don't know what "Juneteenth" means, since it's not a real word.
I cannot possibly disagree with this more, "Juneteenth" is far superior.
Part of it is that it absolutely invokes AAVE. It forces people to consider and be reminded of Black American culture; "Emancipation Day" whitewashes the history a little bit and gives a little too much credit to the so-called "emancipators." Let's keep this centered on Black folks, where it belongs.
Ah, just like Easter, Christmas, Ramadan, Fat Tuesday, Valentine's Day, Purim, Holi, Passover, Cinco De Mayo, D-Day, etc. etc. etc.
Observances regularly don't give you a clue what they are about. Like, if you weren't already aware about Martin Luther King, Jr. day, you'd have to Google it to know what's up. Same with Rosh Hashana. Or Eid. I think you might be getting stuck on something that is demonstrably not a unique phenomena and it's reading a little like there's something about Juneteenth itself that's bothering you.
What you have just told me is a FEATURE. Not a BUG.
I'm very GOOD with people "not immediately knowing." I like that. It forces them to learn about my people and culture.
"Juneteenth" makes you step in and perhaps get a little uncomfortable, like, hmm weird little Black-sounding phrase?
"Emancipation Day" frees (lol) you from engaging, you can just sort of take on the same ol same ol story, which, I imagine for many people starts with Abraham Lincoln and not Black people.
I didn't realize "Juneteenth" was considered "Black-sounding" by some people. Juneteenth is a pretty culturally mainstream term (being a national holiday). And forming new words using contractions doesn't seem like a typically Black-person thing to do.
I associate the term with Black people, not because of how it sounds, but because I know what it means and know about it's origin among formerly-enslaved Black communities.
Maybe you mainly heard it said by black people, so it just sounds black to you? Whereas someone who heard about it on Twitter in 2015 wouldn't have made the same subconscious association, even if it's explicitly about celebrating freeing black people from slavery.
Oh, no. It sounds black because it is black. Check the history. "Juneteenth" the term was absolutely invented by black folks. I'm just finding it interesting that it "doesn't sound black to others."
I mean, I know that. I'm thinking of why it doesn't "sound black" to others but it does to you. Words are just words. They don't have inherent qualities that can't change or are the same to those who haven't heard the word before.
Yeah, I mean I know this can be a feather-ruffling point but (esp at my age) there's something wild about the Black slang -> "mainstream cool" slang pipeline that's ubiquitous and feels instant. :)
I had this conversation with a group of people today and literally not one of them knew its true origin and the word never propelled them to look into it further. They just assumed (correctly) that someone came up with the name because it’s in June and the nineTEENTH day, but they didn’t realize the term was actually used long ago.
So take from that anecdote what you will, but I’ll admit the name kind of has a modern sound and I don’t think it spurs the kind of curiosity that you hope it does.
Also, FWIW, the name “Emancipation Day” is also a commonly used name for the holiday, though not as common as Juneteenth.
"Emancipation Day" is way too ambiguous in the US because there are already several other days that are called "Emancipation Day" in various states [1].
They mostly all have something to do with the ending of slavery but it is different things in different states. For example in Massachusetts it is on July 8th and commemorates slavery being found to be legally unenforceable there under in a 1783 decision.
I mean... you could just look it up, if you didn't know. Plenty of places have obscurely-named holidays (for instance, a number of countries have Whit Monday as a holiday; good luck figuring out what _that_ is from the name...)
Also, if Serbia has some holidays that I can't recognize when I read them from a calendar, should Serbia change the names of them for me? Or is it only the words that black Americans use that aren't real when random people don't recognize them?
This attitude is my problem with this day. If this is a day celebrating the nation and how we overcame the evil of slavery to create something better, emancipating millions of fellow Americans, I’m for it.
If this is a federal holiday to “center blackness” and “put our attention on black folk”, then that’s state sanctioned racial factionalism and perpetuates an arrogant race centrism that’s already all too prevalent among some segments of black Americans. That I will not celebrate.
We should be creating a society that celebrates Americans, regardless of their skin color. Emancipation day is a great thing, over half a million Americans (many white) died to correct an evil that denied freedom to millions of our fellow Americans - it’s a tragedy so many had to die, but their sacrifice made a better country for all of us.
Do you want people to associate AAVE with the term? I'm not quite finding the right term but it seems "unprofessional", in a sense.
It would be like advocating for Christmas Day to be formally recognised as "Chrisso" or "Chrissie" here in Australia. Yeah we all informally call it that, but it would be embarrassing to codify it.
I do, and this is a far bigger discussion than I can get into here -- but it's about respecting/understanding Black American cultural contributions ..
.. which is hard because when you start making accounts of them you begin to realize how universal and yet unrecognized so many of our contributions are.
It doesn't help that, in the fervour to amplify black contributions, there is a lot of embellishment, appropriation, and even outright lies, often at the expense of White pioneers. I know we won't agree on this point, yourself clearly being a proud black man and myself a proud White man, but that is the sense that I have around this topic now. If I'm being frank, I find that I am conditioned at this point to treat these claims with a great amount of suspicion, as they often appear to be motivated more so by racial interests than historical accuracy.
You posted several comments in this thread that stirred up controversy and took the discussion away from the kind of discussion we would hope for on a sensitive topic like this. The guidelines ask us to avoid this, and other comments of yours in other threads have also been inflammatory. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
The western, Christian values explicitly had slavery in them. The slave owners were Christian. I don't really see how religion has to do with the abolishment of race-based slavery, sadly.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.
Theres no straw man arugement here. The fact is everything is on the internet. Telling someone their ignorant because its on the internet is a half truth. Its like saying I graduated from Harvard and therefore I had the best education money could buy and theres no way i'm ignorant. The straw was the ignorant comment and not providing what it is why it should be celebrated by Americans.
Nah it’s really easy to understand Juneteenth if you just google it. Let’s not argue on the fringes of the subject and claim it applies here. Ignorant people always have excuses for why it’s too hard to become educated on a simple subject.
I get that you're reasonably new here, but we need you to understand that this style of commenting on Hacker News is unacceptable. It's not what the site is for and it destroys what it is for. Please read and observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
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By people in a small community in Texas and nowhere else. No one elsewhere heard of this thing till now. Now everyone pretends it's a big deal but it was strictly a local event there. You never heard of it till Biden's group brought it up. I bet I'm older than you (the reader). I never heard of this till Biden brought it up.
This holiday is beyond stupid when you consider that the guy who freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, doesn't have a Federal holiday where one gets the day off.
EDIT: Now that I've had my time for my "shower thoughts": Why is there no national holiday for the American Indian? They were here first. Mistreated and kicked out of the areas they occuplied. A wonderful culture with a wonderful history but no mention anywhere on the calendar?
> I bet I'm older than you (the reader). I never heard of this till Biden brought it up.
I'm in my mid-50s, maybe you are older than me. It's something I had heard about in the 2015-2020 timeframe. I'm white as fuck, but being online meant I saw tweet threads or short explainers about it for a few years. I didn't meet folks who celebrated it, but when I asked around to Black folks I knew they were like, "Yeah, it's a thing."
So I suspect that the holiday gained momentum among Black Americans and spread out from Texas sometime prior to me hearing about it, perhaps with the rise of social media, and then us folks who are out of the loop started hearing about it later. (Either through our own social media intake or through the declaration of a federal holiday.)
> This holiday is beyond stupid when you consider that the guy who freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, doesn't have a Federal holiday where one gets the day off.
American & Western European chattel slavery (or perhaps more accurately, western christianity-driven chattel slavery) is uniquely barbaric historically.
The wide-scale dehumanization on a racial basis has no precedent historically.
Imperialist Christianity, of which the modern US continues to suffer from (even if it's a secular version), is uniquely brutal and violent.
> just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it's not real.
This style of commenting is not allowed on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's a clear breach of the guidelines that ask us to avoid swipes and name-calling.
We've had to ask you several times to correct this kind of conduct here. If it keeps up, we'll have to ban the account.
Please quit this pointless war. Yes, anyone who is banned can create a new account. That's always been the case and we don't even try to prevent it. We just keep upholding the guidelines regardless. Consider that maybe it's not the big win you think it is, to be one of the few people making an effort to use a website in defiant opposition to its intended use, when it's only a place people want to frequent because others put their efforts into making it function well.
I'm gonna repeat for the second time to you: you let comments that are blatant dog whistles stand and you respond to those that break rules of decorum. It's pretty simple to understand - either moderate the hate speech yourself or let people respond to it as it should be responded to: vociferously.
Edit:
> Please quit this pointless war
Arguing with trolls and bigots is as pointless as anything else in life but it's certainly much more pointed than moderating a tech forum to maintain decorum.
Edit 2:
Links because apparently I'm deflecting and not actually pointing out a serious pathology with this site and its moderation that's been obvious for years
It's deeply unhelpful to try and discuss something as complicated as slavery if you insist on whitewashing it as a simple, binary case of good and bad.
Of those comments, one of them would be killed by now if you'd just used the site's functionality as intended and flagged it.
Without expertise on the topic (and I am Australian, I don't have deep expertise on these topics, and it doesn't seem like other readers do either), the merit of those comments seem like a question of historical accuracy. If there's a way in which the content of these comments breach the guidelines (and no, the guidelines don't permit people to, say, support fascism or genocide as long as they're polite about it as it's been facetiously put in the past; anything that is unkind or abusive or oppressive to other people is against the guidelines here), you or anyone can explain that in a reply or an email to us. We understand that sometimes comments break the guidelines in ways that aren't obvious at face value (as you put it "dog whistles"), and in these cases people can, point this out in comments or emails to us. Positive contributors to HN do this all the time. Nobody has done that in this case, but you're welcome to do so, now or in any other similar situation.
Edit: I was reflecting as I took a walk that this discussion is almost a mirror image of one I had about a week ago with a user who seems to be on the other side of the political spectrum. Like you, their belief was that HN's discourse and moderation is biased against their political persuasion, and that this entitles them to disregard the guidelines and engage in battle against what they perceive as malevolent actors on the site. We've seen this effect forever here: the more strongly someone is focused on a particular ideological issue, the more keenly they notice anything that breaches their sensibilities about that topic. Dang has written about it and cited examples of it many times over the years:
The truth is we don't – and can't moderate in support of any particular ideological agenda. We just don't have time to pore through all the comments and manoeuvre things in a way that pushes things one way or another. All we can do is respond to the bad stuff we see, which we can only do if people use the site's feedback mechanisms to alert us to things that need our intervention.
> All we can do is respond to the bad stuff we see, which we can only do if people use the site's feedback mechanisms to alert us to things that need our intervention.
....
> Of those comments, one of them would be killed by now if you'd just used the site's functionality as intended and flagged it.
Am I taking crazy pills? I directly linked you to both comments, you concede one of them crossed a line, and yet this morning I wake up and they're both still live simply because I didn't hit a specific button?
And no I'm not gonna hit the button. Because my point isn't actually about political bias or whatever - it's that you people are weirdo hall monitors that tone police instead of actually encourage discourse (as I've said many times now in this thread, despite your claims that I'm complaining about bias).
It's not about tone it's about substance. When your comments are all laced with indignation, the substance is lost. I'm actually pleading with you to engage in discourse here. I'm telling you that I (and, evidently, many others in this community), aren't expert enough in this specific topic to see how these comments are so egregious (rather than just wrong, which is not a guidelines breach). I did some enquiries of my own about the topics, and sure, I picked up some further details. But that's not enough to me to unilaterally kill these comments, and after all that's not the point. You're expecting us to moderate a particular way about topics you have particular knowledge about and particularly strong feelings about. That's not something we can ever do, no matter the topic or the side. This is a perfect example of why it matters to optimise for substance over indignation. You could simply respond with opposing evidence, and educate other readers, me included. That's what we most want here.
> You're expecting us to moderate a particular way about topics you have particular knowledge about and particularly strong feelings about. That's not something we can ever do, no matter the topic or the side. This is a perfect example of why it matters to optimise for substance over indignation.
This is such a weird false-dichotomy you're portraying. No one is expecting you to weigh in on arcane/abstruse things. This is about a current holiday in America that commemorates freeing of slaves ~150 years ago, not slavery in the Mycenaean civilization of 1100BCE.
You said you're not American - ok then maybe you should've stayed out of the thread entirely? But since you didn't, then you should realize it is your responsibility to educate yourself. Like just plain and simple: can you imagine a police officer policing a foreign people being unaware of their history/culture/etc?
Like can you imagine the same thread about mistreatment of aboriginals in AU - would you similarly blithely claim ignorance? Indifference?
What I keep saying is that my job is not to adjudicate on content correctness, it's to uphold the guidelines, and the guidelines are designed to optimise discussions for substance and avoid ragey flamewars.
The whole reason we're having this discussion is that you expressed your points – which I acknowledged were valid and valuable – in inflammatory ways. And ever since you've been rejecting my appeals to you to avoid inflammatory commenting, by claiming that other comments are so egregious that the guidelines shouldn't apply to you.
I'm telling you that it's not obvious how those comments are so egregious. Other community members haven't called them out as egregious. They didn't set off flamewars. I've acknowledged that dog-whistles exist and sometimes comments can be egregious in ways that aren't immediately obvious, and asked for you to explain how these ones are egregious, and you keep refusing. I'm not going to be goaded or shamed into acting on comments on the basis that "it should be obvious". We can't operate a site like that.
The egregiousness of other comments doesn't excuse you from observing the guidelines. That's a very well established norm here.
> by claiming that other comments are so egregious that the guidelines shouldn't apply to you.
no man i keep claiming the same thing over and over: that you have done nothing about any other comment in this thread except mine. i've literally said this same thing like 5 times. and what's happening is you keep reasserting some kind of lattitude to ignore them.
> I'm not going to be goaded or shamed into acting on comments on the basis that "it should be obvious". We can't operate a site like that.
you can't have your cake and eat it too: if my comments are obvious enough given a particular value system that you can scold and censure me, then there can be plenty of others that are just as obvious.
edit:
> rather than insisting that you are above the guidelines... take responsibility for your own conduct
please point out for me (by using links) where i didn't "take responsibility"? at multiple points i admitted to being sarcastic/flippant. how would you like me to further take responsibility? would you like me to apologize to those people? would you like me to delete my comment so that they continue fly under the radar? would you like me to commit hari-kari?
You are only being held to account according to the guidelines, which apply equally to everyone. I'm telling you that I'm willing to act on other comments when it's clear how they breach the guidelines, but we need you to play your role as a citizen of this site who uses the mechanisms available to everyone, rather than insisting that you are above the guidelines and refusing to use the mechanisms we offer. Please stop fixating on other comments and take responsibility for your own conduct and role in making this site what you expect it to be.
Edit: To be clear, the reason your comments were acted on is that they were flagged and commented on by other community members. We act mostly on what we're alerted to, which is why I keep tell you that we need you to alert us to things if you want them acted upon (and not just as a way of deflecting from the conduct you're being called out for). It's also false that we hadn't acted on other comments in the subthread.
It is an old neologism, but the style feels surprisingly modern, and/or AAVE is so dominant today that even (youngish?) white people would have coined this type of abbreviation today.
> on June 19, 1866… "Jubilee Day"
> The Black community began using the word Juneteenth for Jubilee Day early in the 1890s.
As far as I know most people consider Emancipation Day the day that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law in 1863, whereas Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed from the people who decided to just not tell them about the law.
> Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed
Nope, just the last in the Confederate States; the last Union chattel slaves (e.g., in Delaware) were freed by operation of law a few months later with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
>(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
To expand on this, knowingbetter did an in-depth video on this topic[0]. The salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt, so that the Japanese couldn't use it as war propaganda against the US.
> the salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt,
No, convict leasing, one of several manifestations of penal slavery, was (formally) ended by Roosevelt then. Penal slavery continues in the US today, although some states have abolished it recently (though there is litigation in some of those states over it being continued in practice despite the recent formal abolition.)
This is not true. The last slaves in the United States were set free by the thirteenth amendment in Delaware, IIRC. Emancipation Day could make sense as the last slaves freed by the emancipation proclamation took place on that date.
A common misconception holds that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in the United States, or that the General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865, marked the end of slavery in the United States. In fact, the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified and proclaimed in December 1865, was the article that made slavery illegal in the United States nationwide, not the Emancipation Proclamation.[6][7][8][9]
Another common misconception is that it took over two years for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas, and that slaves did not know they had already been freed by it. In fact, news of the Proclamation had reached Texas long before 1865, and many slaves knew about Lincoln's order emancipating them, but they had not been freed since the Union army had yet to reach Texas to enforce the Proclamation. Only after the arrival of the Union army and General Order No. 3 was the Proclamation widely enforced in Texas.
Regardless, people have been calling it Juneteenth for over a hundred years, it was made a national holiday as Juneteenth, I'm gonna keep calling it that.
In Texas and maybe celebrated in other places(I haven't done the research) this is true. For a large swath of the United States it was obscure or unknown. Most of us learned about the Emancipation Proclamation though. Making Juneteenth a holiday rather than the Date of the Emancipation Proclamation is odd to me. It is as odd to me as say, celebrating Independence Day on the date the last colony got word of the signing on, hypothetically, July 5th.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed very few slaves. The order did not apply to areas of the Union which still had slaves, nor did it apply to areas of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. Although, it did apply to unoccupied areas of the Confederacy. The government of the Confederacy was unlikely to follow an order issued by the Union during the Civil War.
It may have encouraged some slaves in the Confederacy to flee, if they found out about it.
>The last slaves in the United States were set free by the thirteenth amendment
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
You may be surprised to learn that, coincidentally, America has more people in prison than anywhere else.
Did the Emancipation Proclamation actual emancipate anybody? The South didn't free them and the proclamation explicitly allowed the Northern states that had slavery to continue to have slaves.
Yes it did. When the Northern army was in Southern territory they would free the local slaves. They would then recruit volunteers into the army. Not sure how many they freed but they did pick up about 200k soldiers that way.
African-Americans in coastal California for the most part do not care about Juneteenth.. African-American politicians do try to get a photo op. A very large majority of low income African-Americans in North and Southern California, do not care about this day, do not mention it, do not do special events for it, do not mark it on any calendar or gather with special clothes on for it. compare and contrast to "Kwanzaa" also
> Black Americans in coastal California do not care about Juneteenth..
Some do, some don't. "Black Americans in Coastal California" aren't a homogenous group, and this varies a lot by things like family geographic history, socioeconomic status, and a variety of other factors.
Sorry, what do you guys mean by "been there, done that"?
Do you mean that you're slave descended black americans, and, in the case of HN User mistrial9, therefore speak for most of the slave descended black americans in coastal California?
Or do you guys mean that you celebrate Juneteenth. Thus, "been there, done that"?
The former I would challenge you on, despite obviously not being "black american coastal Californian?". The latter I would never challenge you on as that's your business.
> Black AF takes place in California and the main character had a huge celebration with his entire extended family before it was even a federal holiday.
Did you just use the fact that Black characters in fictional media set in California celebrated the holiday to contradict an argument that actual Black people in coastal California do not?
I mean, the claim was factually wrong, but that's the worst counterargument imaginable.
no it is not factually wrong, because populations are a demographic system, not a single number. Arguing over "wrong on the Internet" is a waste of brain cells, and you claim my lived experience is "wrong" .. all the worst of online discourse.
so I talked to some people at random on the street, because I was bothered by this exchange. There are a range of responses and I think that the responses are very telling.
I wont do a detailed writeup here. This one is the one I want to hilite:
Two middle aged, very poor African-Americans walking down the street in daylight, the woman with a shopping cart and the man with clean but ordinary clothes. I say in a loud voice from many feet away "Is today a holiday of come kind?" The guy replies facing me "the Post Office is closed, I dont know" .. I said "something is on" .. "yeah" .. I get creative .. "but you have been to Texas right?" and he says in a stage whisper with his hand next to his mouth like he is shielding the statement "its Juneteenth" .. I said "nobody cares about that here, right?" He replies "its a DAY, just a day. that's all it is". This is consistent with what I was referring to.. this man did not want to talk about this, or say the name.
After congratulating myself silently because you know "someone was wrong on the Internet" .. I walked a a few blocks and I saw an upright, clean cut African-American man walking, dressed in a way that suggested he was a Church member or off-duty uniform services, also very middle-aged. This man had a clean white t-shirt with an elaborate, dare I say "European logo style" t-shirt that said Juneteenth in some formal typeset way. So I bother to write this long and too-personal reply because "someone on the Internet was wrong" ;-)
Trucktober and Frappuccino aren't "real words" but most Americans know what they mean. The unfamiliarity with Juneteenth is not due to the unrealness of the word.
Both of those are portmanteau's, giving hints as to their meaning. No such thing with Juneteenth.
I agree lack of familiarity isn't because it's "unreal"---we invent words all the time, but I agree with OP that we could have come up with a better name. I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
Agree it’s a silly nitpick of language. I’ll keep picking.
Picturing a frappe and cappuccino gives you a sense for what a Frappuccino _is_. Picturing june and thirteenth/nineteenth only gives you sense for _when_ it is.
In only contend a better name would be one where the name suggests something about the content to someone hearing it for the first time.
Another American holiday coming up with an equally useless name is Fourth of July. Nobody seems to have a problem with that name, and nobody I know calls it Independence Day. Neither Fourth of July or Juneteenth are great names out of context, but they both have histories behind them and can't be changed anymore.
Heck, Juneteenth is a better name, since it is not literally month+day.
The name of the holiday, so named by the people affected, is a century and change old. The problem isn't the quality of the name, which is where we started.
I'm white AF and this thread is cringe. "We" didn't name it, for starters. It would take an electron microscope to find the amount of self-awareness to avoid suggesting better alternatives. Damn.
June (nine)teenth, seems pretty straightforward to me. Clearer than All Hallows' Evening --> Halloween.
>I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
And lots of people think Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day, doesn't make the holiday any less valid. It's just an issue of education.
> but that eventually would be sooner with a better name
Do you have some basis for thinking this? I rather suspect the reason White Americans don't know about it has more to do with the fact that it celebrates Black American history and culture, which is just not that popular among White Americans. (Of course there are exceptions, but the point is they're exceptions.) I seriously doubt that the name is the problem. The problem is that relatively few people are interested.
Juneteenth is the same sort of portmanteau as Trucktober. Plus holidays have weird names. What's a Christmas, a Mardi Gras, a Festivus? It's almost entirely a matter of usage and familiarity.
I’m not dying on this hill, I just think the name could be better, but I don’t particularly care. It’s not as though I’ve got a beef with the celebrating the freedom of slaves. I think that’s essential for America to celebrate.
It's simply important, while celebrating slavery, to correct the way that black people speak. Just so they'll be understood. Just so they'll know that regular people don't talk like that.
I don't know what your point is. You know Frappaccino? So his point stands? Regardless of his examples, we deal with no end of made up nonsense words, rarely anybody bats an eye until it sounds black and has to do with black people.And yes, this is a thing, this thread is the umpteenth one I've encountered today with people undermining and questioning the name for what amounts to it sounding black.
So your anecdote isn't useful. Kind of the opposite.
I'm pretty sure less than 1% of people in the EU would know what Juneteenth means. I didn't remember either. I just remembered I read it somewhere before and would have guessed it was something like pi day or star wars day.
Why would anyone in Europe, know when the slaves in the US were freed? Or even when the slaves in Brazil were freed? Or Peru? Or Colombia? Or Cuba?
I mean won't every nation have its own history and important days? And it seems to me that those days in every nation will be different. I'd even wager very few of us, (far less than 1%), know what those important days are called in other nations.
It’s not just an argument of name, it’s an argument of when. Go down to Charleston, SC where the local black population celebrates Emancipation Day on January 1st and has for a long, long time.
Juneteenth is in that context as artificial a holiday as Kwanza. I would imagine most other southern states have similar breaks with the Juneteenth holiday, in that it doesn’t represent the historical reality of their community.
I didn't know what emancipation day is, but could have guessed and wouldn't have looked. Like you said, I have no idea what the fuck juneteenth is, and so I clicked and now know more about this facet of American history than I would have otherwise.
Not to be snarky, but they should just learn what it means? I could just as easily not know what emancipation means. I frankly have some family members that I'm sure don't.
- At least one local bank website I've gone to today has a banner saying it is closed and uses the word "Juneteenth."
This seems to be reasonable enough to consider it a real word.
Additionally, the term "Emancipation Day" is inaccurate (and therefore obfuscatory) because slavery is still legal and constitutional if you are convicted of a crime. Emancipation doesn't accurately describe the current state unless this is no longer true. I'm going by this dictionary definition of "emancipation": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emancipation
Here's an article, the power relationship was exercised by denying parole that would have otherwise been granted without a profit motive:
https://archive.ph/0gVie
"Since 2018, about 575 companies and more than 100 public agencies in Alabama have used incarcerated people as landscapers, janitors, drivers, metal fabricators and fast-food workers, the lawsuit states, reaping an annual benefit of $450 million."
You know in movies and cartoons and stuff when you'd see like, a whole bunch of prisoners in striped pajamas, chained together breaking rocks or digging ditches or whatever? Those are depictions of an enslaved workforce.
Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.
We have a similar sounding exception clause in Germany, and nobody would call the prisoners slaves.
That being said, I don't doubt that the american prison systems has severe problems, for example the one raised in the other answer to my previous comment.
The text of the 13th amendment makes a direct equivalence between the chattel slavery it outlawed and the incarcerated forced labor that it left unaffected:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted*, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction
The plain reading of that text is that slavery remains a permitted punishment in the US.
I’m not an American or a constitutional expert but my plain reading of that text is that the exception is for “involuntary servitude”. You could read it both ways but that’s how I’d understand it.
1. slavery became illegal, except as punishment for a crime
2. a ton of vague laws sprung up, like "malicious mischief". Look up "Jim Crow" or "black codes" to get a sense of these.
3. States started "convict-leasing" out prisoners as a source of income, often right back to the plantations that slaves were liberated from before. The convicted were not paid for this labor.
Additional context: Virginia Supreme Court rules that inmates are slaves to the state in 1871: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/slaves-s... Virginia held the capitol of the Confederacy - the states that tried to leave the USA to retain their slaves.
I forget why the crime exception was added to the 13th amendment, but I assume it was to make it more palatable to the states that still wanted slaves
We Americans don't like doing that either, because it makes us uncomfortable.
>Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.
I'm having trouble understanding how it's different. They are held by the state, forced to work, are not free to leave, and we have a bit of a history...
So we've come to the difference of opinions, which is that your definition of slavery excludes those convicted of a crime, while others' doesn't. Not a very interesting point to debate on.
Yes, I think there is a difference between being kidnapped from your home, shipped across the ocean and sold into a life of servitude (with any children you have being born into the same condition, or yourself being born into such a situation) vs. doing labor as part of a sentence for a crime of which you have been duly convicted (and will someday be released from). That is my opinion.
Would your opinion change if the legal system that permitted people to be kidnapped, shipped, and sold, was the same system that decided if you're a criminal fit to be kidnapped, shipped, and sold?
No. The system that allowed the former was changed. I reject the premise that convicted criminals were or are "kidnapped, shipped, and sold" in any way that is comparable to chattel slavery. Were there some abuses? Probably. We live in an imperfect world.
You might not have heard about it before then but it’s been celebrated since the Reconstruction era and it became a state holiday starting with Texas in 1938, making it roughly as old as Veterans’ Day.
no they usually start with a bunch of people celebrating something. this holiday is just an underhanded way for liberals to shove their politics down the throats of the other half of the country
>I just cannot believe people can just fly the confederate flag and not be thrown into prison or worse. Same with Nazis.
Yeah, this is how things like freedom of expression and free speech clauses to the constitution work, they prohibit imprisoning ("or worse") people for displaying symbols of their preference, just because you don't like them, even if they're racist, as long as they're not actually committing violence against others.
Does your "or worse" refer to torturing people for these things perhaps? Congratulations, you're about as shitty as any garden variety authoritarian, racist or not.
We have a president doing his best to winnow down the 1st amendment against his particular brand of dislike, and on the other hand idiocies like what you demand doing it from another end. In both cases, emotionally claiming that what they want to restrict is "dangerous".
>If a house divided will inevitably fall, then certainly, a house that tolerates people advocating destruction of the house will also fall.
If your notion of a house divided means anyone not sharing your worldview then being imprisoned ("or worse"), it's you, or people like you who are really the problem in a country where it's exactly the kind of authoritarian bullshit you vomit that has been largely rejected by centuries of constitutional protections.
We can look to German society for an alternative balance on the principles of free speech and Nazism. Germany isn't doing too bad as a society in terms of individual liberty and prosperity. One might argue they're better governed than any particular state in the US, or the US overall.
Germans also understand Nazis better than the US and they decided their democracy doesn't need it.
Modern Germany has its fair share of problems with how the state can define permitted speech and use it to censor selectively. Since the legacy of the Nazi era is still there, along with the legacy of the Stasi era, German society and government are generally careful to not go overboard on certain things, but this would apply either way. Does anyone really think that the only thing stopping the resurgence of Nazism is a law prohibiting swastikas and certain kinds of speech? No, it's a general social tendency towards avoiding strong authoritarian trends, based on some of the worst historical experience possible.
In essence, these laws don't really "help" anyhow in terms of stopping any serious movement toward extremism, while on the other hand sometimes selectively being used to censor in completely nonsensical ways.
Also worth noting, historically, it was exactly a fear of letting deeply hated ideological enemies of the country's conservative elements that caused the Weimar conservatives to make justifications for censoring ideologically opposed viewpoints and "protecting the nation" against their definition of treason through laws that created loopholes for authoritarian control. This very same perceived need led them to an alliance with the Nazis and the formation of the Hitler cabinet of 1933, after which the much more extreme Hitler used the same legal loopholes -so easily exploitable by serious authoritarians- to completely destroy the Weimar Republic and all of its existing political, social and individual freedoms.
The so-called paradox of tolerance is bullshit. It was specifically intolerance and legal mechanisms for its expression against supposedly extreme viewpoints, that destroyed Weimar Germany and led to Nazi Germany. I have yet to see a country where too much free expression leads to more repression. The exact opposite is the case everywhere you look. Politicians and ideologues establish "reasonable" limits on extremist speech and later expand those ever more censoriously as they redefine extremism or treason to include anything that supposedly divides the nation, ie: goes against their views of a unified political system.
Nah, if your freespeech involves treason and rebellion you no longer have rights.
No, "worse" meant capital punishment (the universal punishment for that crime). The only good traitor is a dead traitor. Don't betray your country. Don't fly the flags of its enemies. I am fine with a moderate punishment (1-2 years in prison), I just expected society to treat it with the seriousness it deserves.
If you conspire to kill someone or rob a bank, that's a conspiracy charge. if you run around dressed and armed like a militia and wearing confederate flags, threatening race wars, then it's free speech. that makes no sense.
This isn't an unpopular sentiment outside the US as you think. I like germany's approach to the problem. the punishment isn't severe but just enough. Try the nazi salute in germany or flying the nazi flag and you'll see what happens.
Your argument is a logical fallacy (slipperly slope). No, I am not suggesting arbitrary banning of arbitrary symbols and flags I dislike, there is no slippery slope. If an entity is declared an enemy of the united states by the democratically elected government of the united states, then you don't get to fly its flags on american soil without consequence. You don't get to fly ISIS or al-qaeda flags just the same as confederate and nazi flags. I am not against flying random KKK or white supremacist flags (well I am, I just don't think that should be illegal). Displaying symbols or making speech in advocacy of a declared enemy of your country shouldn't be legal.
If the checks and balances of government allow Trump to declare an entity enemy of the state then yeah, you can't fly their flags either. That's how democracy works, don't elect people who are not trustworthy. The constitution is not a religion and freedom of speech means nothing without a stable country to administer it.
Being intolerant to some speech is necessary for the preservation of free speech. Free speech doesn't mean you get to say anything without consequence (can't yell fire in a crowd, I'd say rebellion is worse than that!).
Treason and rebellion is worse than mass murder! that's our disconnect. you see it as an opinion, I see it as something so horrific that I wouldn't be all that upset if the person's precious life (and even in case of murder I don't support capital punishment, except for extreme cases) was taken from them. War and the death of millions of innocents is what I equate treason and rebellion with, and not just death but so much human suffering that lasts decades (see the misery of post-civil-war reconstruction!).
> Nah, if your freespeech involves treason and rebellion you no longer have rights
Do that and you can guarantee that it’ll be used against you. I abhor people who fly those flags, I’ll personally stomp their faces, but the government shouldn’t be allowed to stop them or else your run into the issue of what treasonous speech is. I firmly believe the people (society in general) should hold all of the power when it comes to policing speech.
Like I said, this isn't arbitrary, if I start flying the flags of my country's enemies, then like any other law it should apply to me. Who gets to decide who the enemy is? The democratically elected legislators and officials. Plenty of countries with better free-speech and free-press protections than the US ban things like this, holocaust denial, etc... it isn't a slippery slope.
Right now, the 'enemies' of the democratically elected leaders are Democrats and Socialists. You think jail time for being a member of the DSA is reasonable? That's democracy working as intended? (That said, the US is not a democracy, and it's really important to remember that, because we do value some votes more highly than others and put significant barriers in place to prevent everyone from voting.)
That's not a slippery slope, the admin is on the record saying that socialists are their enemies. I don't want to give them the power to go after anyone who might be a socialist. Especially when they are carting people off to death camps in foreign countries.
Sorry for ignorance but I have no idea what the DSA is.
That said, you hit it on the nail when you said the US isn't a democracy. that's only half way true but let's fix that! If the we're not a democracy then free speech still means nothing either way. US citizens are being abducted and disappeared in broad daylight, what free speech do you have when that can happen to you?
But if democracy is working right, and that is the premise I made my original statement under, and we owe allegiance to our country than explicit and outright betrayal of your country isn't free speech. it is exactly what it is and should be treated as such. Anything short of that falls under the half-measure bucket I mentioned earlier. It is nursing a festering wound until it causes sepsis and kills the whole body.
I would even argue that the loss of democracy you're talking about has to do with the culture of half-measures. Protests that affect or risk nothing, people being outraged but not acting on it (voting or more). Tolerating nazis under "free speech" is why there are nazis running the country right now. These people should have been buried under prisons a long time ago.
Oh, sorry, DSA is the "Democratic Socialists of America" -- a left of Democrats group that mostly focuses on advancing Social Democrat and Democratic Socialist causes (like housing and healthcare for all).
>The only good traitor is a dead traitor. Don't betray your country. Don't fly the flags of its enemies.
In essence, you're an authoritarian moron, shitting out justifications for vicious repression under the name of protecting against extremists. There's already no shortage of this same foolish nonsense being bayed and barked for by Trump's supporters against their supposed "enemies of the nation" on the progressive left or by anyone who doesn't lock-step support their half-baked policies.
These same people quickly label anyone who disagrees with them on various things as a traitor and really, so much of that boils down to exactly what you foolishly claim you don't support, which is banning X arbitrary things one dislikes. You can yammer as much as you like about how stupid slippery slope arguments are, but their justifications absolutely do exist, especially when applied based on the ridiculous criteria by which you seem to hatefully enjoy defining the idea of treason and fantasizing about how'd you love to see supposed traitors executed.
There's more rehashed stupidity to unpack in the rest of your comment, but why bother?
No, we should not let the state decide -based on often ideological, nationalistic or simply corrupt criteria- what thoughts, symbols or expressions of opinion by people are suddenly treason. Those enforcing such things have historically, almost inevitably slid towards authoritarianism and those supporting such things as members of the public tend to make their own slide towards applauding nationalistic idiocy.
Nice, started of with an insult, pretty much you broke plenty of HN rules. Try to be civil please.
This isn't about a political disagreement. It is a universal fact in any country or form of government that betraying your country is considered equivalent to condemning its people and is one of the highest crimes a person can commit. I didn't make that up, nor do I deserve to be insulted for stating that fact. Political enemies and enemies of the country are different things, you're conflating the two for rage-bait reasons I suppose, so you can feel anger at someone. Sorry, I am neither a trump supporter, an authoritarian, or someone who supports criminalizing political disagreements. You just made that up so you can insult someone.
A person is not a traitor because someone calls them a traitor, that is purely childish. Treason and rebellion are well defined under the laws of every single country in existence. It is a crime that must be proven in court. If you believe the courts can adjudicate crimes like murder then they are also capable of doing the same for treason and rebellion. Therefore, standing by my earlier statement, if a person is proven in court as supporting rebellion and treason against his country, they should be punished accordingly with punishment that fits the crime.
> "we should not let the state decide -based on often ideological, nationalistic or simply corrupt criteria- what thoughts, symbols or expressions of opinion by people are suddenly treason. "
Wow! rarely do I see text-book examples of a straw man argument, but there it is! who in this thread claimed that should be the case? an enemy of a country is not declared as such because of those reasons but because they intend to cause harm to its people. There is no grey area here, if a group wants to kill americans, that's why they're the enemy, it's that simple. it isn't "democrats" or "people we don't like" , it is "nazis who want to murder americans" or "isis who want to destroy america", "the confederate army who led a bloody civil war against america", there is no slippery slope or grey area as you would like there for it to be. don't support people who want to murder us, it is that simple. It is possible to have laws that define specific parameters of their enforcement.
It's not about being nice, but on Hacker News we operate according to guidelines and norms that have evolved over more than 15 years, which keep discussions focused on substance and prevent it from burning to the ground the way most online communities do.
Please do your part to make this place better not worse. The point you made above was a valid and valuable one, but the way you expressed it means its value is lost.
Anyone can act as though their position is righteous enough, and their opponent's is pernicious enough, that an exception should be made in their case. But it's only because enough people make an effort to avoid that that HN can continue to exist as a place where people want to come and discuss important topics.
If someone else's comment is wrong, respond with an opposing argument. If their comment is inflammatory or in some other way in breach of the guidelines, flag it, and/or report it to us via email. We have several ways of keeping discussion healthy here, but we need everyone to do their part.
> Anyone can act as though their position is righteous enough, and their opponent's is pernicious enough, that an exception should be made in this case.
"Both sides are the same"
> If someone else's comment is wrong, respond with an opposing argument. If their comment is inflammatory or in some other way in breach of the guidelines, flag it, and/or report it to us via email.
My man - there are well known dog whistles and revisionist accounts of the slave trade in this very comment chain ... And yet the only one that gets flagged is mine. And even so based on what grounds - a flippant remark about Wikipedia being free? Forgive me if I don't take your commitment to "healthy" discourse seriously.
We don't care about the "side". I don't even know what "side" or what central point you're arguing. Our role as moderators is not to adjudicate on arguments, it's to prevent the place from burning to the ground.
Your comments have been inflammatory and abusive from the very beginning of your participation in the thread, so of course you're attracting flags. But you're certainly not the only commenter getting flags in the thread.
All the feedback mechanisms we offer are here to help you if your intention is to contribute positively to the site. Votes, flags, vouches, email support. If you don't use them, you're in no position to claim that the system is biased against you.
I'm sorry, but what? A quick look at this person's profile has tons of flagged comments on every page. None of it is pretty. I see rants about pretty much every non-White Christian group. You can't just ignore that.
But yeah, almostgotcaught is the one who needs a bollocking because he got a bit testy when the Nazi was goosestepping around ... :-/
Now I've been able to look into those comments, I agree it's not what we want on HN, and I've acted on more of their comments. If that kind of thing continued we'd ban them.
The problem in this thread was that almostgotcaught posted multiple escalatory comments, then when I replied to them asking them to stop, which is just routine moderation here, they continued escalating and making swipes against HN's whole approach to moderation and assuming bad faith on our part, rather than doing what many others do and working constructively with us to help HN function better.
They've said elsewhere that they were very upset by the comments and I can understand that. It's a topic that's sensitive and is prone to get people upset. I could have been more considerate of that. It's hard to be considerate when your character is under attack for just doing the job that is expected of you and that you do the same way every day.
The biggest takeaway is that HN can't discuss topics like this without them descending into hellish flamewars, which is disappointing.
I wasn't implying it's biased against me - that would be banal - I'm implying you don't actually care about healthy discourse but keeping up appearances because the only thing you're responding to is my purple language and not all the hate speech.
Edit: I'm rate limited
> you're not doing your part to help
... I responded to a comment and pointed out a revisionist take. Did you scold that person too or just me? Do you get it now?
We moderate what we see in the order we see it and it takes time to get to everything. As I said, if you're not doing your part to help, first by observing the guidelines yourself and then by flagging or reporting other comments that breach the guidelines, you're not in a position to complain.
Someone got mad at me today because I said "we beat slavery" was I accidentally dog whistling? It's just how I thought about it. I guess "white people" did beat it but also "white people" were doing it. We kind of beat it as a country is what I meant. Idk my family wasn't even here yet but I'm just happy there isn't slavery.
You are being actively obtuse here, which is understandable if perhaps you're taking almostgotcaught's comments as a direct attack on you. (which it most likely isn't)
If you looked at the adjacent comments you would immediately see a combination of "western christian values," and open pondering that "Epstein is an Israeli asset. Democrats and Republicans have loyalty to Israel." This alone is enough dog whistling for at least my neighborhood's dogs to start acting up.
Sorry, It wasn't a rhetorical device, it actually happened to me today. I'm not taking either "side", I thought it might explain something I didn't understand. 100% legitimately.
Remember Vatican 2? you may have heard about it. pretty big deal, lots of changes in the catholic church, made a whole bunch of news, put the latin mass out to pasture and also pulled back on the doctrine of deicide, ruffled a lot of feathers, etc.
There are some people who yearn for the aesthetics and cultural heritage of the latin mass. They miss the funny words in a language they don't speak, the historical continuity of the latin liturgy, etc. For these types, it's purely innocent aesthetic yearning, mostly harmless.
There are also some people who both miss the latin mass and feel very strongly about the perfidy of the jews being a theologically important teaching. These anti-semitic sedevacantist types share the same information ecology with all of the more harmless latin mass types. Dog whistles are a tool that can be used to disambiguate between the two types of latin-mass-enjoyers.
Fetishizing "western christian values" communicates different things when one of the most prominent far-right groups, the proud boys, makes this a central doctrine. If a latin-mass-enjoyer were to tell me they deeply valued western christian values, before airing their favorite anti-semitic conspiracies, I'm likely to predict they're not into latin mass for purely aesthetic reasons.
Someone once tried to make the argument to me that African Americans should feel eternal gratitude toward whites for fighting a war to free them. The fact of the matter is that America is one of the very few countries in history to fight a war to keep slavery.
This type of reductionist take is unhelpful no matter who is making it. We can have a bunch of free states, with whites and blacks fighting for abolition as far back as the founding, and a bunch of slave states fighting for slavery.
Trying to flatten the situation into one general group vs another cannot explain the complexity of the situation, like the fact that there were black and mixed-race slave owners, or that Delaware fought for the Union Army despite being a slave state.
They had a war to keep slavery because there was a strong movement to abolish it. Most countries in the world didn’t have strong movements to abolish slavery like we did. Mostly due to Christian movements.
China, Korea had slavery well into the 20th century and had no major conflicts because they didn’t have Christian abolitionist movements.
That's likely a reference to the show "Cuties" which was a rage-provocateur for awhile.
I cannot make assertions about the show, only that I am passingly familiar with the internet's larger distaste for the show based on allegations of exploitation of minors.
Oh wow, I've even seen this movie, and I didn't pick up on what they were referring to. I vaguely remember some controversy, and being unable to get worked up about it. Thanks for reminding me.
Happy Juneteenth! A reminder that we can change as a country. May we never have to liberate by war again.
Happy Juneteenth
Idk why so many people are upset or arguing. Sorry to add to the noise but I’m a naturalized citizen here and I feel like USA has so much history of doing better and moving things forward for everyone.
People all operate independently in thought here, but somehow since 1776 they have genuinely pushed society forward all things considered.
Everyone acting out of self interest but in a direction where things get better, objectively speaking, makes it a good society.
It is superior to living under dictatorships, corruption rotted “democracies”, or religious intolerance where the people always lose.
I appreciate the external vantage point, and agree that life across the board is improving and it's tough to retain that perspective in the modern era. Equally as important is remembering that much of the progress we enjoy today was not free, but was fought and paid for in blood. It is also at risk of constant erosion and requires vigilance and consistency to push back on.
There are some wonderful photos and stories here, salute to the people at Texas Highways for putting this together.
From the article:
"The day was dubbed Emancipation Day but, slowly, the term Juneteenth — a portmanteau of June and 19th — took hold."
Debating the name instead of appreciating the holiday and gravity of the topic is missing the forrest for the trees. Just wow.
I substantially prefer the term "Emancipation Day," as it gets the point across more clearly. Lots of people don't know what "Juneteenth" means, since it's not a real word.
I cannot possibly disagree with this more, "Juneteenth" is far superior.
Part of it is that it absolutely invokes AAVE. It forces people to consider and be reminded of Black American culture; "Emancipation Day" whitewashes the history a little bit and gives a little too much credit to the so-called "emancipators." Let's keep this centered on Black folks, where it belongs.
Invoking questions is a feature, not a bug.
> Part of it is that it absolutely invokes AAVE. It forces people to consider and be reminded of Black American culture
If you don't already know what "Juneteenth" means, the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand. Literally zilch. It involkes nothing.
"Emancipation Day" does give the outsider a clue.
Names matter.
Ah, just like Easter, Christmas, Ramadan, Fat Tuesday, Valentine's Day, Purim, Holi, Passover, Cinco De Mayo, D-Day, etc. etc. etc.
Observances regularly don't give you a clue what they are about. Like, if you weren't already aware about Martin Luther King, Jr. day, you'd have to Google it to know what's up. Same with Rosh Hashana. Or Eid. I think you might be getting stuck on something that is demonstrably not a unique phenomena and it's reading a little like there's something about Juneteenth itself that's bothering you.
The UK just gave up and named them "Late May Bank Holiday".
Again. GOOD GOOD GOOD.
What you have just told me is a FEATURE. Not a BUG.
I'm very GOOD with people "not immediately knowing." I like that. It forces them to learn about my people and culture.
"Juneteenth" makes you step in and perhaps get a little uncomfortable, like, hmm weird little Black-sounding phrase?
"Emancipation Day" frees (lol) you from engaging, you can just sort of take on the same ol same ol story, which, I imagine for many people starts with Abraham Lincoln and not Black people.
I didn't realize "Juneteenth" was considered "Black-sounding" by some people. Juneteenth is a pretty culturally mainstream term (being a national holiday). And forming new words using contractions doesn't seem like a typically Black-person thing to do.
I associate the term with Black people, not because of how it sounds, but because I know what it means and know about it's origin among formerly-enslaved Black communities.
That's super interesting. I'm not why my assumptions are different, perhaps because I'm black and 48 years old?
Maybe you mainly heard it said by black people, so it just sounds black to you? Whereas someone who heard about it on Twitter in 2015 wouldn't have made the same subconscious association, even if it's explicitly about celebrating freeing black people from slavery.
Oh, no. It sounds black because it is black. Check the history. "Juneteenth" the term was absolutely invented by black folks. I'm just finding it interesting that it "doesn't sound black to others."
I mean, I know that. I'm thinking of why it doesn't "sound black" to others but it does to you. Words are just words. They don't have inherent qualities that can't change or are the same to those who haven't heard the word before.
Yeah, I mean I know this can be a feather-ruffling point but (esp at my age) there's something wild about the Black slang -> "mainstream cool" slang pipeline that's ubiquitous and feels instant. :)
I had this conversation with a group of people today and literally not one of them knew its true origin and the word never propelled them to look into it further. They just assumed (correctly) that someone came up with the name because it’s in June and the nineTEENTH day, but they didn’t realize the term was actually used long ago.
So take from that anecdote what you will, but I’ll admit the name kind of has a modern sound and I don’t think it spurs the kind of curiosity that you hope it does.
Also, FWIW, the name “Emancipation Day” is also a commonly used name for the holiday, though not as common as Juneteenth.
"Emancipation Day" is way too ambiguous in the US because there are already several other days that are called "Emancipation Day" in various states [1].
They mostly all have something to do with the ending of slavery but it is different things in different states. For example in Massachusetts it is on July 8th and commemorates slavery being found to be legally unenforceable there under in a 1783 decision.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Day#United_States
I mean... you could just look it up, if you didn't know. Plenty of places have obscurely-named holidays (for instance, a number of countries have Whit Monday as a holiday; good luck figuring out what _that_ is from the name...)
Do Thanksgiving.
Also, if Serbia has some holidays that I can't recognize when I read them from a calendar, should Serbia change the names of them for me? Or is it only the words that black Americans use that aren't real when random people don't recognize them?
> "Emancipation Day" does give the outsider a clue.
shall we also rename shabbat and yom kippur and purim so that "outsiders" can have a clue?
people are so tone deaf sometimes - it's not for you - it's for the people whose ancestors were freed on this day.
> the word itself gives you nothing to help you understand
neither does any other word that you don't bother to look up in dictionary or encyclopedia.
Actually, I guess we have! Notice how you typed "shabbat" and not "שבת". Much easier to Google.
This attitude is my problem with this day. If this is a day celebrating the nation and how we overcame the evil of slavery to create something better, emancipating millions of fellow Americans, I’m for it.
If this is a federal holiday to “center blackness” and “put our attention on black folk”, then that’s state sanctioned racial factionalism and perpetuates an arrogant race centrism that’s already all too prevalent among some segments of black Americans. That I will not celebrate.
We should be creating a society that celebrates Americans, regardless of their skin color. Emancipation day is a great thing, over half a million Americans (many white) died to correct an evil that denied freedom to millions of our fellow Americans - it’s a tragedy so many had to die, but their sacrifice made a better country for all of us.
Do you want people to associate AAVE with the term? I'm not quite finding the right term but it seems "unprofessional", in a sense.
It would be like advocating for Christmas Day to be formally recognised as "Chrisso" or "Chrissie" here in Australia. Yeah we all informally call it that, but it would be embarrassing to codify it.
I do, and this is a far bigger discussion than I can get into here -- but it's about respecting/understanding Black American cultural contributions ..
.. which is hard because when you start making accounts of them you begin to realize how universal and yet unrecognized so many of our contributions are.
It doesn't help that, in the fervour to amplify black contributions, there is a lot of embellishment, appropriation, and even outright lies, often at the expense of White pioneers. I know we won't agree on this point, yourself clearly being a proud black man and myself a proud White man, but that is the sense that I have around this topic now. If I'm being frank, I find that I am conditioned at this point to treat these claims with a great amount of suspicion, as they often appear to be motivated more so by racial interests than historical accuracy.
Oh.
Yeah, sorry man, you're rightly getting downvoted to hell here because you're absolutely wrong; it's the reverse that's more often true.
[flagged]
You posted several comments in this thread that stirred up controversy and took the discussion away from the kind of discussion we would hope for on a sensitive topic like this. The guidelines ask us to avoid this, and other comments of yours in other threads have also been inflammatory. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm unaware of a large non-Christian population living in the Confederate States of America.
The western, Christian values explicitly had slavery in them. The slave owners were Christian. I don't really see how religion has to do with the abolishment of race-based slavery, sadly.
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I've been told that I wear the mark of Cain, so
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_slavery
Slave owners would cite Ephesians 6:5-6.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.
I legitimately can't tell if this is satire.
Anyway, as a Black Christian, I always tell people on both sides -- know what religion is most responsible for slavery in the US?
Christianity.
And also, know what religion is most responsible for freedom for Black folks in the Us?
Also Christianity.
It's just complicated.
Not "western" of course, but the traditions/organization of Black churches.
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Yes. And those who believe everything on the internet are not igonorant. If its there it must be true!
Don’t use strawman arguments mixed with sarcasm, it doesn’t help anyone. Not everything on the internet is a lie or propaganda.
Wikipedia is reliable enough to lookup what Juneteenth is, if you were really curious and not just complaining about the name.
Theres no straw man arugement here. The fact is everything is on the internet. Telling someone their ignorant because its on the internet is a half truth. Its like saying I graduated from Harvard and therefore I had the best education money could buy and theres no way i'm ignorant. The straw was the ignorant comment and not providing what it is why it should be celebrated by Americans.
Nah it’s really easy to understand Juneteenth if you just google it. Let’s not argue on the fringes of the subject and claim it applies here. Ignorant people always have excuses for why it’s too hard to become educated on a simple subject.
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I get that you're reasonably new here, but we need you to understand that this style of commenting on Hacker News is unacceptable. It's not what the site is for and it destroys what it is for. Please read and observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sure, apologies.
Many thanks!
> America's latest attempt at making themselves feel better about their barbaric cultural history
This isn't a new phenomena. Juneteenth has been celebrated for well over a hundred years now.
By people in a small community in Texas and nowhere else. No one elsewhere heard of this thing till now. Now everyone pretends it's a big deal but it was strictly a local event there. You never heard of it till Biden's group brought it up. I bet I'm older than you (the reader). I never heard of this till Biden brought it up.
This holiday is beyond stupid when you consider that the guy who freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, doesn't have a Federal holiday where one gets the day off.
EDIT: Now that I've had my time for my "shower thoughts": Why is there no national holiday for the American Indian? They were here first. Mistreated and kicked out of the areas they occuplied. A wonderful culture with a wonderful history but no mention anywhere on the calendar?
> I bet I'm older than you (the reader). I never heard of this till Biden brought it up.
I'm in my mid-50s, maybe you are older than me. It's something I had heard about in the 2015-2020 timeframe. I'm white as fuck, but being online meant I saw tweet threads or short explainers about it for a few years. I didn't meet folks who celebrated it, but when I asked around to Black folks I knew they were like, "Yeah, it's a thing."
So I suspect that the holiday gained momentum among Black Americans and spread out from Texas sometime prior to me hearing about it, perhaps with the rise of social media, and then us folks who are out of the loop started hearing about it later. (Either through our own social media intake or through the declaration of a federal holiday.)
> This holiday is beyond stupid when you consider that the guy who freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln, doesn't have a Federal holiday where one gets the day off.
Don't see why we can't have both.
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Mostly because I think we have too few holidays. I'm fine with Juneteenth, you are the one who seems to have a problem with it?
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No. We don't have multiple Federal holidays for any such thing.
Just the one holiday. And the day before it. Oh, and that other day in spring.
You must live in another country. We have no such national or federal holidays.
The American ethnocentrism is real and in FORCE when racism is involved. Not surprising for an American holiday relevant only to Americans.
Genuinely curious--what's a country that doesn't have a barbarous cultural history?
American & Western European chattel slavery (or perhaps more accurately, western christianity-driven chattel slavery) is uniquely barbaric historically.
The wide-scale dehumanization on a racial basis has no precedent historically.
Imperialist Christianity, of which the modern US continues to suffer from (even if it's a secular version), is uniquely brutal and violent.
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> jesus christ you people are so thick:
> just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it's not real.
This style of commenting is not allowed on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's a clear breach of the guidelines that ask us to avoid swipes and name-calling.
We've had to ask you several times to correct this kind of conduct here. If it keeps up, we'll have to ban the account.
Lol ban me I'll just make another account (and I know you guys think you have just the best fingerprinting tech but newsflash you do not :)
Please quit this pointless war. Yes, anyone who is banned can create a new account. That's always been the case and we don't even try to prevent it. We just keep upholding the guidelines regardless. Consider that maybe it's not the big win you think it is, to be one of the few people making an effort to use a website in defiant opposition to its intended use, when it's only a place people want to frequent because others put their efforts into making it function well.
I'm gonna repeat for the second time to you: you let comments that are blatant dog whistles stand and you respond to those that break rules of decorum. It's pretty simple to understand - either moderate the hate speech yourself or let people respond to it as it should be responded to: vociferously.
Edit:
> Please quit this pointless war
Arguing with trolls and bigots is as pointless as anything else in life but it's certainly much more pointed than moderating a tech forum to maintain decorum.
Edit 2:
Links because apparently I'm deflecting and not actually pointing out a serious pathology with this site and its moderation that's been obvious for years
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44323748
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44323351
Neither of those comments are inaccurate.
It's deeply unhelpful to try and discuss something as complicated as slavery if you insist on whitewashing it as a simple, binary case of good and bad.
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> jesus christ you people are so thick:
You think this comment was flagged because of sarcasm? lol
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Do you find pleasure in being a random angsty troll deep in day old HN threads lol
Can we all just stop this please? It's already gone on too long, me included.
> you let comments that are blatant dog whistles stand and you respond to those that break rules of decorum
Please include links here so we can all see whether your claims are on solid ground rather than an attempt to deflect from your own conduct.
Of those comments, one of them would be killed by now if you'd just used the site's functionality as intended and flagged it.
Without expertise on the topic (and I am Australian, I don't have deep expertise on these topics, and it doesn't seem like other readers do either), the merit of those comments seem like a question of historical accuracy. If there's a way in which the content of these comments breach the guidelines (and no, the guidelines don't permit people to, say, support fascism or genocide as long as they're polite about it as it's been facetiously put in the past; anything that is unkind or abusive or oppressive to other people is against the guidelines here), you or anyone can explain that in a reply or an email to us. We understand that sometimes comments break the guidelines in ways that aren't obvious at face value (as you put it "dog whistles"), and in these cases people can, point this out in comments or emails to us. Positive contributors to HN do this all the time. Nobody has done that in this case, but you're welcome to do so, now or in any other similar situation.
Edit: I was reflecting as I took a walk that this discussion is almost a mirror image of one I had about a week ago with a user who seems to be on the other side of the political spectrum. Like you, their belief was that HN's discourse and moderation is biased against their political persuasion, and that this entitles them to disregard the guidelines and engage in battle against what they perceive as malevolent actors on the site. We've seen this effect forever here: the more strongly someone is focused on a particular ideological issue, the more keenly they notice anything that breaches their sensibilities about that topic. Dang has written about it and cited examples of it many times over the years:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
And in this subthread just three months ago, a banned user insisting that there's a “hard liberal-progressive tilt to comments and post flagging”:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43136198
The truth is we don't – and can't moderate in support of any particular ideological agenda. We just don't have time to pore through all the comments and manoeuvre things in a way that pushes things one way or another. All we can do is respond to the bad stuff we see, which we can only do if people use the site's feedback mechanisms to alert us to things that need our intervention.
> All we can do is respond to the bad stuff we see, which we can only do if people use the site's feedback mechanisms to alert us to things that need our intervention.
....
> Of those comments, one of them would be killed by now if you'd just used the site's functionality as intended and flagged it.
Am I taking crazy pills? I directly linked you to both comments, you concede one of them crossed a line, and yet this morning I wake up and they're both still live simply because I didn't hit a specific button?
And no I'm not gonna hit the button. Because my point isn't actually about political bias or whatever - it's that you people are weirdo hall monitors that tone police instead of actually encourage discourse (as I've said many times now in this thread, despite your claims that I'm complaining about bias).
It's not about tone it's about substance. When your comments are all laced with indignation, the substance is lost. I'm actually pleading with you to engage in discourse here. I'm telling you that I (and, evidently, many others in this community), aren't expert enough in this specific topic to see how these comments are so egregious (rather than just wrong, which is not a guidelines breach). I did some enquiries of my own about the topics, and sure, I picked up some further details. But that's not enough to me to unilaterally kill these comments, and after all that's not the point. You're expecting us to moderate a particular way about topics you have particular knowledge about and particularly strong feelings about. That's not something we can ever do, no matter the topic or the side. This is a perfect example of why it matters to optimise for substance over indignation. You could simply respond with opposing evidence, and educate other readers, me included. That's what we most want here.
> You're expecting us to moderate a particular way about topics you have particular knowledge about and particularly strong feelings about. That's not something we can ever do, no matter the topic or the side. This is a perfect example of why it matters to optimise for substance over indignation.
This is such a weird false-dichotomy you're portraying. No one is expecting you to weigh in on arcane/abstruse things. This is about a current holiday in America that commemorates freeing of slaves ~150 years ago, not slavery in the Mycenaean civilization of 1100BCE.
You said you're not American - ok then maybe you should've stayed out of the thread entirely? But since you didn't, then you should realize it is your responsibility to educate yourself. Like just plain and simple: can you imagine a police officer policing a foreign people being unaware of their history/culture/etc?
Like can you imagine the same thread about mistreatment of aboriginals in AU - would you similarly blithely claim ignorance? Indifference?
What I keep saying is that my job is not to adjudicate on content correctness, it's to uphold the guidelines, and the guidelines are designed to optimise discussions for substance and avoid ragey flamewars.
The whole reason we're having this discussion is that you expressed your points – which I acknowledged were valid and valuable – in inflammatory ways. And ever since you've been rejecting my appeals to you to avoid inflammatory commenting, by claiming that other comments are so egregious that the guidelines shouldn't apply to you.
I'm telling you that it's not obvious how those comments are so egregious. Other community members haven't called them out as egregious. They didn't set off flamewars. I've acknowledged that dog-whistles exist and sometimes comments can be egregious in ways that aren't immediately obvious, and asked for you to explain how these ones are egregious, and you keep refusing. I'm not going to be goaded or shamed into acting on comments on the basis that "it should be obvious". We can't operate a site like that.
The egregiousness of other comments doesn't excuse you from observing the guidelines. That's a very well established norm here.
> by claiming that other comments are so egregious that the guidelines shouldn't apply to you.
no man i keep claiming the same thing over and over: that you have done nothing about any other comment in this thread except mine. i've literally said this same thing like 5 times. and what's happening is you keep reasserting some kind of lattitude to ignore them.
> I'm not going to be goaded or shamed into acting on comments on the basis that "it should be obvious". We can't operate a site like that.
you can't have your cake and eat it too: if my comments are obvious enough given a particular value system that you can scold and censure me, then there can be plenty of others that are just as obvious.
edit:
> rather than insisting that you are above the guidelines... take responsibility for your own conduct
please point out for me (by using links) where i didn't "take responsibility"? at multiple points i admitted to being sarcastic/flippant. how would you like me to further take responsibility? would you like me to apologize to those people? would you like me to delete my comment so that they continue fly under the radar? would you like me to commit hari-kari?
You are only being held to account according to the guidelines, which apply equally to everyone. I'm telling you that I'm willing to act on other comments when it's clear how they breach the guidelines, but we need you to play your role as a citizen of this site who uses the mechanisms available to everyone, rather than insisting that you are above the guidelines and refusing to use the mechanisms we offer. Please stop fixating on other comments and take responsibility for your own conduct and role in making this site what you expect it to be.
Edit: To be clear, the reason your comments were acted on is that they were flagged and commented on by other community members. We act mostly on what we're alerted to, which is why I keep tell you that we need you to alert us to things if you want them acted upon (and not just as a way of deflecting from the conduct you're being called out for). It's also false that we hadn't acted on other comments in the subthread.
> The Black community began using the word Juneteenth for Jubilee Day early in the 1890s. [1]
I thought it was a neologism until I looked it up. Turns out, I'm just white.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_e...
Cool! Seems about what I'd expect for an initially illiterate, persecuted minority's culture-specific holiday.
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Presumably "It's just that I'm white and was therefore hadn't been exposed to this tradition."
It is an old neologism, but the style feels surprisingly modern, and/or AAVE is so dominant today that even (youngish?) white people would have coined this type of abbreviation today.
> on June 19, 1866… "Jubilee Day"
> The Black community began using the word Juneteenth for Jubilee Day early in the 1890s.
Well they've got plenty of time to learn.
As far as I know most people consider Emancipation Day the day that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law in 1863, whereas Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed from the people who decided to just not tell them about the law.
> Juneteenth marks the day 2.5 years later that the last known enslaved people were freed
Nope, just the last in the Confederate States; the last Union chattel slaves (e.g., in Delaware) were freed by operation of law a few months later with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
>(And that's not even discussing penal slavery allowed under the 13th Amendment.)
To expand on this, knowingbetter did an in-depth video on this topic[0]. The salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt, so that the Japanese couldn't use it as war propaganda against the US.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
> the salient bit is that penal slavery was ended in 1941-1942 by Roosevelt,
No, convict leasing, one of several manifestations of penal slavery, was (formally) ended by Roosevelt then. Penal slavery continues in the US today, although some states have abolished it recently (though there is litigation in some of those states over it being continued in practice despite the recent formal abolition.)
This is not true. The last slaves in the United States were set free by the thirteenth amendment in Delaware, IIRC. Emancipation Day could make sense as the last slaves freed by the emancipation proclamation took place on that date.
General Order No. 3 - June 19, 1865
Thirteenth Amendment - December 6, 1865
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._3#Misconcept...
Text:
A common misconception holds that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in the United States, or that the General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865, marked the end of slavery in the United States. In fact, the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified and proclaimed in December 1865, was the article that made slavery illegal in the United States nationwide, not the Emancipation Proclamation.[6][7][8][9]
Another common misconception is that it took over two years for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas, and that slaves did not know they had already been freed by it. In fact, news of the Proclamation had reached Texas long before 1865, and many slaves knew about Lincoln's order emancipating them, but they had not been freed since the Union army had yet to reach Texas to enforce the Proclamation. Only after the arrival of the Union army and General Order No. 3 was the Proclamation widely enforced in Texas.
In my opinion, we still have slaves in the USA. (In prison, as explicitly allowed by the 13th Amendment)
Interesting thanks for the information.
Regardless, people have been calling it Juneteenth for over a hundred years, it was made a national holiday as Juneteenth, I'm gonna keep calling it that.
In Texas and maybe celebrated in other places(I haven't done the research) this is true. For a large swath of the United States it was obscure or unknown. Most of us learned about the Emancipation Proclamation though. Making Juneteenth a holiday rather than the Date of the Emancipation Proclamation is odd to me. It is as odd to me as say, celebrating Independence Day on the date the last colony got word of the signing on, hypothetically, July 5th.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed very few slaves. The order did not apply to areas of the Union which still had slaves, nor did it apply to areas of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. Although, it did apply to unoccupied areas of the Confederacy. The government of the Confederacy was unlikely to follow an order issued by the Union during the Civil War.
It may have encouraged some slaves in the Confederacy to flee, if they found out about it.
Just stop. Better is better. Let’s celebrate progress and not thump Wikipedia.
>The last slaves in the United States were set free by the thirteenth amendment
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
You may be surprised to learn that, coincidentally, America has more people in prison than anywhere else.
Did the Emancipation Proclamation actual emancipate anybody? The South didn't free them and the proclamation explicitly allowed the Northern states that had slavery to continue to have slaves.
Yes it did. When the Northern army was in Southern territory they would free the local slaves. They would then recruit volunteers into the army. Not sure how many they freed but they did pick up about 200k soldiers that way.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe that's why black Americans celebrate Juneteenth instead?
Kind of makes sense to me.
African-Americans in coastal California for the most part do not care about Juneteenth.. African-American politicians do try to get a photo op. A very large majority of low income African-Americans in North and Southern California, do not care about this day, do not mention it, do not do special events for it, do not mark it on any calendar or gather with special clothes on for it. compare and contrast to "Kwanzaa" also
source: been there, done that
> Black Americans in coastal California do not care about Juneteenth..
Some do, some don't. "Black Americans in Coastal California" aren't a homogenous group, and this varies a lot by things like family geographic history, socioeconomic status, and a variety of other factors.
Source: Also been there, also done that.
Sorry, what do you guys mean by "been there, done that"?
Do you mean that you're slave descended black americans, and, in the case of HN User mistrial9, therefore speak for most of the slave descended black americans in coastal California?
Or do you guys mean that you celebrate Juneteenth. Thus, "been there, done that"?
The former I would challenge you on, despite obviously not being "black american coastal Californian?". The latter I would never challenge you on as that's your business.
It's a federal holiday now so there eventually will be a tradition around the whole country.
Black AF takes place in California and the main character had a huge celebration with his entire extended family before it was even a federal holiday.
> Black AF takes place in California and the main character had a huge celebration with his entire extended family before it was even a federal holiday.
Did you just use the fact that Black characters in fictional media set in California celebrated the holiday to contradict an argument that actual Black people in coastal California do not?
I mean, the claim was factually wrong, but that's the worst counterargument imaginable.
> the claim was factually wrong
no it is not factually wrong, because populations are a demographic system, not a single number. Arguing over "wrong on the Internet" is a waste of brain cells, and you claim my lived experience is "wrong" .. all the worst of online discourse.
so I talked to some people at random on the street, because I was bothered by this exchange. There are a range of responses and I think that the responses are very telling. I wont do a detailed writeup here. This one is the one I want to hilite:
Two middle aged, very poor African-Americans walking down the street in daylight, the woman with a shopping cart and the man with clean but ordinary clothes. I say in a loud voice from many feet away "Is today a holiday of come kind?" The guy replies facing me "the Post Office is closed, I dont know" .. I said "something is on" .. "yeah" .. I get creative .. "but you have been to Texas right?" and he says in a stage whisper with his hand next to his mouth like he is shielding the statement "its Juneteenth" .. I said "nobody cares about that here, right?" He replies "its a DAY, just a day. that's all it is". This is consistent with what I was referring to.. this man did not want to talk about this, or say the name.
After congratulating myself silently because you know "someone was wrong on the Internet" .. I walked a a few blocks and I saw an upright, clean cut African-American man walking, dressed in a way that suggested he was a Church member or off-duty uniform services, also very middle-aged. This man had a clean white t-shirt with an elaborate, dare I say "European logo style" t-shirt that said Juneteenth in some formal typeset way. So I bother to write this long and too-personal reply because "someone on the Internet was wrong" ;-)
Trucktober and Frappuccino aren't "real words" but most Americans know what they mean. The unfamiliarity with Juneteenth is not due to the unrealness of the word.
Both of those are portmanteau's, giving hints as to their meaning. No such thing with Juneteenth.
I agree lack of familiarity isn't because it's "unreal"---we invent words all the time, but I agree with OP that we could have come up with a better name. I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
How is "Juneteenth" any less of a portmanteau than "Frappuccino"?
It's been called Juneteenth for more than a century, and has been a state holiday for almost half a century.
Wouldn't it be even more ridiculous if the US federal government took an existing celebration and renamed it?
There both portmanteau but Frappuccino combines two things you can envision. A date doesn’t unless the association already existed.
Regardless of its history I venture that 95% of the population hadn’t heard the word before 2020, so it’s not like it was in the public consciousness.
You’re right though, even if almost joined knew about it, it _did_ have a name and so def tough to change it.
A June and a -teenth is no harder to envision than a Frapp and a CCino. It's a silly tangent.
Agree it’s a silly nitpick of language. I’ll keep picking.
Picturing a frappe and cappuccino gives you a sense for what a Frappuccino _is_. Picturing june and thirteenth/nineteenth only gives you sense for _when_ it is.
In only contend a better name would be one where the name suggests something about the content to someone hearing it for the first time.
Another American holiday coming up with an equally useless name is Fourth of July. Nobody seems to have a problem with that name, and nobody I know calls it Independence Day. Neither Fourth of July or Juneteenth are great names out of context, but they both have histories behind them and can't be changed anymore.
Heck, Juneteenth is a better name, since it is not literally month+day.
The name of the holiday, so named by the people affected, is a century and change old. The problem isn't the quality of the name, which is where we started.
Wait until you hear about September through December not being the 7th through 10th months of the year.
They don’t even give you a sense for _when_ they are. Or, more accurately, they give you the _wrong_ sense for when they are by name alone.
Wait until you hear about Cinco De Mayo!
In the case of Frappuccino, many people care. In the other case, most people don't care.
I'm white AF and this thread is cringe. "We" didn't name it, for starters. It would take an electron microscope to find the amount of self-awareness to avoid suggesting better alternatives. Damn.
June (nine)teenth, seems pretty straightforward to me. Clearer than All Hallows' Evening --> Halloween.
>I bet if you I were to walk down the street here and ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
And lots of people think Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day, doesn't make the holiday any less valid. It's just an issue of education.
I’m not saying the holiday isn’t valid, I think it’s a great holiday. The name is all I take exception to.
Eventually we’ll all know what it is, but that eventually would be sooner with a better name.
> but that eventually would be sooner with a better name
Do you have some basis for thinking this? I rather suspect the reason White Americans don't know about it has more to do with the fact that it celebrates Black American history and culture, which is just not that popular among White Americans. (Of course there are exceptions, but the point is they're exceptions.) I seriously doubt that the name is the problem. The problem is that relatively few people are interested.
The really striking thing is how poorly the name distinguishes the date from the seven days before it...
Ju(ne) n(in)eteenth! :D
>And lots of people think Cinco de Mayo is Mexico's Independence Day,
Probably because it has the same sort of bad name as Juneteenth.
Juneteenth is the same sort of portmanteau as Trucktober. Plus holidays have weird names. What's a Christmas, a Mardi Gras, a Festivus? It's almost entirely a matter of usage and familiarity.
I mean, Christ Mass is also the same sort of portmanteau.
And as an aside, I was curious about Festivus. Apparently it's Latin for "excellent, jovial, lively."
Origin of Festivus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1njzgXSzA-A
The writer of this episode based it on something from his family that his father did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oeu2cVABHg
You're pre-qualified for the Feats of Strength but not, so far, for the Airing of Grievances.
Yeah, people get their knickers in a twist about Juneteenth but will say "February" like that makes complete sense.
>ask 10 people what Juneteenth is only 1 would be able to do better than: "something to do with freeing the slaves".
That shouldn't be considered a naming failure. It's an education failure.
Ask the same 10 people what "Emancipation Day" is and you'll have 7 or 8 people say the same thing even though it's not even an actual holiday.
It’s both. The name Juneteenth requires more education than, say, emancipation day or something along those lines.
Easy names require less “education” than hard names.
This is such a weird hill to die on
I’m not dying on this hill, I just think the name could be better, but I don’t particularly care. It’s not as though I’ve got a beef with the celebrating the freedom of slaves. I think that’s essential for America to celebrate.
It's simply important, while celebrating slavery, to correct the way that black people speak. Just so they'll be understood. Just so they'll know that regular people don't talk like that.
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White guy here, and I have never heard of "Trucktober"..
I'm also going to my local Juneteenth events (in Oakland).. that said, I did have to look it up a few years ago.
EDIT: Yeah, downvote me, I replied to the wrong sub-thread post. Made more sense w/r/t resistance to Juneteenth naming.
I have never heard of "Trucktober"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPBaC6VPuU
You must be some sort of communist! There's a Trucktober question on the naturalization test, right before the one about Thanksgiving.
I don't know what your point is. You know Frappaccino? So his point stands? Regardless of his examples, we deal with no end of made up nonsense words, rarely anybody bats an eye until it sounds black and has to do with black people.And yes, this is a thing, this thread is the umpteenth one I've encountered today with people undermining and questioning the name for what amounts to it sounding black.
So your anecdote isn't useful. Kind of the opposite.
While I'm from EU and didn't know either then Juneteenth seems to be well known enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth.
I'm pretty sure less than 1% of people in the EU would know what Juneteenth means. I didn't remember either. I just remembered I read it somewhere before and would have guessed it was something like pi day or star wars day.
Why would anyone in Europe, know when the slaves in the US were freed? Or even when the slaves in Brazil were freed? Or Peru? Or Colombia? Or Cuba?
I mean won't every nation have its own history and important days? And it seems to me that those days in every nation will be different. I'd even wager very few of us, (far less than 1%), know what those important days are called in other nations.
argument about naming conventions is exactly what I expected to find on hn
It’s not just an argument of name, it’s an argument of when. Go down to Charleston, SC where the local black population celebrates Emancipation Day on January 1st and has for a long, long time.
Juneteenth is in that context as artificial a holiday as Kwanza. I would imagine most other southern states have similar breaks with the Juneteenth holiday, in that it doesn’t represent the historical reality of their community.
Thank you. As a non American I have no idea what it means - only knew something was up because the us markets didn’t seem to be moving.
Why should the names of American holidays mean something to non-Americans? Would you know what Thanksgiving meant without looking it up?
> Lots of people don't know what "Juneteenth" means, since it's not a real word.
The federal holiday was called "Juneteenth" because the existing celebration which it formalizes in law was called "Juneteenth."
Renaming it would have been weird.
I didn't know what emancipation day is, but could have guessed and wouldn't have looked. Like you said, I have no idea what the fuck juneteenth is, and so I clicked and now know more about this facet of American history than I would have otherwise.
Not to be snarky, but they should just learn what it means? I could just as easily not know what emancipation means. I frankly have some family members that I'm sure don't.
- It's in a dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Juneteenth.
- At least one local bank website I've gone to today has a banner saying it is closed and uses the word "Juneteenth."
This seems to be reasonable enough to consider it a real word.
Additionally, the term "Emancipation Day" is inaccurate (and therefore obfuscatory) because slavery is still legal and constitutional if you are convicted of a crime. Emancipation doesn't accurately describe the current state unless this is no longer true. I'm going by this dictionary definition of "emancipation": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emancipation
I'm pretty sure you're making a political point but: How are criminals enslaved? Who owns them?
Here's an article, the power relationship was exercised by denying parole that would have otherwise been granted without a profit motive: https://archive.ph/0gVie
"Since 2018, about 575 companies and more than 100 public agencies in Alabama have used incarcerated people as landscapers, janitors, drivers, metal fabricators and fast-food workers, the lawsuit states, reaping an annual benefit of $450 million."
The prisons. I mean more specifically the state or federal government ultimately but the prisons more practically.
The 13th amendment specifically carves out an exception to allow prisoners to be enslaved. They aren't just using political rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_exception_clause
You know in movies and cartoons and stuff when you'd see like, a whole bunch of prisoners in striped pajamas, chained together breaking rocks or digging ditches or whatever? Those are depictions of an enslaved workforce.
Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state. We have a similar sounding exception clause in Germany, and nobody would call the prisoners slaves.
That being said, I don't doubt that the american prison systems has severe problems, for example the one raised in the other answer to my previous comment.
The text of the 13th amendment makes a direct equivalence between the chattel slavery it outlawed and the incarcerated forced labor that it left unaffected:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted*, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction
The plain reading of that text is that slavery remains a permitted punishment in the US.
I’m not an American or a constitutional expert but my plain reading of that text is that the exception is for “involuntary servitude”. You could read it both ways but that’s how I’d understand it.
I don't know much about constitutional law, either german or american, but I know you often can't just "plain read" the text.
Maybe some additional context would help.
Right after the civil war,
1. slavery became illegal, except as punishment for a crime
2. a ton of vague laws sprung up, like "malicious mischief". Look up "Jim Crow" or "black codes" to get a sense of these.
3. States started "convict-leasing" out prisoners as a source of income, often right back to the plantations that slaves were liberated from before. The convicted were not paid for this labor.
Additional context: Virginia Supreme Court rules that inmates are slaves to the state in 1871: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/slaves-s... Virginia held the capitol of the Confederacy - the states that tried to leave the USA to retain their slaves.
I forget why the crime exception was added to the 13th amendment, but I assume it was to make it more palatable to the states that still wanted slaves
That's cool but I'm not talking about Germany.
> Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave.
The difference is so slight as to be meaningless.
> nobody would call the prisoners slaves.
We Americans don't like doing that either, because it makes us uncomfortable.
>Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.
I'm having trouble understanding how it's different. They are held by the state, forced to work, are not free to leave, and we have a bit of a history...
It’s the “convicted of a crime” part that makes it different.
So we've come to the difference of opinions, which is that your definition of slavery excludes those convicted of a crime, while others' doesn't. Not a very interesting point to debate on.
Yes, I think there is a difference between being kidnapped from your home, shipped across the ocean and sold into a life of servitude (with any children you have being born into the same condition, or yourself being born into such a situation) vs. doing labor as part of a sentence for a crime of which you have been duly convicted (and will someday be released from). That is my opinion.
Everybody thinks those things are different, so that's not very interesting either.
Would your opinion change if the legal system that permitted people to be kidnapped, shipped, and sold, was the same system that decided if you're a criminal fit to be kidnapped, shipped, and sold?
No. The system that allowed the former was changed. I reject the premise that convicted criminals were or are "kidnapped, shipped, and sold" in any way that is comparable to chattel slavery. Were there some abuses? Probably. We live in an imperfect world.
Fair, not comparable to chattel slavery.
Do you know about black codes? I brought up the "who decides who criminals are" because it starts here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_(United_States)
Again, not comparable to chattel slavery, but related enough that it links to the page for chattel slavery in the first paragraph.
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You might not have heard about it before then but it’s been celebrated since the Reconstruction era and it became a state holiday starting with Texas in 1938, making it roughly as old as Veterans’ Day.
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They’re all made up.
no they usually start with a bunch of people celebrating something. this holiday is just an underhanded way for liberals to shove their politics down the throats of the other half of the country
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>I just cannot believe people can just fly the confederate flag and not be thrown into prison or worse. Same with Nazis.
Yeah, this is how things like freedom of expression and free speech clauses to the constitution work, they prohibit imprisoning ("or worse") people for displaying symbols of their preference, just because you don't like them, even if they're racist, as long as they're not actually committing violence against others.
Does your "or worse" refer to torturing people for these things perhaps? Congratulations, you're about as shitty as any garden variety authoritarian, racist or not.
We have a president doing his best to winnow down the 1st amendment against his particular brand of dislike, and on the other hand idiocies like what you demand doing it from another end. In both cases, emotionally claiming that what they want to restrict is "dangerous".
>If a house divided will inevitably fall, then certainly, a house that tolerates people advocating destruction of the house will also fall.
If your notion of a house divided means anyone not sharing your worldview then being imprisoned ("or worse"), it's you, or people like you who are really the problem in a country where it's exactly the kind of authoritarian bullshit you vomit that has been largely rejected by centuries of constitutional protections.
We can look to German society for an alternative balance on the principles of free speech and Nazism. Germany isn't doing too bad as a society in terms of individual liberty and prosperity. One might argue they're better governed than any particular state in the US, or the US overall.
Germans also understand Nazis better than the US and they decided their democracy doesn't need it.
Modern Germany has its fair share of problems with how the state can define permitted speech and use it to censor selectively. Since the legacy of the Nazi era is still there, along with the legacy of the Stasi era, German society and government are generally careful to not go overboard on certain things, but this would apply either way. Does anyone really think that the only thing stopping the resurgence of Nazism is a law prohibiting swastikas and certain kinds of speech? No, it's a general social tendency towards avoiding strong authoritarian trends, based on some of the worst historical experience possible.
In essence, these laws don't really "help" anyhow in terms of stopping any serious movement toward extremism, while on the other hand sometimes selectively being used to censor in completely nonsensical ways.
Also worth noting, historically, it was exactly a fear of letting deeply hated ideological enemies of the country's conservative elements that caused the Weimar conservatives to make justifications for censoring ideologically opposed viewpoints and "protecting the nation" against their definition of treason through laws that created loopholes for authoritarian control. This very same perceived need led them to an alliance with the Nazis and the formation of the Hitler cabinet of 1933, after which the much more extreme Hitler used the same legal loopholes -so easily exploitable by serious authoritarians- to completely destroy the Weimar Republic and all of its existing political, social and individual freedoms.
The so-called paradox of tolerance is bullshit. It was specifically intolerance and legal mechanisms for its expression against supposedly extreme viewpoints, that destroyed Weimar Germany and led to Nazi Germany. I have yet to see a country where too much free expression leads to more repression. The exact opposite is the case everywhere you look. Politicians and ideologues establish "reasonable" limits on extremist speech and later expand those ever more censoriously as they redefine extremism or treason to include anything that supposedly divides the nation, ie: goes against their views of a unified political system.
Nah, if your freespeech involves treason and rebellion you no longer have rights.
No, "worse" meant capital punishment (the universal punishment for that crime). The only good traitor is a dead traitor. Don't betray your country. Don't fly the flags of its enemies. I am fine with a moderate punishment (1-2 years in prison), I just expected society to treat it with the seriousness it deserves.
If you conspire to kill someone or rob a bank, that's a conspiracy charge. if you run around dressed and armed like a militia and wearing confederate flags, threatening race wars, then it's free speech. that makes no sense.
This isn't an unpopular sentiment outside the US as you think. I like germany's approach to the problem. the punishment isn't severe but just enough. Try the nazi salute in germany or flying the nazi flag and you'll see what happens.
Your argument is a logical fallacy (slipperly slope). No, I am not suggesting arbitrary banning of arbitrary symbols and flags I dislike, there is no slippery slope. If an entity is declared an enemy of the united states by the democratically elected government of the united states, then you don't get to fly its flags on american soil without consequence. You don't get to fly ISIS or al-qaeda flags just the same as confederate and nazi flags. I am not against flying random KKK or white supremacist flags (well I am, I just don't think that should be illegal). Displaying symbols or making speech in advocacy of a declared enemy of your country shouldn't be legal.
If the checks and balances of government allow Trump to declare an entity enemy of the state then yeah, you can't fly their flags either. That's how democracy works, don't elect people who are not trustworthy. The constitution is not a religion and freedom of speech means nothing without a stable country to administer it.
Being intolerant to some speech is necessary for the preservation of free speech. Free speech doesn't mean you get to say anything without consequence (can't yell fire in a crowd, I'd say rebellion is worse than that!).
Treason and rebellion is worse than mass murder! that's our disconnect. you see it as an opinion, I see it as something so horrific that I wouldn't be all that upset if the person's precious life (and even in case of murder I don't support capital punishment, except for extreme cases) was taken from them. War and the death of millions of innocents is what I equate treason and rebellion with, and not just death but so much human suffering that lasts decades (see the misery of post-civil-war reconstruction!).
> Nah, if your freespeech involves treason and rebellion you no longer have rights
Do that and you can guarantee that it’ll be used against you. I abhor people who fly those flags, I’ll personally stomp their faces, but the government shouldn’t be allowed to stop them or else your run into the issue of what treasonous speech is. I firmly believe the people (society in general) should hold all of the power when it comes to policing speech.
Like I said, this isn't arbitrary, if I start flying the flags of my country's enemies, then like any other law it should apply to me. Who gets to decide who the enemy is? The democratically elected legislators and officials. Plenty of countries with better free-speech and free-press protections than the US ban things like this, holocaust denial, etc... it isn't a slippery slope.
Either you have faith in democracy or you don't.
Right now, the 'enemies' of the democratically elected leaders are Democrats and Socialists. You think jail time for being a member of the DSA is reasonable? That's democracy working as intended? (That said, the US is not a democracy, and it's really important to remember that, because we do value some votes more highly than others and put significant barriers in place to prevent everyone from voting.)
That's not a slippery slope, the admin is on the record saying that socialists are their enemies. I don't want to give them the power to go after anyone who might be a socialist. Especially when they are carting people off to death camps in foreign countries.
Sorry for ignorance but I have no idea what the DSA is.
That said, you hit it on the nail when you said the US isn't a democracy. that's only half way true but let's fix that! If the we're not a democracy then free speech still means nothing either way. US citizens are being abducted and disappeared in broad daylight, what free speech do you have when that can happen to you?
But if democracy is working right, and that is the premise I made my original statement under, and we owe allegiance to our country than explicit and outright betrayal of your country isn't free speech. it is exactly what it is and should be treated as such. Anything short of that falls under the half-measure bucket I mentioned earlier. It is nursing a festering wound until it causes sepsis and kills the whole body.
I would even argue that the loss of democracy you're talking about has to do with the culture of half-measures. Protests that affect or risk nothing, people being outraged but not acting on it (voting or more). Tolerating nazis under "free speech" is why there are nazis running the country right now. These people should have been buried under prisons a long time ago.
Oh, sorry, DSA is the "Democratic Socialists of America" -- a left of Democrats group that mostly focuses on advancing Social Democrat and Democratic Socialist causes (like housing and healthcare for all).
>The only good traitor is a dead traitor. Don't betray your country. Don't fly the flags of its enemies.
In essence, you're an authoritarian moron, shitting out justifications for vicious repression under the name of protecting against extremists. There's already no shortage of this same foolish nonsense being bayed and barked for by Trump's supporters against their supposed "enemies of the nation" on the progressive left or by anyone who doesn't lock-step support their half-baked policies.
These same people quickly label anyone who disagrees with them on various things as a traitor and really, so much of that boils down to exactly what you foolishly claim you don't support, which is banning X arbitrary things one dislikes. You can yammer as much as you like about how stupid slippery slope arguments are, but their justifications absolutely do exist, especially when applied based on the ridiculous criteria by which you seem to hatefully enjoy defining the idea of treason and fantasizing about how'd you love to see supposed traitors executed.
There's more rehashed stupidity to unpack in the rest of your comment, but why bother?
No, we should not let the state decide -based on often ideological, nationalistic or simply corrupt criteria- what thoughts, symbols or expressions of opinion by people are suddenly treason. Those enforcing such things have historically, almost inevitably slid towards authoritarianism and those supporting such things as members of the public tend to make their own slide towards applauding nationalistic idiocy.
Nice, started of with an insult, pretty much you broke plenty of HN rules. Try to be civil please.
This isn't about a political disagreement. It is a universal fact in any country or form of government that betraying your country is considered equivalent to condemning its people and is one of the highest crimes a person can commit. I didn't make that up, nor do I deserve to be insulted for stating that fact. Political enemies and enemies of the country are different things, you're conflating the two for rage-bait reasons I suppose, so you can feel anger at someone. Sorry, I am neither a trump supporter, an authoritarian, or someone who supports criminalizing political disagreements. You just made that up so you can insult someone.
A person is not a traitor because someone calls them a traitor, that is purely childish. Treason and rebellion are well defined under the laws of every single country in existence. It is a crime that must be proven in court. If you believe the courts can adjudicate crimes like murder then they are also capable of doing the same for treason and rebellion. Therefore, standing by my earlier statement, if a person is proven in court as supporting rebellion and treason against his country, they should be punished accordingly with punishment that fits the crime.
> "we should not let the state decide -based on often ideological, nationalistic or simply corrupt criteria- what thoughts, symbols or expressions of opinion by people are suddenly treason. "
Wow! rarely do I see text-book examples of a straw man argument, but there it is! who in this thread claimed that should be the case? an enemy of a country is not declared as such because of those reasons but because they intend to cause harm to its people. There is no grey area here, if a group wants to kill americans, that's why they're the enemy, it's that simple. it isn't "democrats" or "people we don't like" , it is "nazis who want to murder americans" or "isis who want to destroy america", "the confederate army who led a bloody civil war against america", there is no slippery slope or grey area as you would like there for it to be. don't support people who want to murder us, it is that simple. It is possible to have laws that define specific parameters of their enforcement.
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We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44321374 and marked it off topic.
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Technically correct, but there are 1 million nicer ways to make your point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You're missing that it's a dog whistle - we should not be nice. Look at this person's adjacent comments here.
> we should not be nice
It's not about being nice, but on Hacker News we operate according to guidelines and norms that have evolved over more than 15 years, which keep discussions focused on substance and prevent it from burning to the ground the way most online communities do.
Please do your part to make this place better not worse. The point you made above was a valid and valuable one, but the way you expressed it means its value is lost.
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Anyone can act as though their position is righteous enough, and their opponent's is pernicious enough, that an exception should be made in their case. But it's only because enough people make an effort to avoid that that HN can continue to exist as a place where people want to come and discuss important topics.
If someone else's comment is wrong, respond with an opposing argument. If their comment is inflammatory or in some other way in breach of the guidelines, flag it, and/or report it to us via email. We have several ways of keeping discussion healthy here, but we need everyone to do their part.
> Anyone can act as though their position is righteous enough, and their opponent's is pernicious enough, that an exception should be made in this case.
"Both sides are the same"
> If someone else's comment is wrong, respond with an opposing argument. If their comment is inflammatory or in some other way in breach of the guidelines, flag it, and/or report it to us via email.
My man - there are well known dog whistles and revisionist accounts of the slave trade in this very comment chain ... And yet the only one that gets flagged is mine. And even so based on what grounds - a flippant remark about Wikipedia being free? Forgive me if I don't take your commitment to "healthy" discourse seriously.
We don't care about the "side". I don't even know what "side" or what central point you're arguing. Our role as moderators is not to adjudicate on arguments, it's to prevent the place from burning to the ground.
Your comments have been inflammatory and abusive from the very beginning of your participation in the thread, so of course you're attracting flags. But you're certainly not the only commenter getting flags in the thread.
All the feedback mechanisms we offer are here to help you if your intention is to contribute positively to the site. Votes, flags, vouches, email support. If you don't use them, you're in no position to claim that the system is biased against you.
> We don't care about the "side"
I'm sorry, but what? A quick look at this person's profile has tons of flagged comments on every page. None of it is pretty. I see rants about pretty much every non-White Christian group. You can't just ignore that.
But yeah, almostgotcaught is the one who needs a bollocking because he got a bit testy when the Nazi was goosestepping around ... :-/
Now I've been able to look into those comments, I agree it's not what we want on HN, and I've acted on more of their comments. If that kind of thing continued we'd ban them.
The problem in this thread was that almostgotcaught posted multiple escalatory comments, then when I replied to them asking them to stop, which is just routine moderation here, they continued escalating and making swipes against HN's whole approach to moderation and assuming bad faith on our part, rather than doing what many others do and working constructively with us to help HN function better.
They've said elsewhere that they were very upset by the comments and I can understand that. It's a topic that's sensitive and is prone to get people upset. I could have been more considerate of that. It's hard to be considerate when your character is under attack for just doing the job that is expected of you and that you do the same way every day.
The biggest takeaway is that HN can't discuss topics like this without them descending into hellish flamewars, which is disappointing.
I wasn't implying it's biased against me - that would be banal - I'm implying you don't actually care about healthy discourse but keeping up appearances because the only thing you're responding to is my purple language and not all the hate speech.
Edit: I'm rate limited
> you're not doing your part to help
... I responded to a comment and pointed out a revisionist take. Did you scold that person too or just me? Do you get it now?
We moderate what we see in the order we see it and it takes time to get to everything. As I said, if you're not doing your part to help, first by observing the guidelines yourself and then by flagging or reporting other comments that breach the guidelines, you're not in a position to complain.
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Someone got mad at me today because I said "we beat slavery" was I accidentally dog whistling? It's just how I thought about it. I guess "white people" did beat it but also "white people" were doing it. We kind of beat it as a country is what I meant. Idk my family wasn't even here yet but I'm just happy there isn't slavery.
You are being actively obtuse here, which is understandable if perhaps you're taking almostgotcaught's comments as a direct attack on you. (which it most likely isn't)
If you looked at the adjacent comments you would immediately see a combination of "western christian values," and open pondering that "Epstein is an Israeli asset. Democrats and Republicans have loyalty to Israel." This alone is enough dog whistling for at least my neighborhood's dogs to start acting up.
Sorry, It wasn't a rhetorical device, it actually happened to me today. I'm not taking either "side", I thought it might explain something I didn't understand. 100% legitimately.
That's fine, you don't have to apologize to me.
To put it into terms that may hit closer to home:
Remember Vatican 2? you may have heard about it. pretty big deal, lots of changes in the catholic church, made a whole bunch of news, put the latin mass out to pasture and also pulled back on the doctrine of deicide, ruffled a lot of feathers, etc.
There are some people who yearn for the aesthetics and cultural heritage of the latin mass. They miss the funny words in a language they don't speak, the historical continuity of the latin liturgy, etc. For these types, it's purely innocent aesthetic yearning, mostly harmless.
There are also some people who both miss the latin mass and feel very strongly about the perfidy of the jews being a theologically important teaching. These anti-semitic sedevacantist types share the same information ecology with all of the more harmless latin mass types. Dog whistles are a tool that can be used to disambiguate between the two types of latin-mass-enjoyers.
Fetishizing "western christian values" communicates different things when one of the most prominent far-right groups, the proud boys, makes this a central doctrine. If a latin-mass-enjoyer were to tell me they deeply valued western christian values, before airing their favorite anti-semitic conspiracies, I'm likely to predict they're not into latin mass for purely aesthetic reasons.
Someone once tried to make the argument to me that African Americans should feel eternal gratitude toward whites for fighting a war to free them. The fact of the matter is that America is one of the very few countries in history to fight a war to keep slavery.
This type of reductionist take is unhelpful no matter who is making it. We can have a bunch of free states, with whites and blacks fighting for abolition as far back as the founding, and a bunch of slave states fighting for slavery.
Trying to flatten the situation into one general group vs another cannot explain the complexity of the situation, like the fact that there were black and mixed-race slave owners, or that Delaware fought for the Union Army despite being a slave state.
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A quote I like from Wynton Marsalis: "with race in America it's never just black against white. It's always black and white against white."
And we never actually ended slavery, we just changed the rules on how to enslave people (ie we must imprison them first).
They had a war to keep slavery because there was a strong movement to abolish it. Most countries in the world didn’t have strong movements to abolish slavery like we did. Mostly due to Christian movements.
China, Korea had slavery well into the 20th century and had no major conflicts because they didn’t have Christian abolitionist movements.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_abolitionism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce
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There's still open slave markets in 2025
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Sure, whatever.
But surely you're not just deaf and blind to the mass allure for those other ~2.5m people a year who decide to come here.
The US runs a pretty big cultural show in modern culture. If you can look outside your own country at all, you've heard of the US.
But there are plenty of better places to be depending on what you value.
The EU gets 4 million immigrants per year, so what is exactly your point?
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>Netflix
>-Content featuring the sexual exploitation of children
What?
Edit: I see the parent has been flagged and removed, so I assume it was nothing
That's likely a reference to the show "Cuties" which was a rage-provocateur for awhile.
I cannot make assertions about the show, only that I am passingly familiar with the internet's larger distaste for the show based on allegations of exploitation of minors.
Oh wow, I've even seen this movie, and I didn't pick up on what they were referring to. I vaguely remember some controversy, and being unable to get worked up about it. Thanks for reminding me.