Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cedilla 1900 days ago
The reason why I personally flagged this story is not because it is outrage porn – I think it obviously is, but that's not why I flagged it.

I flagged it because it misrepresented the very source you now linked. Quote:

> For the purposes of ruling on Defendants' motion to dismiss, the Court accepts as true the following allegations set forth in the amended complaint and attached exhibits.

This court decision did not side with the plaintiff, nor has the court spend a second thinking about whether his allegations are or could be true. A motion to dismiss simply says "Hey, even if we take everything at face value here, this case can't win".

The article misrepresents this as the court siding with the plaintiff. That did not happen. I can't know if that's an honest misunderstanding or deception; but in any case it shows that the author did not understand the court decision, as he evidently didn't take into account the premise I quoted above.

1 comments

The very fact that this comment has to engage in a theatre of objectivity (I can't know if that's an honest misunderstanding or deception; the post in flagged on some technicality despite intuition) when it is very clear this post is outrage porn is PRECISELY why micro-aggressions are a problem without fully stating it: coded language.

Once coded language is on the table, there is absolutely no statement that can be decided as misunderstanding or deception, and thus the gaslighting retort of "you, the accuser, must be misunderstanding/projecting", but also, the prevalent fear amongst certain non-Black males that "people will just make something up to get me"/"I will be unprotected".

There's no satisfactory resolution to coded language in the legal domain because it is a purely ethical problem. The real problem in America isn't "them/the other side", its that no one, as far as I can tell, actually values or can actually imagine a world where we can and do live together without hegemony.

I'm very reminded of Neil DeGrasse Tyson arguing with Rogan on JRE about tourist litter in the Himalayas: you either value ending and cleaning-up the pollution, and all other solutions flow from this, or you don't. But everyone's just hand-waving the elephant in the room.