No one was calling anyone a white supremecist in the conversation. They were likely talking about white supremacy as a cultural and political force in the context of how the policy could perpetrate it.

That doesn’t change the fact that leadership then must either:

* Accept the claim that the company is and has been supporting white supremacy, de facto surrendering decisions on anything an employee suggests might support white supremacy

* Disagree with the claim

The redefinition of white supremacy (as you’ve defined it) is a bad faith rhetorical tool designed to create these kind of situations. Leaders are under no obligation to appease employees acting in bad faith.

So, two thoughts:

First, you're creating such a stark false dichotomy that it's hard not to wonder if it's somehow deliberate.

Second, saying that white supremacy is present in the company is not the same thing as saying that the company is run by white supremacists. The term functions very differently in the noun sense than it does in the adjective sense.

> First, you're creating such a stark false dichotomy that it's hard not to wonder if it's somehow deliberate.

Perhaps you might enlighten us as to why this is a false dichotomy, and what other options there are.

> Second

You cannot run a company that perpetuates white supremacy without implicitly supporting that white supremacy, whether you know it or not. I've already been clearly told that malice and intent are not required.

Or are you genuinely going to make the case that "someone who supports white supremacy" is not interchangeable with "white supremacist?" I'm not interested in debating your personal redefinitions of terms.

Honestly, nah.

Since we've already touched on the subject of "bad faith rhetorical tools," getting on other people's cases for acknowledging that the English language is soaked in polysemy isn't exactly an encouraging sign. It's difficult to have an enjoyable conversation with someone who's brandishing a cape.

No good faith conversations starts by redefining the other side as white supremacists. But I think you know that.

But no one's done that. You keep claiming the other side is doing that, but they keep disagreeing with you. You're ascribing actions that aren't done and proceeding to take offense.

From the comment I responded to:

> The term functions very differently in the noun sense than it does in the adjective sense.

The terms don’t in the dictionary, so there’s no way to continue the discussion without debating what this commenter thinks these terms mean.

This isn’t my first rodeo, and we can all see what’s happening here.

The first step to knowing what someone else thinks is to ask. You seem to have skipped that step, and when they clarified, you disagreed. Who are you to say what they think?

Again this is all you projecting thoughts onto other people.

There's no value in debating bad faith personal redefinitions of words lobbed as insults.

If I called you a pedophile, I imagine you wouldn't be super expectant of a productive conversation about my unique definition of the word or how I think it applies to you. You wouldn't care what I thought, because if I cared what you thought, I wouldn't have smeared you as a pedophile.

You're begging the question. The entire point people have been making is that white supremacy as a socio-political concept is not the same as a white-supremacist in the nazi-saluting way that you seem to have in your head.

You're still mentally skipping the idea of systemic white supremacy and jumping straight from white supremacy to you are a nazi. But that jump comparison only works for white supremacist. There isn't a comparable systemic thing for pedophilia. We don't discuss systemic pedophilia and how society broadly favors pedophiles in the same way that we do talk about systemic favoritism of white people and culture (and even if you personally disagree that society does favor white people and culture, the conversation does happen). When the other person says white supremacy, this is what they mean: cultural systems and norms that favor white people and things associated with white people, often to the detriment of other cultures and peoples.

So again, you're presupposing someone is smearing you, when they've once again never claimed to have done that and further more actively claimed the opposite. And please note that now four different people have pointed out that no, this wasn't calling anyone a white supremacist. So perhaps it is simply you who is the one using a custom definition here.

Part of this seems to be that you keep insisting on making things about individuals, and not the company and systems itself. Consistently you've changed "the company's actions maintain white supremacy" to "the leaders of the company are white supremacists". That's two jumps: company and its actions to the leaders and then an ascription of intent. People can do things by mistake. Groups can do things unintentionally. You're assuming that everyone is presupposing fault and intent, and using that to ascribe nefarious motives to people who at no point appeared to ascribe fault or intent.

It's also totally unclear how

> * Accept the claim that the company is and has been supporting white supremacy, de facto surrendering decisions on anything an employee suggests might support white supremacy

makes sense. This is akin to saying "yes, we've made mistakes before". I don't see how that "surrenders decisions", I mean unless you mean that they're going to say this about certain decision but still assume they made the right decision (or maybe they did, but then they need to justify this).

You are correct activists use this undeclared redefinition of the term white supremacy to mean "someone that does not have a social justice activist mindset". Which is exactly the issue.

Why? It is a tool to utilize confusion to remove the targets moral authority. Both yes and no are bad answers that make you loose moral authority, which is the point of the power tool.

Never trust anyone that uses such a tool, as it shows that the activist attacker is willing to smear individuals they disagree with using deceptive language in order to reduce the unlucky targets moral standing. Is this someone that is worthy of trust?

… you’re literally doing the same thing you’re accusing them of. Creating an arbitrary binary and than applying moral judgment to it.

Do you have a counter argument? Do you think such a person should be trusted or do you think this is not how the activism works?

If it’s about my comment on trust: You are welcome to trust someone that use these power tactics based upon lies to undermine the moral authority of viewpoint opponents, I just believe there are so many people of better character out there to build a relationship with.

Social justice tactics when it boils down to it are effective, but not very creative. Domain specific language is coopted and it’s definitions changed to mean what’s useful for activism. Goal is to redirect as much as possible of an organizations resources and attention towards the ideology instead of whatever it used to do.

I don't have a counter-argument because having one would require accepting your premise. Your hair is a bird.

Please point out where I asserted there are no issues with activist techniques. As far as I can remember, all I've done is point out that you constructed an arbitrary binary specifically to decry the creation of arbitrary binaries.

I then called your hair a bird.

> Please point out where I asserted there are no issues with activist techniques.

Refer to the comment I replied to where you argue "No one was calling anyone a white supremecist", and then justified this conclusion by stating the social justice redefinition of the colloquial term:

> No one was calling anyone a white supremecist in the conversation. They were likely talking about white supremacy as a cultural and political force in the context of how the policy could perpetrate it.

To your other statement:

> all I've done is point out that you constructed an arbitrary binary specifically to decry the creation of arbitrary binaries.

There are many different types of individual viewpoints and behaviors, so a critique of or an unwillingness to accept a type of behavior normally means that you have tons of others you accept. Disagreeing being a binary choice is a social justice dogma that model the world very badly.