Hacker Cinema
Milk
2008 · Film · 128 min
Directed by Gus Van Sant
The true story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man ever elected to public office. In San Francisco in the late 1970s, Harvey Milk becomes an activist for gay rights and inspires others to join him in his fight for equal rights that should be available to all Americans.
3 positive5 neutralfrom 8 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
then do them better.
It's pretty common for the first iteration of something to be terrible.
Early surgery killed most of its patients. Think of current DEI as basically 18th-century medicine.
The correct response, as with surgery, is not to abandon the work, but rather do it in a way that yields better results.
One thing I saw at a large tech corporation that was very DEI-focused (circa 2020) was that several of the interventions primarily addressed the need to feel that something could be done at all, which is a fascinating psychological need, fundamental to normally-functioning humans, and almost always overlooked.
During 2020, this was important both to the employer, which wanted to be seen as though they were on the correct side of history, and diverse hires (like me,) who wanted to have a feeling like management was not abandoning or ignoring us during a fraught period.
What happened, though, was that we were sort of encouraged to really take up a lot of space. While this may have helped the progressive movement (an outcome I am incidentally fine with,) it wound up doing so at the expense of several careers (an outcome I am not fine with.)
This reminds me of the early days of what was then called the 'gay lib' movement, as captured in e.g. the film _Milk_. Group pressure to come out, and show your support for your people, often ignored the (often extremely serious) consequences gay men experienced when they did what their community asked.
That the strategy *worked* for the gay mens' community does not mean it was without ethical blemish, and a similar moral hazard is not something I want from my HR department.
The balance that a marginalized person must seek between personal advancement and communal advancement is irreducibly and overwhelmingly personal, intimate, and, in a workplace, where you are *trying to do work*, probably not a great thing for HR to dig into, unless it wants to start offering career insurance to people who are coaxed into expressing something private, in the wrong room, to the wrong audience, and are never seen the same way again.
As a trans woman, Singal is one of my least-favourite writers, so I am at pains to express my disagreement with him on any point other than this: current DEI efforts are naive and often have perverse effects.
The solution I'd propose is: in HR, hire anthropologists, not activists. Get people who spend as much time observing and attempting to understand without judgment as they spend making slide decks about Bringing Your Whole Self to Work, and other terrible ideas. At least some of DEI's goals are achievable. But we can't get there from here.
I think you might be thinking of the plot of the movie 'Milk' while not realizing it took place over two decades before the time being talked about here.
I hope this isn't considered devolving the thread but that episode of Radiolab mentioned above certainly made it seem, to me, the issue was about censoring movie makers.
If you're on the left you more likely than not like Michael Moore movies. They are often very political. Should they be banned? That was the topic that came up in Radiolab.
Citizens United, inspired by Michael Moore's movies, decided they wanted to do the same thing. Someone decided Citizens United didn't have the same rights to release movies with a political message as Michael Moore and the studios that funded and distributed his movies. The Supreme Court I think saw the problem. Where does it end? Is Transformers political speech? Is Sense8 political speech? Is Milk?
I don't know how to solve the issue of getting money out of politics but I can at least see the argument that deciding which movies are political and which are not is not as easy as it sounds. Maybe Michael Moore's movie should have been prevented from release within N months before the election? I think that was the actual law used to prevent Citizen's United's movie coming out even though Moore's came out within the same type of time frame before an election.
This is a classic reactionary comment that doesn't understand the asymmetry between the "bourgeoisie" and the lower classes.
The "hegemonic" "bourgeoisie", secure in the status quo, sees politics as a game for "opportunists", while the oppressed classes lay aside their differences so they can try build enough power to overthrow the oppression and end their suffering.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013753/quotes/qt1525548 [City Councilman Dan White is complaining that he is having trouble getting re-elected because his base doesn't have any problems that need government intervention, while 'lucky duck' Harvey Milk has the natural support of the gay voter base who want the police to stop murdering them.]
Dan White: You have an issue [gay rights]. Harvey Milk: It's more than an issue. This is our life we're fighting for.
It's hard to visit with an open mind when you would risk several years in prison for doing what you would at home. Capital punishment is required for being in the company with someone possessing a small amount of weed. "Obscene material" gives you prison up to three months, 21 years if you make it avaliable to someone under 21. If you watch the movie Milk with someone under 21 years old, you risk 21 years in prison. All members of Jehovas Witnesses were imprisioned in 2004. Richard Dawkins would probably have been sentenced for long imprisonment without a trial.
I used to think exactly like her. I understand where she's coming from. She likely has no conception of her own bigotry. There's quite a bit of cognitive dissonance in the church. I finally left all that behind when I couldn't reconcile the concept of a loving God with homophobia. Some things that helped were being judged by fellow Christians for my own moral choices, watching the movie 'Milk', and having a close friend explain what it was like to be gay and raised in a Christian family.
On a related note - the Milk film that he references is fantastic. Possibly it was because I saw it knowing nothing about the story (I've got no idea about SF/gay politics) and so it was all new to me. Well worth watching.
If you look at the Boston map, there is one zone just outside route 128 near Lexington that consistently contrasts with its neighbors. That's Hanscom Air Force Base. It's particularly stark with the movie "Milk."
The other areas of sharp contrast I noticed are Mattapan and Lynn. Interesting stuff.