Sad to see this canceled and especially at the last minute.
Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.
This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it. The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
For context, the first Grace Hopper Celebration was 1994, and had been held for the last 20 consecutive years. Long before DEI.
But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens. Too many business cowards don't want to have problems with their merger, acquisition, IPO, FCC license, etc for supporting celebrating a great American like this, just because she was a woman.
From what was reported there was a broad reduction of interest from sponsors. Speculation, but the late cancellation very much sounds like there was an effort to find a main sponsor to make up the gap but no corporate was willing to step up and just be the primary sponsor to fund what was needed.
Corporate lawyers now broadly advise their companies against putting any money towards demographic-specific initiatives due to the risks of being sued for discrimination.
Buying a booth at an event would probably be seen as fine but I can only imagine pitches to be a title sponsor were met with “don’t touch this” advice from corporate lawyers.
The implication here that the DEI movement had done nothing wrong is rather naive… it wasn’t all bad, but there was a lot of bad things happening to answer for.
You could say that it was easier to practice before the executive (that routinely hires the dumbest troglodytes - whose only qualification is loyalty to the fuhrer - into positions of power) started a witchhunt against anyone practicing it.
Since the only god our corporatations worship goes by power and money, they all started tripping over themselves to kiss the ring.
DEI didn’t implode; it’s not an implosion when it’s shot at from the outside by malicious actors intent on destroying something they don’t understand and can only kneejerk react to out of unreasoning fear.
This isn’t collateral, this was the plan, the planners were just too stupid to see the natural consequences of their plan. See also the price of diesel.
Most students are probably on trips paid for by others. Many of those groups would probably not be keen to fund an itinerary-free trip to Irvine California for a few days. Even if the students were purported to want to impromptu organize.
They were advertising tickets three days before they announced everything was cancelled: https://archive.ph/Uimqj
> What happens to my in-person or virtual registration fee?
> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.
Who does AnitaB.org actually support or advocate for?
Their "Our Mission" page refers only to the perfectly vague "our community", never once describing what that is. Nor does their landing page. Their "Our History" page says that the organisation started out to support women in the tech industry, but then describes several name changes, eventually dropping all use of the words "woman" or "women" and switching to the user of "individuals" without explanation or elaboration. It reads like a perfectly choreographed PR "product" designed to maximise deniability of... something. But what?
You clearly do not work in Tech. Grace Hopper has been around for decades, and companies have understood how important it is for furthering their industries.
This is absolutely the US Gov to blame for its DEI attacks and threats.
This was true 10 years ago, today not so much. After several years of cultural revolution, recent crimes, discrimination lawsuits, the entire "women in tech" subject is toxic.
Now it is in implosion phase, where activists will start eating their own (just see the hit list OP published).
Another problem is AI. Common coders will become obsolete (together with "women in tech"). There is no push for more "women in plumbing jobs". Pushing young people into tech (presumably with expensive student loans) is just cruel. Women are not stupid!
I wonder if people are confused about their repositioning.
An AnitaB.org press release dated April 24, 2025, stated its mission as:
> “to get women in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded so that they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more equitable and sustainable future.”
The current mission page instead says:
> “to get our community in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded, so they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more impartial and sustainable future.”
It's really hard to tell from their current mission statement who "our community" is.
Since DEI became a curse word, you cannot say you do anything for women anymore. I think it's pretty clear who the community still is, but with snowflakes running the government, wording suffers.
I so hate that trying to help historically disadvantaged groups some extra help is considered bad. Like I get not making a group extra powered, but to help women in tech or research into Black prenatal care just seems absurd.
Let's not focus too much on the past problems that a group of people had, but let's make sure that the situation is improved for that group right now.
Focusing too much on past and try to tip the scale _because_ the past was so bad may lead to bad outcomes today. It may be perceived as a search for grievances and retribution and not the equalization of outcomes that one claims it should seek.
But they think they can do it because they can spin it as "you did it first".
This just makes the point that there is nothing to gain by framing the issue as a grievance.
There are real prejudices and real systemic disadvantages to fix and while it's important to understand the history of them, I believe we put too much focus on that and less on what we can do to put that past behind us instead of dwelling in it.
I don't think this approach of grievances has done anybody any favour in practice.
Snowflake has the weirdest provinance. It was used in Fight Club as a metaphor for individual uniqueness, but because the people who thought Tyler Durden was the coolest thing ever identified with his followers. When Tyler said "You are not snowflakes" they took it to be a positive statement. Snowflake got reinterpreted as a metaphor for fragility.
Ironicly many of those who use the term are not snowflakes in one of those senses and are in the other, but the opposite of what they believe to be true.
> Palahniuk was hardly the first person to use the metaphor. It's the stuff of self-help books and inspirational posters and elementary school assurances.
> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.
> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.
Tyler Durden, Don Drapper, Patrick Bateman, are all characters that you’re not supposed to want to be like but that “blackpilled” men completely miss the point and worship. There must be a name for this type of character influence. It reminds me of the “torrent nexus” trope but for people.
> “Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left
Horseshoe theory [1]. Both the far left and right are thin skinned, constantly engrossed in nonsensical semantic debates and accusing their betters of lacking a sense of humor.
These days, Varoufakis talks about "radical centrists".
(It's possisble he doesn't actually have a sense of humour and what we're seeing is pure schadenfreude over, eg, the unsurprising stuff that's happening to the centre-left in Sweden right now. Which happened to Starmer, and has yet to happen to Burnham
But this is maybe only "empirical"--- your wiki link mentions the vulnerability of centrism to elite takeover, and subsequent alienation from the masses. Nod to your "betters")
Sweden has bloc politics, i.e. no single party has the majority to govern.
The red-green bloc (left, center and greens) won a majority but the center party is playing kingmaker and refusing to let the left party into government. The left party has said from well before the election that they, reasonably, will not vote to support a government which they are not part of.
This has been due to decades of bourgeois / social democrat rat-fucking on policies, most notably disability / sick insurance reforms, after they got the left party's support votes. [1]
There is speculation that the center party would instead support the prior right wing government instead (voting with the extreme-right) - as long as the extreme right stays out of government, despite the extreme right getting all of their policies pushed through anyway. Even going so far as to withhold key votes in parliament until their immigration reforms (removing permanent residency and restricting citizenship, in this case) got passed. [2]
The short of it is that "centrist" parties are just right wing parties in disguise, in that they NEVER support leftist reforms but will happily support the right when it suits upper class economic interests.
Democracy being what it is, can be messy and nobody goes home happy. But the left of the left bloc saw the largest electoral gains in this election, so a move to the left is arguably what a growing portion of the electorate wanted. It was still a very close election, so you could frame it in many ways, but that the green-reds did see the biggest gains is fact.
You make it sound like the center party is playing both sides but as I understand it is not part of that block, and they would be OK with social democrats but not far left in government. What's wrong with that?
Aha ok I was wondering when I asked if you meant the internal politics or either social democrats or greens - what I think of as the two center left parties - had been going through an activist far left internal struggle (as is happening to the very separate Green Party in the UK right now).
I don't think this word has meaning anymore in modern Western politics. We have institutionalists.They aren't that different from the animating essence of Trump 1.0–they want to go back to some good old days. Even though the world has since changed. And the old days weren't that good, they're the reason we're where we are now.
And we have various folks pitching reform. The idiots on the far left and the right agree on the broad structure of reform, namely, nothing thoughtful except getting rid of the other guys. But they aren't the only ones pitching reform.
Sure. All instances of "centrist" in the #Modern portion of that wiki could be replaced by "institutionalist".. but it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform (internally, with respect to general electoral processes)
Yes, and it's being used ironically here. The people who pointed and laughed at those who wanted "safe spaces" and overly sensitive, are overly sensitive about people not like them getting any help. "You called us snowflakes, but you're the ones who have the fragile ego."
Why it may have lacked the funding to continue operations:
"Last year, Women Who Code, a nonprofit that got its start in California, closed because of a lack of funding. AnitaB.org, which brings together women in tech at its annual Grace Hopper Celebration, cut its workforce in 2024 and pointed to a downturn in corporate DEI investments." - "Why Big Tech is pulling back [from DEI efforts]" [2025] (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-15/google-and...)
"I've seen companies who have rebranded their diversity, equity, inclusion as colleague engagement, as listening and empowerment, or and whatever else, I've seen many different iterations, and I think a lot of organizations... [want] to get to a place where they can hide their activity..." ... "Those organizations want to continue doing the work, but they no longer want attention for that work. And so to try to, like, hide it in some ways, and we're in a very unprecedented time right now, nothing is normal right now." ... "Well, basically, corporations interpreted the ADA to say, like, I don't have to offer any... And then you have this three executive orders around DEI, and companies are falling over themselves to comply in advance without any legal mandate for compliance." ... "I just saw a New York Times article that was published a list of a hundred and ninety-nine words that the Trump administration is targeting, words like diversity and inclusion, but also things like bias, stereotypes, underrepresented, underserved, and many more words. They're flagging these words, they're removing them from websites, they're investigating, delaying, denying grants and funding." - Bo Young Lee, President of Research & Advisory for AnitaB.org [2025] (https://voices.berkeley.edu/podcast/dei-not-doa-part-1 | locally AI extracted transcript: https://pastebin.ca/5Mmy5Q6deu)
What scares me for the future of my children is that people cheer or blend in, hide, give up. All this repression is helped from multitude of directions, actively or passively, but helped. And the intentional confrontation, seeking it, is increasingly the norm while standing up for it, the protective confrontation is disappearing into the shades, under the grass, not to be seen, go dormant or in some instances, die. This will not end well.
The first thing I think about when I hear GHC is the gaslighting. For years I was prodded about that I should go. Men are absolutely welcome. Everyone is welcome, etc.
I never felt that I was actually welcome. And I don't have to be. It's not for me, and it doesn't have to be. I answered women inviting me that no, that wasn't made for me, have fun though.
Then mass layoffs happened, and men who lost their jobs, or looking for their first job, went.
Suddenly everything flipped. Keynote was basically "what the fuck are all you men doing here, taking the space of women?".
There are no isolated phenomena. There are no accidents. It apples to everything. Times are changing. Priorities are changing. The party is coming to an end. People are getting real. It's like the world suddenly progressed past it's childhood or waking from a musical dream.
The courtesy smiles, the pretentive presentations, the sale talk, the polite social customs, the diplomacy, the power due to knowledge, weaponry, currency fixations, - all will face the concrete realities. Water recedes exposing the naked, boisterous economies. The zero-carbon evangelists run to Russia for diesel and to China for minerals or they get extinct, unable to adapt and sitting on their presumptive glory.
Sad to see this canceled and especially at the last minute.
Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.
This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it. The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
For context, the first Grace Hopper Celebration was 1994, and had been held for the last 20 consecutive years. Long before DEI.
But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens. Too many business cowards don't want to have problems with their merger, acquisition, IPO, FCC license, etc for supporting celebrating a great American like this, just because she was a woman.
> seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors
Do we know any sponsors who pulled out? Even if that was the case, pulling the plug like this at t minus two weeks speaks to problems internally.
From what was reported there was a broad reduction of interest from sponsors. Speculation, but the late cancellation very much sounds like there was an effort to find a main sponsor to make up the gap but no corporate was willing to step up and just be the primary sponsor to fund what was needed.
Corporate lawyers now broadly advise their companies against putting any money towards demographic-specific initiatives due to the risks of being sued for discrimination.
Buying a booth at an event would probably be seen as fine but I can only imagine pitches to be a title sponsor were met with “don’t touch this” advice from corporate lawyers.
Profiles of corporate courage...
To Godwin it (with his assumed blessing (1)), I guess this is how BMW, Hugo Boss, Allianz, etc, ended up being involved in the Holocaust.
(1) https://www.alternet.org/godwins-law-trump-hitler/
Reducing funding for something sometimes harmful, which then correspondingly means the funding is not passed on to others, is not the Holocaust.
The utter degrading of the meanings of powerful words might get us there, though.
yeah, feels like they were hoping something would come through until it didn't
DEI didn’t implode. It stopped being a valuable marketing exercise for most companies as it wasn’t trending on social media any more.
It became a liability - corporates were legally threatened
> corporates were legally threatened
More like illegally threatened. Corporations caved because they are helmed my weak little men with fragile egos and no principles.
Source for _legally_ ?
DOJ sued Deloitte over DEI programs, they ended up settling for $21.5 million: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deloitte-pay-215-mi...
Several state Attorneys General sent legal threats to 20 major law firms over DEI: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-led-states-deman...
Texas Attorney General warned major banks that DEI programs violate feduciary duty: https://today.westlaw.com/Document/Ibce2fdc5dcec11efb708bbad...
Texas Attorney General declared DEI initiatives unconstitutional in a legal opinion: https://www.gibsondunn.com/texas-attorney-general-declares-p...
Don't know about corporates, but Harvard was sued[0] for DEI-esque discrimination.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
> This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it.
Shocking.
DEI did not implode; it was heavily and viciously assaulted.
The implication here that the DEI movement had done nothing wrong is rather naive… it wasn’t all bad, but there was a lot of bad things happening to answer for.
Could you elaborate on some of these "bad things"?
Racism
You could also say that DEI is easier to defend when human work was more valuable and capital was cheaper.
You could say that it was easier to practice before the executive (that routinely hires the dumbest troglodytes - whose only qualification is loyalty to the fuhrer - into positions of power) started a witchhunt against anyone practicing it.
Since the only god our corporatations worship goes by power and money, they all started tripping over themselves to kiss the ring.
DEI didn’t implode; it’s not an implosion when it’s shot at from the outside by malicious actors intent on destroying something they don’t understand and can only kneejerk react to out of unreasoning fear.
This isn’t collateral, this was the plan, the planners were just too stupid to see the natural consequences of their plan. See also the price of diesel.
It was definitely and constantly imploding. It was just kept alive by a giant amount of taxpayer and corporate money.
You don't want to run afoul of Agent Orange by celebrating a woman so close to his coronation
Is it because international registrations were down. I know that I am dodging US travel ATM
I've had the option of a free trip to the US twice in the past year.
I've rejected both due toy sentiment right now.
Ugh. A bunch of our students already booked travel and rooms. What a horrible situation all around.
What's stopping those students from holding an impromptu memorial?
Most students are probably on trips paid for by others. Many of those groups would probably not be keen to fund an itinerary-free trip to Irvine California for a few days. Even if the students were purported to want to impromptu organize.
Organizing
were there any hints that this might happen at all? so abrupt
They were advertising tickets three days before they announced everything was cancelled: https://archive.ph/Uimqj
> What happens to my in-person or virtual registration fee?
> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.
Incredible.
We faculty learned about it this evening. :(
Some of the best hires I ever made came through GHC - truly a sad day.
For as much COBOL as my (former) coworkers use every day, they should bankroll her day.
Submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50070918
…you’re calling dupe on your own submission?
Is there something wrong with that?
How will you get your fake internet points now?!
of course he does. why not?
this is a new low. also needs a (year) /s
That other thread is interesting as it raises issues about how the organization is managed money-wise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082093
I have to admit, I suspected the Secretary of War cancelled the funding
Who does AnitaB.org actually support or advocate for?
Their "Our Mission" page refers only to the perfectly vague "our community", never once describing what that is. Nor does their landing page. Their "Our History" page says that the organisation started out to support women in the tech industry, but then describes several name changes, eventually dropping all use of the words "woman" or "women" and switching to the user of "individuals" without explanation or elaboration. It reads like a perfectly choreographed PR "product" designed to maximise deniability of... something. But what?
I think we can safely assume that all the major sponsors from 2025 pulled out. Any one of them could have carried the whole thing.
https://codewithkate.squarespace.com/blog/the-complete-grace...
Tech Giants & Major Players
Amazon - Booth 751
Google - Booth 1246
Meta - Booth 1010
Nvidia - Booth 1039
Disney - Booth 946
Snap - Booth 447
Roblox - Booth 1209
PlayStation - Booth 433
Nintendo - Booth 429
Finance & Trading Firms
Goldman Sachs - (Location TBD)
Morgan Stanley - Booth 633
Jane Street - Booth 618
Citadel - Booth 62
Two Sigma - Booth 1046
DE Shaw - Booth 410
IMC - Booth 1051
Walleye Capital - Booth 1052
Apollo Global Management - Booth 647
Five Rings - Booth 310
Cboe - Booth 952
Banking & Financial Services Bank of America - Booth 439
Capital One - Booth 831
Bloomberg - Booth 824
Navy Federal - Booth 426
USAA - Booth 614
Vanguard - Booth 819
Insurance & Financial Tech Prudential - Booth 526
CHUBB - Booth 344
Voya Financial - Booth 1226
NEXT Insurance - Booth 1227
Manulife - Booth 1122
Tech & Software Companies Intuit - Booth 422
PayPal - Booth 514
Cloudflare - Booth 533
Wayfair - Booth 342
Xero - Booth 343
Adyen - Booth 605
WEX - Booth 1014
Chewy - Booth 1114
Infoblox - Booth 852
InterSystems - Booth 518
Red Hat - Booth 919
DTCC - Booth 418
Consulting & Professional Services EY - Booth 1228
E-commerce & Entertainment Audible - Booth 1251
Automotive & Manufacturing Rivian - Booth 1022
John Deere - (Location TBD)
Crown Equipment Corporation - Booth 1210
Automotive & Manufacturing Rivian - Booth 1022
John Deere - (Location TBD)
Crown Equipment Corporation - Booth 1210
Real Estate & Corporate Services CBRE - Booth 341
Lumen - Booth 345
Retail & Food Services McDonald's - Booth 339
Healthcare & Medical Technology Tandem Diabetes Care - Booth 313
Northwestern Medicine - Booth 1214
Mortgage & Real Estate Tech Rocket - Booth 1211
So they sponsored last year, now you are asking them to pay 50x more?
And if thay paid the whole thing this year, and pulled out next year, th÷pe PR would be 50x worse. Single company cancelled this event in 2027!
Seems like smart move to get out fast!
You clearly do not work in Tech. Grace Hopper has been around for decades, and companies have understood how important it is for furthering their industries.
This is absolutely the US Gov to blame for its DEI attacks and threats.
> mportant it is for furthering their industries
This was true 10 years ago, today not so much. After several years of cultural revolution, recent crimes, discrimination lawsuits, the entire "women in tech" subject is toxic.
Now it is in implosion phase, where activists will start eating their own (just see the hit list OP published).
Another problem is AI. Common coders will become obsolete (together with "women in tech"). There is no push for more "women in plumbing jobs". Pushing young people into tech (presumably with expensive student loans) is just cruel. Women are not stupid!
I wonder if people are confused about their repositioning.
An AnitaB.org press release dated April 24, 2025, stated its mission as:
> “to get women in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded so that they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more equitable and sustainable future.”
The current mission page instead says:
> “to get our community in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded, so they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more impartial and sustainable future.”
It's really hard to tell from their current mission statement who "our community" is.
Since DEI became a curse word, you cannot say you do anything for women anymore. I think it's pretty clear who the community still is, but with snowflakes running the government, wording suffers.
I so hate that trying to help historically disadvantaged groups some extra help is considered bad. Like I get not making a group extra powered, but to help women in tech or research into Black prenatal care just seems absurd.
Lets not forget about female CEOs, they should be making 20x more.
Path dependence causes problems, it's better to make sure you can just use current state instead.
Sorry to be dense. What does that mean?
I believe the meaning in plain English is:
Let's not focus too much on the past problems that a group of people had, but let's make sure that the situation is improved for that group right now.
Focusing too much on past and try to tip the scale _because_ the past was so bad may lead to bad outcomes today. It may be perceived as a search for grievances and retribution and not the equalization of outcomes that one claims it should seek.
Look at the current admin's overt tipping of the scales for white heterosexual Christian (in name only) males to see evidence of DEI in action.
They just don't like it when it's other people
Yeah it's horrible and blatant.
But they think they can do it because they can spin it as "you did it first".
This just makes the point that there is nothing to gain by framing the issue as a grievance.
There are real prejudices and real systemic disadvantages to fix and while it's important to understand the history of them, I believe we put too much focus on that and less on what we can do to put that past behind us instead of dwelling in it. I don't think this approach of grievances has done anybody any favour in practice.
> But they think they can do it because they can spin it as "you did it first".
They are happy to do whatever they want, and they don't worry about needing false-equivalence precedent to do it.
Got it. I agree. If there is no modern negative consequences then no redress is needed.
and conversely, if there are modern negative consequences, let's focus on those and fix them!
100%
> you cannot say you do anything for women anymore
Boy oh boy let me tell you about some stuff going on in sports in the latest years...
I think they mean women as an abstract concept
“Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left…
Snowflake has the weirdest provinance. It was used in Fight Club as a metaphor for individual uniqueness, but because the people who thought Tyler Durden was the coolest thing ever identified with his followers. When Tyler said "You are not snowflakes" they took it to be a positive statement. Snowflake got reinterpreted as a metaphor for fragility.
Ironicly many of those who use the term are not snowflakes in one of those senses and are in the other, but the opposite of what they believe to be true.
> Palahniuk was hardly the first person to use the metaphor. It's the stuff of self-help books and inspirational posters and elementary school assurances.
> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.
> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-less-lovely-sid...
Tyler Durden, Don Drapper, Patrick Bateman, are all characters that you’re not supposed to want to be like but that “blackpilled” men completely miss the point and worship. There must be a name for this type of character influence. It reminds me of the “torrent nexus” trope but for people.
> “Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left
Horseshoe theory [1]. Both the far left and right are thin skinned, constantly engrossed in nonsensical semantic debates and accusing their betters of lacking a sense of humor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
OK. The framing has shifted, though.
These days, Varoufakis talks about "radical centrists".
(It's possisble he doesn't actually have a sense of humour and what we're seeing is pure schadenfreude over, eg, the unsurprising stuff that's happening to the centre-left in Sweden right now. Which happened to Starmer, and has yet to happen to Burnham
But this is maybe only "empirical"--- your wiki link mentions the vulnerability of centrism to elite takeover, and subsequent alienation from the masses. Nod to your "betters")
(What stuff is happening to the center left in Sweden right now?)
Sweden has bloc politics, i.e. no single party has the majority to govern.
The red-green bloc (left, center and greens) won a majority but the center party is playing kingmaker and refusing to let the left party into government. The left party has said from well before the election that they, reasonably, will not vote to support a government which they are not part of.
This has been due to decades of bourgeois / social democrat rat-fucking on policies, most notably disability / sick insurance reforms, after they got the left party's support votes. [1]
There is speculation that the center party would instead support the prior right wing government instead (voting with the extreme-right) - as long as the extreme right stays out of government, despite the extreme right getting all of their policies pushed through anyway. Even going so far as to withhold key votes in parliament until their immigration reforms (removing permanent residency and restricting citizenship, in this case) got passed. [2]
The short of it is that "centrist" parties are just right wing parties in disguise, in that they NEVER support leftist reforms but will happily support the right when it suits upper class economic interests.
Democracy being what it is, can be messy and nobody goes home happy. But the left of the left bloc saw the largest electoral gains in this election, so a move to the left is arguably what a growing portion of the electorate wanted. It was still a very close election, so you could frame it in many ways, but that the green-reds did see the biggest gains is fact.
1. https://arbetet.se/2026/09/21/sjukforsakringen-forklarar-var...
2. https://www.thelocal.se/20261012/beer-strike-and-contract-br...
You make it sound like the center party is playing both sides but as I understand it is not part of that block, and they would be OK with social democrats but not far left in government. What's wrong with that?
Aha ok I was wondering when I asked if you meant the internal politics or either social democrats or greens - what I think of as the two center left parties - had been going through an activist far left internal struggle (as is happening to the very separate Green Party in the UK right now).
I would say the center party is center-right.
> centrism
I don't think this word has meaning anymore in modern Western politics. We have institutionalists.They aren't that different from the animating essence of Trump 1.0–they want to go back to some good old days. Even though the world has since changed. And the old days weren't that good, they're the reason we're where we are now.
And we have various folks pitching reform. The idiots on the far left and the right agree on the broad structure of reform, namely, nothing thoughtful except getting rid of the other guys. But they aren't the only ones pitching reform.
Sure. All instances of "centrist" in the #Modern portion of that wiki could be replaced by "institutionalist".. but it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform (internally, with respect to general electoral processes)
> it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform
Why? Status quo is the default in any state.
Yes, and it's being used ironically here. The people who pointed and laughed at those who wanted "safe spaces" and overly sensitive, are overly sensitive about people not like them getting any help. "You called us snowflakes, but you're the ones who have the fragile ego."
every accusation, confession, etc.
Why it may have lacked the funding to continue operations:
"Last year, Women Who Code, a nonprofit that got its start in California, closed because of a lack of funding. AnitaB.org, which brings together women in tech at its annual Grace Hopper Celebration, cut its workforce in 2024 and pointed to a downturn in corporate DEI investments." - "Why Big Tech is pulling back [from DEI efforts]" [2025] (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-15/google-and...)
"I've seen companies who have rebranded their diversity, equity, inclusion as colleague engagement, as listening and empowerment, or and whatever else, I've seen many different iterations, and I think a lot of organizations... [want] to get to a place where they can hide their activity..." ... "Those organizations want to continue doing the work, but they no longer want attention for that work. And so to try to, like, hide it in some ways, and we're in a very unprecedented time right now, nothing is normal right now." ... "Well, basically, corporations interpreted the ADA to say, like, I don't have to offer any... And then you have this three executive orders around DEI, and companies are falling over themselves to comply in advance without any legal mandate for compliance." ... "I just saw a New York Times article that was published a list of a hundred and ninety-nine words that the Trump administration is targeting, words like diversity and inclusion, but also things like bias, stereotypes, underrepresented, underserved, and many more words. They're flagging these words, they're removing them from websites, they're investigating, delaying, denying grants and funding." - Bo Young Lee, President of Research & Advisory for AnitaB.org [2025] (https://voices.berkeley.edu/podcast/dei-not-doa-part-1 | locally AI extracted transcript: https://pastebin.ca/5Mmy5Q6deu)
What scares me for the future of my children is that people cheer or blend in, hide, give up. All this repression is helped from multitude of directions, actively or passively, but helped. And the intentional confrontation, seeking it, is increasingly the norm while standing up for it, the protective confrontation is disappearing into the shades, under the grass, not to be seen, go dormant or in some instances, die. This will not end well.
The first thing I think about when I hear GHC is the gaslighting. For years I was prodded about that I should go. Men are absolutely welcome. Everyone is welcome, etc.
I never felt that I was actually welcome. And I don't have to be. It's not for me, and it doesn't have to be. I answered women inviting me that no, that wasn't made for me, have fun though.
Then mass layoffs happened, and men who lost their jobs, or looking for their first job, went.
Suddenly everything flipped. Keynote was basically "what the fuck are all you men doing here, taking the space of women?".
Oh, the gaslighting. Glad I never went.
Why did they cancel her, did it turn out that she owned slaves or something?
There are no isolated phenomena. There are no accidents. It apples to everything. Times are changing. Priorities are changing. The party is coming to an end. People are getting real. It's like the world suddenly progressed past it's childhood or waking from a musical dream.
The courtesy smiles, the pretentive presentations, the sale talk, the polite social customs, the diplomacy, the power due to knowledge, weaponry, currency fixations, - all will face the concrete realities. Water recedes exposing the naked, boisterous economies. The zero-carbon evangelists run to Russia for diesel and to China for minerals or they get extinct, unable to adapt and sitting on their presumptive glory.