341–350 of 540 posts
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It's apparently a common word, a demonstrative pronoun, similar to "that". Pretty hard to avoid without language acrobatics.
Did you watch the video of him using it? While it’s a very common phrase while speaking Mandarin, and while I do not think this is a fireable offense, the professor could have chosen one of dozens of other examples in his lecture very easily.
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I have said this before and will continue to say this: to put an end to this, liberals in the United States need to openly repudiate identity politics progressivism and cancel culture. Former-President Obama has ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca... ); we should too. Please speak up and, more importantly, please vote for old-school liberals instead of progressives.
Politics isn't going to solve this. You could elect an anti-PC theorist like Donald Trump, or an old school liberal like Nancy Pelosi, and this sort of thing would keep happening. The real solution is just awareness. As people see more examples of this sort of thing going wrong they will be more careful about it.
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Did you watch the video of him using it? While it’s a very common phrase while speaking Mandarin, and while I do not think this is a fireable offense, the professor could have chosen one of dozens of other examples in his lecture very easily.
I think this is all a huge overreaction. But I also watched the video and honestly it looked like he was saying it because he knew he could get away with it. That's the most likely explanation for why he picked Chinese as an example of another language's "um" word. Just IMO though, no way to know for sure. It was at least tactless. He knew how it would sound.
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It's not confined to universities, either. This growing list of "forbidden words" is making its way into the corporate world, too. Coupled with spineless HR who don't know how to constructively deal with people who claim to be offended. My current company is undertaking a massive, probably thousand man-year (sorry, person-year), effort to scrub all its internal and external documentation and even source code of any f…
Can you kindly provide an example of the type of behavior you might engage in at work in absence of the 'woke patrol' (as you described it)?
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But why does the university cave in so easily? Why is the Dean himself crawling on the floor to apologize for basically nothing? Are they afraid of bad PR? or lawsuits? Why?
This essay provides a highly thought-provoking answer: https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/ The argument is sophisticated and hard to summarise, but essentially, the author argues that "enlightenment liberalism" (i.e. the sort of philosophy that dominates universities) has a flaw at its centre that both creates Marxists and causes "enlightenment liberals" to constantly give in to the demands of…
[0] Free read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
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Can you kindly provide an example of the type of behavior you might engage in at work in absence of the 'woke patrol' (as you described it)?
In my personal case it would be using the words « master » and « slave » when talking about interfacing databases
This action is so obviously wrong I can't but wonder if its not some prank. It would be an ideal prank for the Chinese in particular, to audit the course (at first as an attempt to see how Chinese language and culture is taught here), and then stumble upon this coincidental pronunciation, in the context of a tinder-dry atmosphere of political correctness, and send in (multiple) complaints and watch America burn just…
> "Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better." It's unbelievable that this "un…
I think that microaggressions are real, that language really has import, and I've been noticing those kinds of things more and more on a daily basis. But this is entirely unwarranted and a gross overreaction. Having said that, I also understand the terror that this kind of issue generates in organisations. Imagine you're the dean of an institution in an environment where people only read the headlines in their Facebo…
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Can you kindly provide an example of the type of behavior you might engage in at work in absence of the 'woke patrol' (as you described it)?
In my personal case it would be using the words « master » and « slave » when talking about interfacing databases
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It's not confined to universities, either. This growing list of "forbidden words" is making its way into the corporate world, too. Coupled with spineless HR who don't know how to constructively deal with people who claim to be offended. My current company is undertaking a massive, probably thousand man-year (sorry, person-year), effort to scrub all its internal and external documentation and even source code of any f…
Can you kindly provide an example of the type of behavior you might engage in at work in absence of the 'woke patrol' (as you described it)?
Several engineering leaders forced the Networks team to create an internal RFC on proposed naming convention changes for this, which was then circulated to a wider set of reviewers.
Once it reached the reviewers, someone with common sense stepped in and asked how many actual women engineers or gender non-binary engineers reviewed it, and did they actually think it represented some type of progress on problematic language.
So they formed a committee of female and gender non-binary coworkers to review it, and their conclusion was that this was harmless language clearly and obviously rooted in decades old technical standards that did not invite or inflame any type of comparison with genitalia or gender choices among people, and that instead of worrying about this kind of exceedingly trivial issue, attention would be better paid to more overt and damaging language problems, like harassment or microbehaviors that disadvantage women in group leadership situations.
On one hand I was very proud of the conclusion they reached, but on the other hand very terrified at the whole process, ranging from extreme reactionary forced changes with no basis in reality all the way to giving a committee of women and gender non-binary coworkers carte blanche to rule on whether or not the language had to be changed (as if the rest of us don’t have brains and can’t voice opinions that ought to carry equal weight about that).
All told it was a colossal waste of time and money that deeply compromised employee trust in company leadership.