Business as usual. I'm waiting to receive the list of words I can use. Probably contains "yes", "my" and "lord".
Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
551–560 of 1001 posts
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#552And, obviously, this decisions kill the universities forever. If free speech is organised around a rule, a norm or a law, then it's not free anymore and I don't want to participate as a free individual.
And many people is gonna decide the same way looking for parallel ways of demonstrating their knowledge out of the formal.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#553"retard (n) person with a cognitive disability, person with autism,"
Autism is not the same as mental retardation. That's really offensive Stanford.
Shouldn't we really pinpoint exact people & groups who push for these kind of things? We need to put faces on this ideology. Who exactly is responsible for this?
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#554“You guys” is the plural form of “you” for most speakers of colloquial American English, and is completely ungendered, in an empirical sense: if you observe native speakers speaking naturally and colloquially, you will find that everyone who uses it (regardless of gender) uses it consistently to address groups of multiple people (regardless of gender). It’s derived from the noun “guy”, which is indeed often gendered.…
I was thinking about this the other day. You can approach a group of women and say " hey guys", that is fine. To a group of men," hey gals", and that is not fine. "Hey guys" to a mixed group, why... You've now 'elevated' the women to men so everyone is ok with it. It all implies that being a woman is somehow lesser. And so that is why I'm going to stick to everyone or folks. Although I don't begrudge or ask anyone to…
I have a friend who always says “hi women” when meeting up with our group, no matter the genders of the people present. Nobody is getting offended.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#555I reject the notion that anyone hearing or reading a word from this list could possibly experience anything properly categorized as "harm".
This is what's known in the sports world as "flopping" - feigning an injury to elicit a penalty on the other team.
Except academia has taken it even further. You don't even need to pretend that you're the one injured. You can make up an imaginary person and pretend they are injured, i.e. "maybe somone will hear the word tarball and think of tarbaby and then they'll feel bad" despite the fact that this has never once happened in recorded history.
This way you can search for infractions and more expeditiously accuse and eject your rivals (people whose work is better than yours).
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#556That's plain retarded!
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#557They apparently spider and scan their own websites for "harmful" language: I just find this wild. How and when did language itself become so dangerous to this degree? Along with most adults in my social circle, I care and think about my health, my family, my friends, my work, my dog, my environment, my community, etc. I could not give a flying fuck about language policing. Language isn't going to protect me on my bik…
The thing more of us need to understand is this has never been about "safety", it's about power and control. Becoming able to control someone's thoughts is very, very powerful and sought after, and what are thoughts composed of? Language. Define the language and you define how people think. Define people of latin origin should be referred to by "latinx" and nothing else and congratulations: An entire collection of cu…
And it's a vicious cycle which generates support. If you can pressure a neutral to adopt your 'language', they are likely to eventually convince themselves that they support your ideals, since why else would they go through the trouble of adjusting how they speak?
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#558Do not hire people that attend schools that push insane agendas such as these, period.
There are hundreds of other good schools around the world that don't institute crazy policies such as these - it's time for parents and their children to start pushing back and letting schools with agendas know that this is not okay and there will unfortunately have to be negative consequences for their students who "just go along" with it for the prestige of going to Stanford. These power-crazed schools are becoming indoctrination camps.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#559I don’t think I had seen those before: tarball [use instead: tar archive] While the term refers to an archive that has been created with the tar command, it can be negatively associated with the pejorative term tarbaby. whitespace [use instead: empty space] Assigns value connotations based on color (white = good), an act which is subconsciously racialized. Some of the “solutions” are funny: Hispanic [use instead: Lat…
One can be an immigrant and a [naturalized] citizen at the same time. "Immigrant" means that you moved [here] from [elsewhere], and decidedly does not mean "non-citizen"!
Also, the vast majority of immigrants are citizens [of a different country] and the vast majority of non-citizen [of the country they currently reside in] are not immigrants [but tourists, people on a non-immigrant visa, etc.].
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#560When a hypothetical "injury" occurs entirely within the confines of your own thoughts, it's a recipe for disaster to treat it like you would a crime in the external world. There is no evidence other than the word of the complainant. The whole thing is way, way too easy to game.