Some people will never miss an opportunity to make themselves into a victim.
Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
651–660 of 1001 posts
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#652Serious question, and maybe this is ignorant because I do not have an academic background but: Are these people not just a vocal minority? And if so, who cares? It seems like the internet is always up in arms about woke-ism but I honestly don't notice much of it in my daily life. At work, sure there are rules and regulations, but they make sense. Treat people with respect is always my default stance. If I make an ass…
It depends. Local politics can be pretty touchy depending on the place. I feel like I have to be pretty careful and use the right incantations to stay safe in public (“hi I’m name, he/him pronouns, dialing in from unceded lands). I can’t advocate for LGBT people, have to advocate for LGBTQIA2S+ people, which isn’t a big deal but turns into quite the mouthful when you have to use it repeatedly and can’t be caught slipping. I can’t be caught calling an idea crazy or unhinged because that perpetuates stigma against people living with mental illness.
The real issue is it turns some spaces into a bit of a knife fight situation, and it is very tempting to call others out for slip ups when you need to press an advantage or discredit a politically inconvenient perspective. But then there’s a whole prostration/apology dance that maybe neutralizes things?
If you’re good at bullshit it doesn’t matter, but it can really grate on some people.
Separately, at work, I had to add code to maintain a relationship between an owning context and child nodes. I’ve been stressed about it because I worry that “owner” might be one of the racist programming words, so tomorrow I’m probably going to do a commit to change to “originatingContext”. Not a big deal but add that up a few tens of thousands of times and you’re talking real dead weight loss for the economy. See GitHub changing from master to main. Not really problematic but also a cost without benefit.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#653I 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 injur…
Here's one of many such egregious examples: > committed suicide > died by suicide > Ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with mental health conditions. I had a friend commit suicide, and one of my mum's colleagues - also an acquiantance of mine, who I'd chat with in the pub semi-regularly - also committed suicide many years ago. I've suffered with depression for much of my life since my…
I also ran into that suicide phrase. My experiences are not unlike yours and I don't like to think of my friend who committed suicide as a patient who was overcome by disease. Rather, they were very meticulous and precise about ending their life.
It begs the question: can we represent this thing (somebody ends their own life) in precisely the right way? No, language is insufficient. All cases are different.
When I went to school and learned about linguistics and cultural analysis etc the appropriate way to deal with this insufficiency of language was to use many descriptions and ambiguities. So that you create a general field of meaning around the inexpressible thing.
Apparently we were all wrong; we just lacked the proper wording.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#654I 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 injur…
Some of them are deliberate slurs but most of them are just colourful language. This list is 95% absolutely ridiculous and I’m what you’d probably consider a proponent of social justice. It’s deeply funny, but also tragic because while there should be an attempt to make language inclusive, lists like this make the movement look like a joke.
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Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#655I 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 injur…
Although a lot of this list seems silly, it also has slurs like "retard" and "jewed" on it, which i think are very reasonably considered offensive. I think the tarball thing is rediculous, but the opposite extreme of no words can be hurtful is also rediculous.
> it also has slurs like "retard"
Nobody has ever been genuinely harmed by hearing the word "retard." It's made up outrage.
Note: being butthurt is not being harmed.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#656From the document:
> balls to the wall | accelerate efforts | Attributes personality traits to anatomy.
I've always thought this term had nothing to do with anatomy; am I incorrect here?
From https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/balls_to_the_wall
> First attested in the 1960s in the context of aviation, in reference to ball-shaped grips on an aircraft's joystick and throttle. Pushing the "balls to the wall" would put the plane into a maximum-speed dive > Not related to the vulgar sense of balls (“testicles”).
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#657I've helped compile guidance on inclusive language for my company. Whoever came up with this list has scored an own-goal against people who genuinely seek to make their communities more inclusive.
There are words like "slave" that actually cause offense to real people when used in a trivialising way. Accordingly, terminology around databases and the like has changed, and that's a good thing.
A laundry list of terms to be "eliminated", some of which are completely harmless makes a joke of real problems and is the opposite of helpful.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#658It's pretty remarkable that this conflates: - Well-known slurs like "Jewed" - Outdated, now-offensive terms like "hermaphrodite" - Touchy metaphorical language like "slave replica" - Gendered terms that if you're being assiduous you probably want to avoid, like "manpower" - Words that have long since lost any stigmatizing meaning by virtue of the original use being so ancient ("lame", "dumb", "stupid") - Words that,…
I can think of a few more! "register" - might indicate that someone has to register as a second-class citizen, enemy alien, etc. "bit" - might imply that someone is only a 'bit player', leading to feelings of inferiority. "tool" - an obviously offensive word meaning that someone is only fit to be used by others. "terminal" - we need to be sensitive about words that bring up the concept of death, to avoid triggering e…
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Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#659It's like banning shovels because someone can get hit with a shovel. It's not a language problem, and it cannot be solved by chopping the language up on the Procrustean bed. All it's going to do is annoy people and rally them against what used to be perceived as a good cause. And guess what, sometimes one needs to get hurt by being called a fucking idiot especially, if they act like a fucking idiot. Real life is not kindergarten. You have responsibility, not just rights.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#660What was the driving force for this? What was the percentage of staff and students asking for this level of policing of language?
I'm not American and even I am scared of how un-American such flagrant policing of language is. Some of the examples are shockingly benign, with invisible lines drawn and imaginary people invented to manufacture offense.
With the Twitter Files showing how the US government has colluded with a web of companies to violate the 1st Amendment, I wonder if any lines will end up being drawn between anomalous actions like Stanford's and the US government. Even as a non-American, I'm confused how this doesn't violate the very thing that being American is -> freedom.
This all reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...