As a Mexican, I can tell you that actual people from latino-america dislike the Latinx thing. Use Hispanic, Latina, Latino, Latino-american, or actual country of origin.
Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
701–710 of 1001 posts
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#702Many of these look like good guidelines for someone, especially one in a position of public communications, to use as guidelines . Or for some sort of social worker, I can see these being some reasonable guidelines to consider. But I would recoil at the idea of these being hard and fast rules considered for everyday speech. And the idea that casual, every day speech must be as equitable as possible doesn't sit right…
Yeah, this thread is nuts to me how many people in this thread are mad. Sure, some of the words are a bit of a stretch but while going through the most I was nodding along being like, “yeah, makes sense.” Like nobody is gonna string you up not following the guidelines but in my own writing I follow these pretty much naturally because, yeah, it’s kinda weird that we describe things with limited or reduced functionalit…
> it’s kinda weird that we describe things with limited or reduced functionality as crippled.
You just typed out how that secondary meaning came into being.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#703I 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.
I'd like to think all of us are proponents of social justice. That's the most tragic thing about all of this stuff - it undermines good work and progress. Even more reason for all of us to reject it.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#704There are too many suggested replacements that I find are overly prescriptive, contextually blind, and needlessly aggrandizing. Some, I admit, have merit. (Senile, grey-beard etc.) To me they are common sense. Perhaps, the rest of the terms were common sense to the authors. Several suggestions about cultural appropriation are hypocritical. People of all cultures say the Lord's name in vain all the time. But saying gu…
> Some, I admit, have merit. (Senile, grey-beard etc.) To me they are common sense.
Speak for yourself.
To me "grey beard" is a word which refers to someone with great authority on a subject, whose experience is certain to exceed anyone else.
If someone were to refer to me as a gray beard, I would consider that a sign of respect.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#705I 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.
But that's how this type of ridiculous become standard practice: you include a few unambigous examples, then the rest lean on them for support. Did Stanford really need an official document telling their community that the word "jewed" probably should be avoided? If so, there are lots of worse words and phrases not included here, why not? How did they decide the word "tarball" should be included because it starts with the same three letters as a derogatory term, but "tarsands" (along with being technically inaccurate) is OK?
No one said words can't be hurtful. If you work or attend Stanford you know these words. This document is apparently about harm reduction though, and that harm would be mitigated far more effectively if Stanford admitted more people like the ones these words supposedly trivialize.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#706This is an extremely low quality thread. There is almost no intellectual curiosity in here. Just a lot of "No, it isn't offensive." assertions and personal opinion.
Agree with the list or not it at least tries to explain the reasoning for everything on it.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#707Peter thiel must be foaming at the mouth.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#708“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#709I 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.
It's typical "I'm helping!" feel-good activism achieving exactly nothing at best, negative gains at worst.
But hot damn some are terrible. I'd even go as far to say that some are worse insult as original, calling someone "non-vocal, non-verbal" instead of just "dumb" sounds like a better burn than original.
"This proposition was clearly written by someone neither vocal nor verbal"
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#710An excellent illustration of the beginnings of an SJW dystopia. Not just the list itself, but the general feeling of fear they want you to feel while speaking. One can draw a link between any word and a possible harm - something that a few comments have hilariously shown with some examples. So if the goal was protecting anyone from every possible harmful word, the list fails.
But this demonstrates real evil that hides behind compassion and empathy, because preventing harm is not the real goal. The real goal is the assertion of power to police speech. Once you have that, you can do whatever you want with it to build a utopia where people aren't allowed to say things you don't think should be said. Even SJWs have to decide: what's worse, letting people say "lets bury the hatchet" without realizing they are "appropriating native culture", or putting an arbitrary group of unaccountable people in charge of what everyone says, in full knowledge of how that power can and will be abused?
Good heavens this whole thing is astonishingly stupid.