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Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

itcommunity.stanford.edu

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Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#721

Post by senko »

imgabe wrote: post #555

I 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…

> you can search for infractions and more expeditiously accuse and eject your rivals

This is straight out of totalitarian regimes' playbook.

It's not only taking social justice too far, I'd say it's a betrayal of the ideal of a just, inclusive and safe society.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#722

Post by obscurette »

I lived many years of my life in the country (Soviet Union) where there were a lot of rules what words were insulting and what words were appropriate. The only real use of these rules were to bully people by authorities and assholes. These rules just gave them a seemingly morally superior standpoint and an excuse.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#723

Post by adammarples »

lbwtaylor wrote: post #530
crackercrews wrote: post #424

It is hard to choose which of these is silliest, but my vote goes to the replacement of "he" with [name] or "they", until you know the person's preferred pronouns. [1] The vast, vast majority of people who present as male wish to be referred to as "he". Many of them would be offended or confused if you used "they" as a term of reference. Many listeners would also be confused if you referred to a person who appears to…

Until 'they' got pulled into duty, English didn't have a non gendered pronoun, so if you were referring to someone where you didn't know the gender, you had a choice of defaulting to "he", randomly choosing "he" or " she", or using "he or she" or "the [descriptor like 'programmer']* They at first sounded weird being repurposed this way, but I think now it works better than any of the list above. Once you start using…

they/them has always been a neutral pronoun in English. It's only now that it is a controversial topic that everybody is fussing about it. Imagine the following sentence.

"Someone is knocking at the door, can you let them in?"

Nobody would say "let him in", unless they knew a man was behind the door. This is utterly uncontroversial and boring.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#724

Post by Zigurd »

Here is the cheapest prediction possible:

The outrage against this is going to be a festival of mansplaining, 'splained by people who have never been talked over in a meeting by a woman, nor pulled over for driving while black. OK, that's not your lived experience, but that's why empathy is so valuable to arriving at the right answer. Without it, it's right only for you.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#725

Post by andrepd »

imgabe wrote: post #555

I 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…

It's virtue signalling. Talk to actual people from indigenous communities, they're probably more concerned about actual problems affecting communities than whether someone says "bury the hatchet". Talk to a blind activist association, they're more likely concerned about the unwalkability of public spaces than the usage of the phrase "blind review".

It's mostly white, mostly affluent people, competing in the political sensitivity olympics, probably without even realising they're harming the very causes they claim to fight for.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#727

Post by IceHegel »

prepend wrote: post #700

This doesn’t seem real. Maybe it’s a distraction to engage people who spend a lot of time on things like this so they don’t get involved in real activities and gum up the works. I’ve seen this used where there is an anti-productive person who makes other people waste time. When there’s one of these on a project, it can be a real drain. But if there’s two, you can plug them into each other and they’ll sort of create a…

Does it seem like we’re living in a world where these guys have no influence?
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