How do we know if this is a joke or not. Some of them definitely read tongue in cheek.
Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
811–820 of 1001 posts
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#812> Instead of people of color (used generically), consider using BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)
This list is the result of work done by People of Color in Technology (POC-IT).
So they shouldn't be using their own name.
Utter madness.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#813Probably what you should take away from this is not “wokism gone crazy” (err, sorry “wild”). The more important lesson here is that the bloat in academic institutions has gotten so outrageous that people start bullshit time-consuming initiatives to justify their positions and the positions of their reports. Absolutely no one will take this seriously including the person who wrote it but they will be able to put it on…
There used to be a social market for nice little infographics that could readily illustrate inconvenient truths. I've wondered why we haven't seen the same for college topics. A simple infographic could show the amount of spending on diversity initiatives that could instead have gone to reducing tuition expenses. Between salaries and actual program costs, the number must be embarrassing for universities (not as embarrassing as football program costs but...that's another topic).
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#814Oh wow there was "latinx" there. People from Latin America take a lot of umbrage at having this little exonym pushed on us, believe me. It feels like colonialism. The term "Hispanic" is already very broad to refer to people from a large collection of polities with several cultural spheres in it, but at least the concept of "hispanoamérica" exists in it, and the word isn't a novel take on the Spanish language coming f…
Humor may apply here since the best way to kill this is to pronounce it la-tinks instead of Latin X. My parents are from Central America so feel free to say a latinks person told you it's pronounced that way.
I prefer lantinucks. There was also a short-lived trend of using 'x' in some parts of South America, it kind of died down in Chile as people decided to roll back to more boring centrist positions after a period of radicalization, and priorities shifted lower in the pyramid of needs during an economic crisis and a crime wave.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#815>spaz, brave, user, white paper
this is what these people want to take from you
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#816These kind of institutes have lost all touch with reality. Call it woke, postmodernist, critical (race) theory, I don't know what the correct term is. Their mechanisms are escalating out of control because nobody dares to stop them out of fear of being called an ableist, sexist, colonist, whichever-ist. It's like a virus.
Rather than progressive, it is regressive. It politically alienates a growing group of people in the center, center-left, independents. It's like a perfect recruitment movement for the right-wing, which is on the rise everywhere.
Progressives should stop this nonsense and return to the basics, which is to improve access to livable wages, good education, healthcare. For ALL, regardless of identity. Further, the explosive growth of the administrative function in these institutes needs to be dialed back. Always follow the money. It looks to me like right now, we're paying through the nose for anti-progress.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#817I 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…
My issue with the list is that we're increasing the harm associated with the words in the list. If we perpetuate the story that people are harmed, and introduce new harmful associations that most people don't have, then we're broadening the blast radius ( oh sorry sphere of effect ). The stories we tell ourselves matter, and I don't see why everyone has to tell the most pessimistic, helpless story possible when these…
This is why we should have rejected changing master to main. No one was offended by that in the first place! They created the problem and negative association entirely out of thin air.
But we accepted it, updated our tooling, retrained our muscle memory from git checkout master to git checkout main to appease them. We gave them a taste of power and they're going to keep exercising it until meeting sufficient resistance.
Enough people need to call it out and say No. It shouldn't be that hard. This is a small power drunk group that's colonizing the language. Point it out. No one gets to dictate our language from the top down.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#818> OCD Maybe they should ask actual OCD sufferers whether the term offends them when used to mean “detail oriented” because if they had asked me, a bona fide obsessive-compulsive patient, I would have responded with “meh.” My OCD has caused me untold misery, wrecked relationships, and made work difficult, but we all have a subtle sense about when people mean us harm or are just using a term as a shortcut. Almost never…
And your experience is reflective of all folks who have OCD? I can absolutely imagine someone being pretty upset by seeing how casually "oh I'm just OCD" gets tossed around. I'm queer, I would never presume to say that another queer person's challenges or trauma were the same as mine.
Should we really redefine everything to meet the sensibilities of the most easily offended?
Go read some Vonnegut.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#819Serious 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…
I had a conversation recently with somebody who said they didn’t want to be friends with people who weren’t willing to go the extra mile to be decent to people by using these sorts of speech rules. They were very angry about the subject and had some really nasty words for people who disagreed with them
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#820Is Stanford going to stop issuing Masters' degrees?