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Banning words won’t make the world more just

theatlantic.com

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Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#521

Post by parineum »

_cenw wrote: post #486
JenrHywy wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment. This is the crazy thing. After a century of legitimate struggle for equality, women are having the language of feminism turned on them to deny the existence of femininity. Honestly, I thought the lines would have been drawn with sport, but that fact that it's leaking into medicine is pure insanity. I've been somewhat worried about there not b…

[flagged]

>Some states that introduced trans sports bans couldn't even cite a single person the bill would affect. Tenesee introduced their bill to ban a single person. Who wasn't even close to the top of her discipline. It's all political posturing.

This argument works in reverse as well though. People don't want to throw out the idea of gender to appease a select few.

There is a multitude of things that are simply unfair accidents of birth and there isn't a solid line where it's obvious something should be done. With gender issues there seems to be a lot of people with no dog in the fight who have extremely strong opinions but accomodations aren't always made on stuff like this because a few people are experiencing something unfair which they have no control over. It's not "hate", as many people would say, to want to have a conversation about it.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#522

Post by usrbinbash »

bilalnpe wrote: post #365
nonethewiser wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reeks of criticizing others for your own faults. Someone who makes 12k is poor. If this is offensive to someone then clearly they have a low opinion of poor people. Yet everyone else is reprimanded for it.

I don't have an issue with using the term poor to describe people lacking money but it has other definitions and uses. The second and third definitions I get from define:poor on Google are: - worse than is usual, expected, or desirable; of a low or inferior standard or quality. - (of a person) considered to be deserving of pity or sympathy. I suspect these might be why the term is discouraged.

So what? Natural language is complicated, because a) It does something very complicated, and b) it is the result of a complex process.

Yes, many words have more than one meaning. That's one of the many reasons why we need formal, context-free, specialized languages to communicate our will to machines effectively.

But humans are not machines. We can do context, and we can use words that mean more than one thing. We can also deal with misunderstandings much better than an automaton.

And this newspeak even fails at the goal of providing an unambiguous: Unless context is provided, a person who makes 6 figures a year is "financially disadvantaged" when compared to a billionaire. But noone would mistake someone earning 6 figures with someone who is poor.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#523

Post by sbuk »

roenxi wrote: post #413
lynx23 wrote: post #363

What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in m…

> The language terror they were subjected to has made them so unsecure that they actually dont want to hear that blind people have no issue with being called blind. It is unusual for the opinions of the minorities involved to be relevant.The language policing appears to be a power play within the majority. What you are observing is consistent with that - they aren't worried about offending the blind, they're worried…

It not even a majority that dictates. It’s ostensibly a vocal minority of professional offence-takers who wield power, generally on social media. My partner has MS, and I made an off-the-cuff joke about it, and got pilloried by people that neither of us know. Not one of them took the time to consider that this is how we deal with it; they were too busy being offended on her behalf.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#524

Post by messe »

diedead wrote: post #235

Some very fun ones relating to the IT/tech industry (To me, some of these are reasonable, but "whitespace" and "brown-bag", seriously??) https://itconnect.uw.edu/guides-by-topic/identity-diversity-... https://www.it.northwestern.edu/about/it-projects/dei/glossa...

"Sanity check" is flagged there as well. That's a first for me.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#525

Post by josephg »

smcl wrote: post #514
josephg wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect the unease you perceive with people using different terms for blindness are unease with their own attachments to those words. Nah. I think people are just terrified of coming across as a jerk for not knowing the latest non-offensive term for things. Black? African American? Oh black is ok again? Will I get in trouble with HR/Twitter for calling you blind? And if so, what word do I use instead? Do I ask? I…

"Terrified" is a bit much, I think most people just want to get along and are happy to use whatever term is acceptable to those it describes. Our understanding of what those terms are might shift over time, and it may get muddied by well-intentioned people trying a bit hard to avoid offence (or by people clumsily trying to police it) but it's generally progressing fine. And I think as long as you're compassionate, wi…

I agree it’s usually fine in practice, but I know plenty of people who still find the whole thing quite anxiety inducing.

Having your language policed isn’t an enjoyable experience. Doubly so when it feels counterproductive - like avoiding the word “blind” with blind people who might quite like the term.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#526

Post by chakintosh »

rayiner wrote: post #233

The Sierra Club guide is hilarious: https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/sce-authors/u... . > People of color” has in the past served as a collective term for people who are not white. A preferred term today is “BIPOC” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color, which provides a unifying term for ease of use while still acknowledging the reality that Black and Indigenous people in the United States…

All there is to it is white people inventing words to stake a claim to them.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#527

Post by parineum »

_cenw wrote: post #489
josephg wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then you threw in the (self-described!) theocratic fascist dogwhistle. Huh? What fascist dog whistle? Sounds like the person was just describing their opinion and experience. The whole idea of dogwhistling sounds like a weird conspiracy theory. I’m sure it’s happened more than 0 times, but thinking dogwhistling is everywhere sounds just as unhinged to me as any of the wacky right wing conspiracies.

"What is a woman" is the rhetorical work of Matt Walsh, who describes himself as a "theocratic fascist". The beginning of this essay explains the phrase pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAMM3l156Oo

And since nobody has asked that question before that well known rhetorical work we know everyone who mentions the same question is just dog whistling a reference to it.

You left that part out.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#528

Post by tommiegannert »

usrbinbash wrote: post #448

Whaaaat? I thought so many lives were improved by making devteams replace all usages of "black/whitelist" with "block/allowlist". Well, except for the lives of the users, on-call engineers, 1st and 2nd level tech support, the product owners, and everyone else who had to deal with sudden, unexpected, hard to track bugs resulting from such BS changes. Oh, ofc I apologise for my use of the word "list", which may be hist…

> people who prefer unordered data.

I think "list" is a much more non-inclusive term than that, since you are either on the list, or you're not. /s

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#529

Post by Timon3 »

ramblerman wrote: post #516
ookblah wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing what is currently happening or the end result, just that from even my own personal perspective I usually want to ask "is this word okay to use around you?" instead of just assuming it as such or automatically making someone else responsible for their feelings around my words. You might ultimately be right, but go down that road enough and these people are usually called "assholes" lol. That phrase isn…

We have millions of years of evolution that allow us to pick up on these subtle signals though. And we are really good at it. Do you think the worry of always having to ask up front (if xyz is ok) comes from ironically a lack of natural empathy in your case?

Those same millions of years of evolution have also made us quite adept at reinforcing power and dominance structures through those same signals. Seems like there might be more to the discussion than "doesn't matter", no?
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