If we continue like this, a child born 10 years from now won't understand a book published 10 years ago. We would need to translate "Old English" to "Woke English".
Banning words won’t make the world more just
611–620 of 1001 posts
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I didn’t know the British had manufactured potato blight. That’s quite advanced tech for the time.
If you mean the disease, no.
If you mean blight as in "a thing that spoils or damages something", that something being the Irish substinence, they absolutely did. Read some history.
And since a million died, it's not exactly laughing matter to joke about.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
I'd say more generally "Being embarrassed isn't an enjoyable experience" - it's embarrassing to find out you're using an offensive word or to feel like you're out of touch, but what's important is what you do with those feelings, how you react.
If someone politely reminds you that some word is inflammatory and not well-liked among a given community it describes, then you can either take it politely or blow up about how the world is going crazy and complain about stuff being "woke". That said if someone goes thermonuclear on you because you used "deaf" instead of "hearing-impaired", yeah that person is clearly a dick, doesn't deserve your time of day (note: just re-purposing the example from earlier, obviously this is not something anyone in this thread has done)
It'd be good to be able to convey that to someone who does feel like there is a "language police" or that it is anxiety-inducing to engage with younger people. I should note though that when I've encountered this - among people being racist or homophobic - people tend to dig in, become stubborn and rant about "woke culture" or genders so clearly the problem cuts both ways (and I hope you can see I'm clearly not the type to fly off the handle at someone for something innocuous).
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey not all change is bad, that one in particular is just less ambiguous. Really wish we'd take the hint and do some language house keeping, maybe clean up the discrepancy between electrons and current.
> that one in particular is just less ambiguous. 1) Please show me an engineer who mistakes the meaning of the term "blacklist" in, say, an ACL system 2) The newspeak terms are no less ambiguous. Are the items on the list allowed exclusively or are they just granted special privilege like source IPs from which no authentication is required? Without context, which is provided by the surrounding system in any case, "bl…
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Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#615Earlier 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
It's amazing that some are seemingly convinced a conservative man came up with a problem that feminists (so-called "radfems") have highlighted for years. Goes to show how little attention many pay to women's issues.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
> now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue". Which is partly right, to be fair. It’s a fundamental human right issue about who can force things on your body. The consequences also affect whole families, not all men are arseholes who vanish when their girlfriend gets pregnant. Framing this as only women’s issue is part of a dang…
1. the embryo/fetus inside the mother's body is not the mother's body. 2. it is not the mother's body, but it's completely dependent on it to live. 3. parents have and have to have natural responsibility over their offspring. 4. the society establishment (both secular and religious) are there to protect society's norm. 5. not killing innocent humans is a social norm. 6. the embryo/fetus is a human. 7. saying that som…
I'm unsure if you're joking, so I'll bite: if 6 is true (a fetus is a human), then is a zygote a human? Can a human be a single cell? Of course not.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#617Earlier 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…
I sometimes feel this is some nefarious plan to reconstruct a new masculinity. It won't be as "toxic" as the old version, but we'll be back on top. I've heard "menstruators", "birthing persons", "chest feeding", "vulva havers". I've heard lots of debate about letting trans women compete. Debate about allowing trans women into women's toilets. Or arguing the sincerity of men who claim to identify as women as they are…
> No one is worried in the slightest about letting trans men compete in men's sport.
By and large for most disciplines, there's no separate men's leagues or men's competitions. So women and trans-men and everyone else is mostly already allowed to compete in men's sports.
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
> Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weaker players, thus advancing the idea of a Women's World Champion.[16] However, from the beginning, László was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect."[17] This put the Polgárs in conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation of the day, whose policy was for women to play in women-only tournaments. Polgár's older sister, Susan, first fought the bureaucracy by playing in men's tournaments and refusing to play in women's tournaments. In 1985, when she was a 15-year-old International Master, Susan said that it was due to this conflict that she had not been awarded the Grandmaster title despite having made the norm eleven times.[18]
> Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...
That one is interesting, because women's toilets are usually all cubicles, and men's toilets is the only place where you could actually see anything.. Btw, it's not just trans-men that get a free pass here, but cis-women also often go to men's toilets when the queue for the women's toilets is too long, and nobody bats an eyelid.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#618Not to have the last word.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#619My 11yo came home from school today: "Dad! We can't get rid of any of our Roald Dahl books. They're changing the words in them. My class talked about it and we all think it's stupid". A few months back, my 16yo was telling me about a class conversation about their futures, and what everyone wanted most was a stable relationship, a job they enjoyed and to be able to afford a modest house. It's reassuring that in a see…
> and what everyone wanted most was a stable relationship, a job they enjoyed and to be able to afford a modest house. > It's reassuring that in a seemingly insane world, the kids who are coming up seem have their heads screwed on straight. One might say that the reason is because this is seemingly becoming harder than ever in Western countries.
I was going to say just that. I don't recall people thinking like that when I was 16 because it was assumed that is what people did.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
The term latinx didn't come out of "rich educated people" - certainly a lot of educated folk have been pushing it in the last decade (self-identifying grad students and recent college grads, for instance) - but there's a weird sort of prejudice going on in assuming everything can only come out of "rich educated [non-latino, based on your use of "their" there] people" Some discussion here: https://www.latimes.com/opin…
Ok, two points: 1) anyone who studies in US university, is "rich educated" for South American standards 2) Quote from article bellow: > a queer Latina ... mostly from white, right-wing Latino men. > “When you’re a white Latino ... Black Latino ... transgender Latino, next to a queer Latino, next to an Indigenous Latino > understand the diversity of our community Those three paragraphs paint picture that "Latino" is s…
There's literally no one in the actual Latin American countries that call themselves Latinos outside the USA (and perhaps some other rich countries).
I would be called a Latino in the USA, being a Brazilian of brown skin. That amuses me as I have literally never thought of myself or my fellow Brazilians as Latinos... we're simply Brazilian (we may be region-specific, like carioca - from Rio, or Paulista, from Sao Paulo... but still Brazilian, obviously) and I am pretty sure Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Colombians and others are the same... just like white Americans do the same: are you ever a white person when presenting yourself to another American, or e.g. Texan, Californian or whatever??