On a related note, I feel certain that mandating new words (or capitalization of existing words) does not make the world more just or the lives of its inhabitants more harmonious.
Banning words won’t make the world more just
621–630 of 1001 posts
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#622Whaaaat? 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…
As a non-American, the dumbest change that affects me daily, is the renaming of the master branch. Master means teacher in romance languages and its variations are part of daily usage. In git there's no "slave" part so it always meant "main" and not "owner" It affects me daily because "look on master" became "look on the main branch" for no advantage to absolutely anyone.
The strangest thing about the git branch controversy is that "master" was clearly used in a master/copy sense, just like you used to have a master music record that was then copied, but at the same time, basically every embedded communication protocol and many distributed computing systems still use terms like "bus master" and straight up "master-slave" configuration.
Sure, for many protocols it's a very accurate description, but if we're going to try and remove such language from tech, why not start with the places where the words actually mean the same thing, not just happen to be homographs.
(I do support the master-main change in git for other reasons tho: it's much easier to translate and more natural to say. "Master record" is a term that never got translated into many languages, or at least not in a way that still makes sense for git)
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#623Is this going anywhere outside the US? The "pronouns" thing went nowhere in France. It was considered damaging to the French language. > The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. Also, the shift from moron to mentally defective to retarded to whatever. This is such a sideshow. First, conservatism lost its way. Then liberalism lost its way. If o…
How about mentality retarded -> special so that now "special" is the cruelest taunt on the schoolyard? As for "defund the police" I think I'm the only one who remembers the Reaganite "defund the left" slogan https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/11/opinion/defund-the-left.h... which "defund the police" seems to be modeled after. Thatcherism (the British strain of Reaganism that was just a bit meaner) became so ingrained th…
"Defund Planned Parenthood" has been a Republican rallying cry for abolishing PP for almost two decades and is but one of many "Defund" bills they've introduced going back years:
• Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act (2023)
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2023
• Defund Cities that Defund the Police Act of 2021
• Defund Federal Vaccine Mandates Act (2021)
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2021
• Defund Davos Act (2022)
• Defund Putin Act (2022)
• Defund the Ministry of Truth Act of 2022
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act (2021)
• Defund de Blasio’s Injection Sites Act of 2021
• Defunding Abortion Transportation Act (2022)
• Defund the People’s Liberation Army Act
• Defund the Wuhan Institute of Virology Act
• Defund Cities that Defund the Police Act of 2020
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2019
• Defund Executive Orders that Suppress Free Speech Act
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2019
• Defunding United Nations Act of 2017
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2018
• Defunding the Corrupt and Incompetent United Nations Act (2017)
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2017
• Defund the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Program Act of 2015
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015
• Defund Amnesty Act of 2015
• Defund Obamacare Act of 2013
• Defund United States Assistance to Pakistan Act of 2011
• Defund Libya Act (2011)
• Defund the Individual Mandate Act (2011)
• Defund the Crooks Act (2010)
• Defund ACORN Act (2010)
All of these introduced by Republicans.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#624Earlier 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…
>"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. I'm supposing some people might be more anxious about it than others, and in different contexts. If you see a lot of stuff in the news about people saying things you might have said and getting hounded for it that might make you super anxious - you don't know the etiquette any…
Yeah that's something where you'd hope people could step back and realise that the news is often sensationalised and seeks out salacious stories of people being "cancelled" because they get people riled up and engaged. I still think that if you're open-minded, conscientious and not looking for conflict you can navigate a conversation with even the most extremely over-sensitive of people without having any issues.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#625The pendulum is swinging back because equity language censors took this way way too far. People-first language ("enslaved people" not "slaves") makes complete sense to me, but making a big fuss about how common English idioms like being "blind to a problem" is somehow offensive is going to earn you nothing but eyerolls from nearly everyone. Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep…
> Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep diving on etymology to discover the racist origins. That one in particular, I was almost offended when I learnt during a DEI training that it could be construed as insensitive/racist of me to use that idiom. English is not my native language, and is not an official language of my country. I work for a local branch of a large US tech compan…
I briefly worked for Facebook in Singapore. I felt a similar disconnect with their concern about African-Americans. (I think it might have been 'black history month' or perhaps the 'black lives matter' riots were ongoing. I can't remember.)
Singapore has its own problems and groups of people that aren't doing so well. A focus on African-Americans felt extremely tone-deaf to me. Almost like it was designed to mock the whole DEI enterprise.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
Web accessibility is indeed a very important thing for people like me. I am aware we are a very small minority with rather special needs in this regard, but believe me, investing in accessibility and therefore allowing people with visual and motor disabilities to interact with the digital world can have unexpectedly wonderful consequences for those benefiting from it. It is not often that I manage to pull tech people…
I'm only colour-blind, but I am too, benefitting from accessibility work meant primarily for blind people. And so do the elderly. Which will be all of us in the future (except those who plan to live fast and die young). Humanity is getting older and older on average, too.
Thats right. My girlfriend works for an assistive technology reseller. A growing number of their customers are elderly people who end up using technologies designed for the blind to keep on communicating. iOS with VoiceOver comes to mind. This was designed for the blind. But a determined elderly person whoes vision has deteriorated enough can also use it to avoid being cut off from everything.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd say 9 is more fun to pick apart. Looks like there's only two kinds of religions in the world, those that worship the Right Deity and those that worship Moloch.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me that one of the issues is that the (more extreme) woke culture has put the entire burden of communication on the speakers rather than the listeners. Is not enough that you intend to offend, or that you say something that offends someone, is whether something that you say could possibly offend someone, even if you didn't have the slightest intentions. On the other say the listeners are free to interpret…
I personally believe that 2 things have greatly affected P2P communications. Anonymity and attempting to hold meaningful conversation strictly through text. When we communicate with text we cut off non-verbal communications that are a major source of interpreting the intent of the speaker and the receptiveness of the listener. In-person conversations are constantly adjusting what and how things are said depending on…
Not even anonymity. I've seen people posting insane shit on social networks using their real names.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#629What 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…
I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending. Minorities don't need white Knights to save them, neither do the disabled. If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem. But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide…
I have been told in no uncertain terms that the word “minority” is offensive, as it has come to have pejorative use. No alternative term was suggested, rather that one should refer to specific groups of people with their specific terms, and never generalise.
Additionally, “white knight” I have also been told off for, for the reasons you might expect.
In both of these cases (actually, almost every case I can think of) my language was being policed by, um, materially unencumbered birthgivers of reduced melanin.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#630Can we just all start operating from the perspective that we're not trying to offend each other? Do away with all these rules that serve no purpose other than to slot each other into buckets of enlightened and evil. It's a sign that we have things way too good.
>It's a sign that we have things way too good.
That is not the case though.