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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

#631

Post by RobotToaster »

Lazare wrote: post #415
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…

My partner is disabled, and by chance and via support groups she is a member of, she has many friends annd acquaintences who are as well. And while it's by no means universal, she and all her disabled friends absolutely loathe the "people first language" currently in vogue (ie, "person with a disability" over "disabled"). And it's odd! Because while there are certainly disabled people who prefer one form over another…

Ironically it's the opposite in the autism community, the white Knights insist it should be "autistic people" for some reason.

None of this is going to change anyone's material conditions, it's just a distraction invented by well paid "diversity consultants".

At least the fad for "differently abled" seems to have died.

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

#632

Post by sva_ »

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…

I once had an injury in both of my legs after a long hike. It caused my legs to be so swollen that I had very limited mobility, but I could still walk - though it probably looked very awkward.

In school, children get taught that when someone looks disabled, you shouldn't look at them, because staring at them is some kind of discrimination or so. I couldn't disagree more.

When I had that injury, and was kind of crip-walking, people would intuitively stare at me for a second, then -very obviously- force themselves to look away.

The injury wasn't that bad and went away after a week or two. But the way people forced themselves to look away, was much worse. I can't imagine dealing with that every day.

I'd argue that the people who make up these kind of "rules" probably aren't themselves affected by it.

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

#633

Post by SyzygistSix »

messe wrote: post #524
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.

I recently had a comment on another site flagged by a bot for using ableist language when I used the world "insane". It was a first for me as well. Will go with "batshit" next time.

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

#634

Post by op00to »

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…

Using inclusive language never bothered me. Never saw a bug related to inclusive language, and I worked on software I am confident everyone on HN uses.

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

#635

Post by Version467 »

imgabe wrote: post #385
randomdata wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve taken lunch to school in paper bags that were literally brown Are you sure they weren't a certain shade of orange?

I'm no graphic designer or artist, they look brown to me. They still sell them at Walmart: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Self-Standing-Lunch-B...

I could be wrong, but I think the parent comment is just a reference to the fact that brown doesn't exist. There's no wavelength that our brains map to brown. Instead what we perceive as brown is just orange, but less bright. And wether we see it as brown or dark orange depends entirely on context.

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

#637

Post by prepend »

psyfi wrote: post #556
Lazare wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner is disabled, and by chance and via support groups she is a member of, she has many friends annd acquaintences who are as well. And while it's by no means universal, she and all her disabled friends absolutely loathe the "people first language" currently in vogue (ie, "person with a disability" over "disabled"). And it's odd! Because while there are certainly disabled people who prefer one form over another…

Even worse, some people will use "people of determination" despite being more vague and non-descriptive

Is this mean someone is determined or steadfast in their constitution?

I worked with someone who was really smart but annoyed me because his variable names were cartoon characters, like Tom,jerry,bugs, etc.

I asked him not to do this and he said that each variable was documented so it’s better to use an arbitrary label that never needs to change should the business change it’s name (ie if you called a variable division_names and the org decides to rename divisions to units). We argued over this and he never changed his variable names.

But now I get it. I’d rather just have some arbitrary label that means disabled and never have to change it as “prepend is foo” would stand the test of time while “prepend is disabled” might change to “pretend is of disability” might change to “prepend is not hindered by disability” to “prepend is a human first and valiantly overcomes a limitation in ability” to “prepend only has one arm” etc.

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

#638

Post by kenneth »

lynx23 wrote: post #412
recuter wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not self conscious at all my dude (I'm not one of those insensitive woke people who get off on making everybody feel like shit to try and elevate themselves at all costs), glad I made you chuckle. How do you consume movies? I didn't know that the ̶a̶c̶c̶u̶r̶s̶e̶d̶ "visually impaired" do that. Dope. Don't know why I'm surprised. I bet blind fury would watch movies somehow too. Also, you should obviously change your us…

Regarding how to "watch" movies: Its actually as simple as turning the TV on and listening to what comes out the speakers... In the 80s, movies were actually much more story-driven then today. Even if you missed something happening because you didnt see the visuals, you would get it typically a few seconds or minutes afterwards, because somebody was refering to the event and therefore uncovering the riddle. Something…

When I first got Disney+ because an ex-girlfriend wanted to watch Wanda, the app was misconfigured to have the audio description turned on. It's a pretty weird show, so it took me 3 episodes of being confused by the weirdness of the show to realize something was really off and it wasn't meant to be watched like that. Took me forever to find the setting to turn it off; and it got a bit more watchable after that.

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

#639

Post by imgabe »

Version467 wrote: post #635
imgabe wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no graphic designer or artist, they look brown to me. They still sell them at Walmart: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Self-Standing-Lunch-B...

I could be wrong, but I think the parent comment is just a reference to the fact that brown doesn't exist. There's no wavelength that our brains map to brown. Instead what we perceive as brown is just orange, but less bright. And wether we see it as brown or dark orange depends entirely on context.

Ah, well I learned something new today

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

#640

Post by yathaid »

b112 wrote: post #566
imoverclocked wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Character and intent is what matters. This. I recently ran up against a filter on Reddit where I used a phrase that I was completely unaware of. My account was flagged for hate speech. The comment had no ill-intent. The problem with language is that we want individual words to have inherent meaning but as people adopt phrases to identify a movement, those meanings get carried along for the ride. eg: until recently,…

"It's ok to be _____" but learned that it's actually a dark dog whistle thanks to Scott Adams. The fact that someone can be labeled something, because they use a phrase which is currently, out of the blue, a big deal? And you can only know if you obsessively read all sorts of popculture websites, or fluff news stories daily? That's very sad.

Sure. But you should do your research on the phrase and the polling company that pretends it is a straightforward question before going on a racist screed to get away from a racial group.
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