Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Banning words won’t make the world more just

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 1001 posts

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

#651

Post by somewhereoutth »

eru wrote: post #617
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 weake…

Regarding toilets, it is because women's toilets have also traditionally served as a 'safe space' (i.e. without men). It is somewhere they can go without being subject to (for example) what is colloquially termed the 'male gaze'. Hence the disquiet over trans-women using such spaces, and the lack of disquiet over the reverse.

Of course in a fully enlightened society arguably women should not need such safe spaces, but I'm not sure we are quite there yet.

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

#652

Post by SyzygistSix »

agnos wrote: post #118
scarmig wrote: post #9

The semantic turn of the Left is one of the worst signs of intellectual decay. There's approximately zero evidence that linguistic changes influence thought: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is rejected by linguists except perhaps in some very narrow situations. The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. And none of them are better or worse than the o…

From the article: The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real. Though I wonder if this diagnosis is actually too optimistic, in that…

This what people do to distract from the fact that they don't want to give up housing as a lucrative investment if it means more housing, as that would infringe upon their lifestyle.

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

#653

Post by cornholio »

eru wrote: post #608
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…

Of course, 'disabled' is just the euphemism you grew up with, so it feels neutral enough. The euphemism treadmill has a long history. At some point cripple used to be the neutral term for many kinds of disabled. It's long been deemed offensive. Similar with idiot or retard. Give it a few decades, and all of the 'people first language' will perhaps turn into neutral and then offensive, too. (I am writing the above dis…

The definitive resource on the euphemism treadmill, by a member of a previous generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc

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

#654

Post by vaxintar »

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…

People of Color

Of color black, of color brown, etc

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

#655

Post by [deleted] »

blahblah1234567 wrote: post #172
scarmig wrote: post #9

The semantic turn of the Left is one of the worst signs of intellectual decay. There's approximately zero evidence that linguistic changes influence thought: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is rejected by linguists except perhaps in some very narrow situations. The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. And none of them are better or worse than the o…

I welcome "The semantic turn of the Left". It shows the emperor has no clothes. By increasing the silliness, more and more people observe "Wow these folks are ignorant lunatics, unaware that they're driving the perception of themselves as immature, ignorant hypocrites whose identity is built upon political trends."

[deleted]

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

#656

Post by belorn »

JenrHywy wrote: post #286
tastysandwich wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" Calling my wife a "birthing person" just made her feel like some gross vessel for having a baby. We purposefully chose providers that didn't use that language. "Chestfeeding" is another one that's cropping up and makes zero sense. Men have breasts, so breastfeeding is already gender-neutral. But it's seen as female-centric so out th…

> 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…

Sporting aspirations at the elite level is generally an illusion unless the parents are also at elite level. Last time I looked at studies, the average sport is around 75-99% determined by genetics when it comes to the top elite in those sports. World champions has to first win the genetic lottery, and then do the hard work to even have a chance to win. This is why its fairly common to see top elite sport players having parents, siblings or children that is also at similar elite level.

The big difference with gender is that we can easily those genetics. It is much harder to look at two women or two men and measure their blood oxygen maximums. It is generally trivial to get an idea of blood oxygen maximum if one person is a man and the other is a woman.

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

#657

Post by marmee »

hutzlibu wrote: post #649
marmee wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jews in WW2 needed the Allies to bomb Auschwitz, they did not need Churchill to stop using the word Jew because it is offensive. It is not similar, unless if you have the preconceived notion that 'language is action'

"Jews in WW2 needed the Allies to bomb Auschwitz" I don't really think, the jews in the camp, would have welcomed to be bombed, on top of the daily routine. Can you elaborate how being blown to pieces would have helped anyone, except maybe a lucky person used the chaos to escape (to where exactly)? Also I did not say anything about language equals action and were just speaking in broad terms about helping minorities.…

Auschwitz was effectively a factory of death. Bombing the gas chambers, crematorium, rail lines might have helped.

About Jew: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/05/jew-not-sl...

Also forgive me if I have assumed because of the context that you argued through analogy for protecting minorities of harmful language, my bad

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

#658

Post by fleddr »

We should spend less time on the crazy outcomes of these institutes and more time on why they can even exist in the first place. They are somehow funded yet not accountable to anyone.

Nobody asked for this, it doesn't help anyone, and it cannot survive the most basic scrutiny of the public or market. And yet it exists and even grows. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with outcomes, the underlying mechanism should be explored.

My unscientific take on it is that it is not a matter of real belief, instead a matter of fear. Case in point, businesses do not really care about things like DEI, but a series of impactful lawsuits has scared them senseless. Hence they dress up the optics of DEI to stay out of trouble.

Similarly, universities are under pressure to appear "on the right side of history" by aggressive student activists, fueled by the flames of BLM, MeToo, whichever other social justice outrage. Hence, they dress up an extensive administration and force it upon all staff as part of their performance review: demonstrate the 3 ways in which you contributed to the cause this year. It doesn't matter if you believe in any of it, just do it regardless. Since none is equipped to do anything actually useful (livable wages, accessible healthcare and housing, etc) the next best thing is some imagined micro aggression.

A factory of bullshit and optics driven by fear.

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

#660

Post by pibechorro »

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…

It is. Similarly Latinx is hated by 99.99% of latinos, yet here we are.
Post reply on HN