All too often the people calling for a certain change, often aggressively and with great judgement ...
Have never bothered to ask those they claim to fight for what they need or want.
Its a form of virtue signalling that needs to end.
Banning words won’t make the world more just
671–680 of 1001 posts
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are always exceptions and genocide is very obviously one. I was referring more to the socially constructed self inflicted battles society has been engaging in lately.
I was looking around for societal battles that were not socially constructed. But I guess I'm visually impaired in that respect. Maybe you can help me?
Got me ;)
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#673Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Identity politics is not unintentional. Those indoctrinated into it may be unaware but the intention is to divide us.
While partially true, what most fail to see is that identity politics is played by virtually everyone. It’s just “your” side is the right approach and “not really identity politics”.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, thanks for chiming in. I wonder if the best way to push back against language policing is to simply poll various groups, see which language they prefer, and publish the results. The deltas could be interesting as well, e.g. even if most blind people dislike the term "blind", it would still be interesting if they are more likely to prefer the term "blind" than a member of the general population. I think p…
Groups don't have homogeneous opinions on this stuff. The prime example these days being Latinx. If people aren't called what they prefer, as long as they weren't called a slur, a simple correction is fine. Or, if you're never going to see them again, just let it go.
The challenge is when there is no single term that doesn’t offend everyone.
So you can call a group “Latinx” and offend some and call a group “Latinos” and offend some and call a group “Latinos/Latinas” and offend some.
I want to offend the fewest people with my speech. I would like to use opinion polling to both offend fewest as well as signal that I’m working to offend the fewest.
What’s annoying and frustrating to me is when someone tells me “You must use term X because term Y offends.” Then I change it and someone else tells me “You must use term Y because term X offends.” And the worst part is the circular waste of time. I work in an organization that has a communication clearance process for the purpose of scientific accuracy and we spend a decent amount of time on this kind of editorial preference change/revert. Most isn’t even “offensive” words but stuff like Oxford comma, data are plural, etc.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, thanks for chiming in. I wonder if the best way to push back against language policing is to simply poll various groups, see which language they prefer, and publish the results. The deltas could be interesting as well, e.g. even if most blind people dislike the term "blind", it would still be interesting if they are more likely to prefer the term "blind" than a member of the general population. I think p…
Groups don't have homogeneous opinions on this stuff. The prime example these days being Latinx. If people aren't called what they prefer, as long as they weren't called a slur, a simple correction is fine. Or, if you're never going to see them again, just let it go.
From what I read about Latinx, a significant majority of that community seem to hate the term that has been applied to them (which doesn’t even make any linguistic sense in Spanish anyway). Seems to be a small minority pushing it.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem. It's a pretty big cognitive load though, to remember what everyone finds or doesn't find offensive. This is what bothers me about the recent obsession with pronouns - I have enough trouble remembering people's names; and now I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given perso…
We have externalized what used to be an internal issues
Offense is a you problem, not a me problem. We have abandoned the axiom of "sticks and stones" and replaced it with "words are violence" or even worse "silence is violence"
Today it no longer enough to be "tolerant" you have to actively affirm, support, and validate everything about everyone at all times and support their emotional state no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s a consequence of the well-intentioned, but foolish idea of “bias toward action” that doing something is good and not doing something is bad or complicit. When people see something bad-discrimination against disabled- they want to improve the situation but don’t know what to do. So they do something, anything without considering if the action is effective or if the best course is to do nothing. So making…
It's a superficial thing to complain about, because it's rare that isn't linked to action - from dropping kerbs, to adding lifts and ramps, to building special toilets for wheelchair users. It's questionable how many of these things would have happened if the language wasn't made memorable. Of course it irritates people who would prefer not to think about these things - because it's supposed to. There's actually far…
In my experience it isn’t rare at all. In work I see this a lot where an error is ambiguous and changes make it worse. I see “bias toward action” frequently in work presentations and whatnot.
For debugging it’s not so much to change nothing, but to investigate and figure out what to change rather than change things without an understanding of the intended impact of the change.
Also, it’s not that I don’t think about these things. It’s that I think and determine the best course of action is no action. That gets conflated with not thinking about these things because on the outside it’s hard to differentiate those that thought and care and think to do nothing vs those that are oblivious vs those that choose not to think about this.
In this example, I think the best course is to not include disabled in the list. I want to include disabled people, but I think changing language in this way is not valuable.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#678What 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…
Isn't there is an actual difference between blind and visually impaired tho? The way I understood it blind people are a subset of visually impaired people, but not all visually impaired people are blind in a medical sense. So the reasoning behind such language might be to include people who are not technically blind, but still require similar consideration, assistence, infrastructure and so on. Language is odd here.…
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Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#679Lol seems like a reductio ad absurdum long game on trying to make people be nice to each other. I might use the 'wrong' word or an offensive one but I sure as hell don't mean it to be and that is easy to spot.
Interestingly the people who push these crazy (lol) agendas are normally nowhere near the intended 'offendees' of the terminology.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#680What 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…
Recently I came across a discussion on Twitter where a selection of scientists were arguing that the long-used term "blind peer review" (i.e. where the authors do not know the identities of the reviewers, and vice versa) could be construed as able-ist and should be referred to as "anonymous peer review". I'm all in favour of using inclusive language, but at the time this discussion struck me as odd because I've never connected the definition of "blind" in "blind peer review" to the disability, although its obvious that the link exists from a linguistic standpoint. What are your thoughts on such discussions? I do believe that none of those arguing for the change were themselves blind.