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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

#861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you attributing a ranking to an initialism?

The ranking is the point of the initialism. Black and indigenous people were already included in the blanket term "people of color," so why introduce BIPOC if not to highlight those groups specifically?

Exactly--and the Sierra Club guide discloses that exact motivation in the part I quoted above.

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

#862

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…

Yeah, it could have been IBPOC.

Also, since we are exposing the silliness of all of this -- aren't "black" and "poc" discriminatory to "people who are experiencing albinism" ?

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

#863

In my life, I have been deaf, hearing impaired, hard of hearing, hearing challenged. I suppose at some point I will be acoustically disadvantaged. You know what? At the end of the day, I'm still deaf. It's true. I have limitations that others take for granted. If I can't see someone speaking or if I'm out of batteries, we aren't going to be communicating well. That's pretty deaf. I won't be offended, it's just realit…

> 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,…

Reddit is a cesspool.

If I had time and money to waste, I'd do reddit a spiteful favor and write a WokeBot that calls out every instance of non-equity language. Maybe it even auto-submits hate speech reports for significant transgressions.

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

#864
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 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 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.

I don't know how "unintentional" it is, but it sure is "discrimination" and "condescending." It's like how liberal whites dumb down their speech when talkign to black people: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/30/white-liber....

The dynamic is entirely consistent with them thinking about themselves as shepherding sheep. It's why they don't really care that nobody likes "Latinx." Who care what the sheep want to call themselves? It's also why they don't care whether the people they platform as icons of minority groups (Ilhan Omar, etc.) are representative of those groups or not. It's not coalition politics with give-and-take and compromise. It's a parent/child relationship.

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

#865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it highly unlikely that Scott Adams is a "dark dog whistle" kinda guy. At best the most I'd believe would be that "some people who Scott Adams pissed off now like to say that when he says X he actually means Y".

If you listen to the video of what Scott Adams says, he's quite explicit about it. It doesn't seem like a plausible misspeak. He didn't merely say "It's okay to be white" in an ambiguous context (plausibly not related to the 4chan propaganda campaign.) He said that because some poll claims whatever% of black people disagree with the phrase, that black people are a hate group, that white people should stay away from t…

Previously, Scot Adams "identified as a black person because he wanted to be on the winning team".

And then he decided that 'its OK to be white' was perfectly fine and re-identified as white, and that black people hate white people, and called them a hate group that should be stayed as far away as possible.

The only good out of that whole situation is that Scott Adams is a trashy racist, and anybody who likes him is also a trashy racist.

The real insidious racists are the ones who know how to use diplomacy, and affect organizations with "culture fit" (aka: not white enough), and other types of hard-to-identify racism.

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

#866
post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I can't explain the downvotes. Visit https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous.html for a chronicle of some of the people who saved some of my people.

"I can't explain the downvotes"

I forgot it is friday and "white Knight" is a trigger word for some.

So when there's a headline that says:

"Banning words won’t make the world more just"

and then I say "it depends" to a subpoint with white knight, then I seem to represent the woke enemy to them, who wants to dictate what words they are allowed to use (even though I am actually very pro free speech).

And as a german regarding the righteous and why there were so few of them:

I know the mindset from my grandparents and it was/is one of having a very strong taboo of doing anything against the state, or just thinking about it. They were not nazis and knew what the state was doing was wrong even though they didn't know the details. But they kept their head as low as possible, as most did. And marched in line, if ordered so. So they share their responsibility.

I would like to think, that I would have acted different, but would I? I would have been a different person, being born into that time and culture.

So it is also a tough question of what I personally feel about it. Should I feel personally sorry about industrial mass murdering done by "my kind"?

Well, I don't really feel connected to those germans as a whole at all.

But I do feel connected to my grandparents, so sorry on their behalf, that my family didn't do anything to my knowledge, to help your people. (And personally I do my best to keep the local nazis in check today)

edit: and those words still feel empty. But I don't find better words.

Because the holocaust was just outstanding industrial mass murder with the goal to wipe out a whole race. What can you say about it? Certainly not, what a member of the new german right said: "The german history is a great one and the holocaust was just a litle dirt on it"

So back on topic, I think this person should have the right to say this. Because everyone else now knows what those people (who are all officially against nazis) are really standing for.

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

#867
post #840

Earlier 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…

I can't speak towards how other people, particularly minorities or the disabled think, but, as a woman, I hate the unintentional "othering" of people trying to do the right thing. I am typically the only woman at work, and people will often correct others who use terms like "guys" with statements like "guys or girls". I understand that they are doing it with good intentions and don't get angry, but to me it just serv…

As a "minority" I completely agree with you. IMO, the White Knights target the "others" for an opportunity to virtue signal. It got old after the first time it happened.

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

#868
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 agree with what you are saying, but I also have my own comments relating to such things.

What I had seen is that these use of banning words and using different words, mostly just makes it more difficult to communicate properly, rather than actually helping anyone. (Occasionally some specific change is helpful in some contexts, but often it just makes it worse.)

I think that all of these changes are rather excessive. Sometimes they do make an improvement, but often they don't, and may make it worse. Sometimes it is an improvement in some contexts, but it should not be applied to contexts in which it is inappropriate.

I also don't like such words like "visually challenged", etc. It is better to use words such as "blind", although it can depend on the context. Sometimes "unable to see" might be more appropriate (since, just because you are unable to see something does not necessarily mean that you are blind; e.g. maybe you are looking at something else at the time, or your eyes are closed, etc).

"Disabled" is OK (using words such as "people with disabilities" or "differently-abled" or "people living with disabilities" or whatever, does not help), but usually it is better to specify the specific disability (e.g. "blind" or "deaf"), which is usually much more helpful than writing "disabled". (Although, in some contexts, it may be sensible to write "disabled", because it isn't about a specific kind of disabilities. Even in some cases, "differently-abled" may be appropriate, possibly.)

Accessibility features can be helpful whether or not you are blind, deaf, or other kind of disabilities. For this reason, it is helpful to not restrict their usefulness or to claim that they are only good if you are disabled in this way. (For example, many people can use captions on TV even if you are not deaf, although they are also useful if you are deaf, which should not be disregarded.) I think that many kinds of features can be useful whether or not you are blind/deaf/etc, if the system is well-designed.

In some cases, there just aren't any good words to describe some unusual situations clearly, though.

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

#869
post #581

Earlier 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…

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…

Hey man, what software do you recommend for screen reading? I'm trying to test my websites on accessibility and I've tried JAWS and NVDA so far (while using Lynx to navigate it) but found them a bit confusing. I'm not sure how one would use them in practice to navigate a site like Hacker news, which is relatively simple.

Do you use something else entirely?

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

#870
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact same dynamic that happens with comedy. When a comedian offends a group, it's typically not people from that group who complain - it's third parties who step in to represent that group. IMO the purpose of language changing is not to improve the world; instead, it's to give the feeling of changing the world without putting any real effort. Fun (in a sad way) fact: a friend of mine collaborates with an…

A single person shouldn't be able to be diverse on their own! That's a property of groups. You can try to define a "default person" and then say you want each individual to differ from that in your favourite characteristics, but that's a different game and provides none of the benefits of actual diversity.

> A single person shouldn't be able to be diverse on their own!

Agreed, but I've seen it used like this more than once, and it's both hilarious and unintentionally offensive.

A diverse group -- which makes more sense -- means something inoffensive: that the people in that group are different from each other, representing there's variety within the group according to some parameter (say, skin color).

A "diverse" person as used in PC language is... exactly what? Someone with "diverse ethnicity" (seen this used!) is someone who what? Was this person the offspring of an orgy of people with different skin colors?

Oooh.. I get it, a "diverse" person is someone who is not white, meaning the standard/normal skin color is white, and being "diverse" is to be "other than white", which is of course abnormal, because being white is what's normal. And people saying "diverse" don't even notice the irony of this!

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