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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

#911

Post by usrbinbash »

op00to wrote: post #634
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.

Please tell me, what exactly makes this language "inclusive"? Whos lives got measurably better because of it, and in what way? What specific instances of racism were avoided because of it? Which bad political decisions that would have been reverted because of it?

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

#912

Post by strix_varius »

cutemonster wrote: post #569
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Identity politics is not unintentional. Those indoctrinated into it may be unaware but the intention is to divide us.

I think that's not the only reason, sometimes not a reason at all. Instead, 1, sometimes, someone is looking to make a career, or get a job, make money. And then, in identity politics, they might see an opportunity. Career, status, money then being a goal, and any division a side effect. And, 2, I'm not saying that identity politics is or would always be bad or anything like that. So many unfairness in the world, to…

Exactly. The average DEI director salary is $200k:

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/diversity-e...

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

#913

Post by rullelito »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #874
lumb63 wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is the motivation behind “BIPOC” is to exclude Asians, who are rarely considered as minorities due to their economic and academic success.

They're also the victim of harassment and hate by primarily other minorities, which makes for an uncomfortable fact.

You're not suppose to say this out loud!

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

#914

Post by strix_varius »

jmull wrote: post #825

I hope people realize The Atlantic is baiting us to outrage. For the clicks, of course. No question, these language guides are pretty absurd (at least to someone my age) and have very doubtful moral value... but these are internal guides, for their own communications. It's the Sierra Club's job to figure that out what language their donors/members (potential or current) want to hear. I have no idea if they are gettin…

I found the article interesting and timely.

A few years ago I quit a job at a large tech company after spending most of a year sanitizing text documents to use politically correct language. This isn't marginal.

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

#915

Post by strix_varius »

vannevar wrote: post #849

While I think a lot of these efforts are over-zealous, so is the response overblown. Take one example, the term felon . The San Francisco Board of Supervisors apparently recommended using the term "justice-involved person" instead. In response, the author writes: "When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegiti…

Uh what?

A person who has parented children is a parent.

A person who has won a championship is a champion.

A person who has graduated is a graduate.

A person who has been convicted of a felony is a felon.

The response to attempts to dismantle obvious and useful language constructs seems perfectly valid.

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

#916

Post by Izkata »

imoverclocked wrote: post #445
Sunspark wrote: post #360

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,…

> eg: until recently, I would have just curiously nodded along to the phrase "It's ok to be _____" but learned that it's actually a dark dog whistle thanks to Scott Adams.

It was a troll campaign created on 4chan to trick leftists into reflexively saying "it's not okay to be ____". Anything darker ascribed to it came later, from people who didn't understand the purpose.

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

#917

Post by Izkata »

sanderjd wrote: post #63
SubiculumCode wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“lived experience” was generally first used to differentiate between a person saying “I have experience with x issue” who could be saying “I’ve studied it; I’ve worked with the population” but “lived experience” makes it specific to being an individual’s own life.

It's still used that way. I'm always confused why people criticize this one in particular. The distinction makes perfect sense. There's an enormous amount of stuff that I've read a bunch about or watched a lot of media about or talked about with people, but is nonetheless outside my lived experience.

Because it's now also used to deflect and ignore the research, like the experience of one person is more important than anything else.

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

#918

Post by kelseyfrog »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #807
docmars wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention, the amount of violence committed by members of these outrage groups against whoever stands in their way - primarily towards the "offending" group or class they're prejudiced against, particularly whites, males, and straight sexual orientation. Worse, this violence often goes unaccounted for with impunity, without penalty, because people are terrified of the consequences of criticizing these groups, wh…

I don't think it makes sense to argue against the logic of identity politics by actively identifying as a victim, that only reproduces the very logic you are critiquing, since it is they who also view themselves as victims and who seek retribution for perceived violence against them as an identity group. This is the logic of Nazism at its core, and when you use it to defend traditional values it becomes even more bla…

It sounds like you're saying, "At least with fascism people are united against a common enemy," but I must be reading that wrong.

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

#919

Post by DiscourseFan »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #918
DiscourseFan wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it makes sense to argue against the logic of identity politics by actively identifying as a victim, that only reproduces the very logic you are critiquing, since it is they who also view themselves as victims and who seek retribution for perceived violence against them as an identity group. This is the logic of Nazism at its core, and when you use it to defend traditional values it becomes even more bla…

It sounds like you're saying, "At least with fascism people are united against a common enemy," but I must be reading that wrong.

I guess you could say that, it leaves room for resistance. And its become so intolerable to the vast majority of people that almost nobody seriously considers adopting it as a political system. Meanwhile, childhood suicide rates might be sky-rocketing, there might be vast sexual dissatisfaction and income inequality, not to mention the degradation of the natural world itself, but people will still say its the "best system we have", sounding like a prisoner who has given up on getting out. I don't think the future is some authoritarian system that they have in China, its basically the same over there (if not worse), but why have we given up on building a better society? The spread of Nihlism disgusts me.

I will admit aging population might be contributing to these problems, but at least the US is not projected to lose any population in the next 30 years because of immigration. For the nation states in the world, however...well, there isn't going to be much "nation" left in them if they want to survive the next few decades.

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

#920

Post by msla »

skissane wrote: post #891
msla wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar story: When I was a child, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. This is now malady non grata: For one thing, it's been folded into autism spectrum disorder, the DSM-5 being more on the lumper end of things than previous DSMs were, and, for another, it has a checkered history, with Hans Asperger using his position as a doctor in Vienna during the Second World War to choose which children were sav…

> Later still, the very word "Autism" seems to have faded out of polite speech, with people like me being referred to as "on the spectrum" with no explicit mention of which spectrum It is terribly ignorant, because people who use "spectrum" as an alias for autism/ASD don't know that psychiatry/psychology contains many other "spectrums" – the schizophrenia spectrum, the obsessive-compulsive spectrum, the bipolar spect…

> What if, one day, people look back on ASD/autism/Asperger's/etc just as we now look back on hysteria, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, the Ptolemaic model, the steady-state universe, etc, etc, etc?

None of that makes sense, in that new ideas about how the world works can't change the results of old experiments. That means I'll always be me, I'll always have been me, and part of that involves dealing with things that are, apparently, significantly different from what other people deal with. I am different from other people, regardless of what name is eventually hung on that, and just saying that name can't be "Autism" for some reason or another isn't changing the important part.

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