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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

#651

Post by usrbinbash »

op00to wrote: post #480
usrbinbash wrote: post #349

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

#652

Post by rullelito »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #627
lumb63 wrote: post #574

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

#653

Post by strix_varius »

jmull wrote: post #602

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

#654

Post by strix_varius »

vannevar wrote: post #613

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

#655

Post by Izkata »

imoverclocked wrote: post #346
Sunspark wrote: post #287

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

#656

Post by kelseyfrog »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #591
docmars wrote: post #559

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

#657

Post by msla »

skissane wrote: post #636
msla wrote: post #459

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.

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

#658

Post by msla »

faeriechangling wrote: post #640
msla wrote: post #459

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…

Autism is an insult, it’s a shortened version of “autism spectrum disorder”, disorder is intrinsically an insulting word, and the diagnostic criteria describes variations in human behaviour as dysfunctions and so on. The increased use of “autism” as an insult and people avoiding it is because it is an insult and always was from its conception. That is why doctors regularly try and plot to screen people’s DNA for this…

> Autism is an insult, it’s a shortened version of “autism spectrum disorder”, disorder is intrinsically an insulting word, and the diagnostic criteria describes variations in human behaviour as dysfunctions and so on.

No, people use "Autism" as an insult because they think it's a way to say "retarded" which won't get them slapped down.

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

#659

Post by jaclaz »

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #502
Lazare wrote: post #320

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…

Slightly related: in German, a strange thing happened at the end of the last century. Disabled people used to be called "behindert" (might be translated as "impeded" or "hindered"). I think the word was a good choice, because it took the blame away from people, and just described that they had to overcome bigger obstacles because of their situation. In the eighties or nineties, people started to use the term as a slu…

The "unworthy" meaning has been lost over time in Latin derived languages, the Italian "invalido" is (was) an official word to mean someone that for any reason was not fit for work, typically, but not only, soldiers wounded in the war and workers wounded on the job (amputees).

It was also common (with no negative connotation whatever) to extend the term to people with mobility issues, to blind people, etc.

It has been replaced first by "disabile" (disabled) and later with the more politically correct "diversamente abile" (differently able) which is (IMHO) really terrible.

The latest euphemism is "persona con disabilità" (person with disability) which makes even less sense.

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

#660

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

the_snooze wrote: post #17

>When Latinx began to be used in advanced milieus, a poll found that a large majority of Latinos and Hispanics continued to go by the familiar terms and hadn’t heard of the newly coined, nearly unpronounceable one. There's also a practical case: these terms make you sound like a damn space alien. Unless your audience already agrees completely with you, you lose credibility by using this language. Posturing for your o…

People argue about how much of this comes from the internet/twitter; in the case of latinx it's clearly an internet phenomenon. The word is entirely unpronounceable, it could only have developed in writing.
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