171–180 of 279 posts
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What's pathetic is thinking that using inclusive language is anything but pathetic.
You could write a manual for national socialism. I bet you think I'm talking about socialism.
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master has no root in slavery. to put it in another way: if master has to be removed because of slavery in america, then we should also remove the words chain, boat and trade.
Comically terrible examples)reasoning. You could have just used "pussy" as the example and done much better.
I am able to connect chains to slavery, but pussy?
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the word "master" predates american slavery (apparently the only slavery people care about) blacklist predates black people being enslaved in America. It's PC war on words that distorted their original meaning.
The word fa***t predates it’s use as a slur for homosexuals, but I don’t think anybody reasonable would argue that it’s not commonly perceived as an offensive term. These are obviously different degrees of subjective “offensiveness”, but my point is that people don’t sit down and work out the etymology before deciding if something makes them feel bad.
A "glass masters of Murano" makes beautiful art with glass, because he's a master in that craft.
Doesn't matter if the word has been distorted to mean something bad for a brief period of human history.
Slave is the offending word, not master.
We should have master branch or master database, but secondary branch and secondary database, instead of "slave" ones.
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the word "master" predates american slavery (apparently the only slavery people care about) blacklist predates black people being enslaved in America. It's PC war on words that distorted their original meaning.
The word fa***t predates it’s use as a slur for homosexuals, but I don’t think anybody reasonable would argue that it’s not commonly perceived as an offensive term. These are obviously different degrees of subjective “offensiveness”, but my point is that people don’t sit down and work out the etymology before deciding if something makes them feel bad.
And given the stuff that was between us, i don't get why i should let other people tell us whether we should be offended by that word or not.
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> I suspect employees want their work to make them feel good in terms of alignment with their bedrock principles. if it makes you feel good to play with words I am not sure if thats a good energy expenditure for your activism. it feels like a cheap way to value signal instead of doing something actually meaningful.
Words have meaning and power. How they are used literally changes the discourse. Your participation in this discussion is proof that the example under consideration has impact well beyond "playing with words."
The idea that we're going to use words but ignore context and intent is self-defeating. It weakens the powers of human communication. It's as if to say: "Words speak louder than action."
That's sounds like a quote for 1984.
> "Master Password" renamed to "Primary Password" How does the term "Primary Password" describe the password which enables access to the list of credentials better than "Master Password"? Are they just entertained by the alliteration?
Master/Slave nomenclature is considered "problematic language" (because it harks back to slavery), and thus often replaced with more PC language these days. My organization had a whole "fix this nomenclature throughout the whole codebase" week (things like "black-/whitelist, master/slave, ....)
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It is amusing we glorify words like Pirate and Ninja. Yet other words become vilified so we ban them.
Which in this case is doubly ironic, because pirates and buccaneers were exactly the group that had kept the slave trade alive even after it was officially banned in many places, if my limited knowledge on the Atlantic slave trade is correct.
By most estimates there are more slaves today than in any other point in history and it's almost entire in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Instead of helping those people, putting sanctions on the countries and companies turning a blind eye on slavery, or even acknowledging that slavery is not history but an ongoing condition - the West spins its wheels changing language in highly unrelated fields.
The absurdity of it all is something out of Camus.
> "Master Password" renamed to "Primary Password" How does the term "Primary Password" describe the password which enables access to the list of credentials better than "Master Password"? Are they just entertained by the alliteration?
I think language matters, and de-normalizing language with a root in slavery is a good idea.
> "Master Password" renamed to "Primary Password" How does the term "Primary Password" describe the password which enables access to the list of credentials better than "Master Password"? Are they just entertained by the alliteration?
I wish I could believe that a single Black person's life across all of time and space will improve because of this change.
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Alternative perspective on exactly the same data: This kind of developer-driven change does not wind me up, because developers working on products should be able to reflect on how those products are part of society and if they choose to make changes in their branding, presentation, or diction, they should be able to do so. Mozilla has a pretty rich tradition of employee activism, as we all observed after the Eich deb…
> I suspect employees want their work to make them feel good in terms of alignment with their bedrock principles. if it makes you feel good to play with words I am not sure if thats a good energy expenditure for your activism. it feels like a cheap way to value signal instead of doing something actually meaningful.
Like, I suspect some of the employees involved in this change also volunteer with organizations, they also donate money to organizations, they also make other changes in their personal life, right? Maybe not all of them. Maybe some of them wake up and think "Social justice is really important to me so I'm going to do an empty virtue signal and then nothing else, wow I'm great". Even if that were true it's not super obvious what the concern is here -- okay, so maybe someone involved in this change could be a better person and could be using their energy more effectively? And? Surely there's a better use of my energy and yours than replying to a patchnotes post on hacker news to get mad about a one word change in a changelog of an email client, and yet here we are.
About half of my post was talking about how symbolic things, while not a substitute for concrete things, are part of making changes, and how often times tackling problems with a combination of the most urgent issues and the easiest to fix issues is normal, so it's weird that the reply would be "Symbolic things just substitute for concrete things and this issue is easy, not urgent". Like, yes, I've already considered your perspective here, that's why I replied to begin with?