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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

#441

Post by mihaaly »

lynx23 wrote: 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…

Apparently people wanted to intensionally offend people so much the traditional swear words or offenses were not enogh so used anything they thought could hurt - disability or mere difference in the shade of the skin - that forgot the original meaning of the words (raising childs learned the offensive meaning first?).

People need to stop being intensionally offensive instead of using then banning more and more words doing that. The words are the symptom not the cause.

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

#442

Post by recuter »

ookblah wrote: post #433
lynx23 wrote: 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 think it all starts from a good place. Would you rather people just using words "carelessly" without regard to how you might feel? It's questioning the assumption that the word used is fine throughout history. I don't think there is anything nefarious about it, just that "people" always co-opt the motives in the end and make it muddled for their own benefit. Overthinking it I guess. I know it when I see it, but it'…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_road_to_hell_is_paved_with...

> It's questioning the assumption that the word used is fine throughout history.

Bullshit. It forbids questioning of the questioning. That is all it is really about.

> "people" always co-opt the motives in the end and make it muddled for their own benefit

At least you can concede that point. Which is an enormously important point and more than enough of a reason not to go down this idiotic path of linguistic power struggles.

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

#443

Post by [deleted] »

makeitdouble wrote: post #427
lynx23 wrote: 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…

The difficult part of this being, some of the 100% blind people effectively don’t like the word and don’t want to be called blind. Then some people are ‘only’ 80% blind, and don’t want to be called blind. Then some family members of blind people don’t want the word to be used. I think it’s pretty common phenomenon, like the people who call themselves “black”, those who are called “black” but hate it, and everyone in…

[deleted]

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

#444

Post by Scarblac »

Y_Y wrote: post #422
pizza234 wrote: post #418

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.

It's me, actually. I'm 48, white, male, cis, hetero, graying, healthy, overweight but not obese, married with two kids, and slaving away in a wage job behind a computer somewhere.

"Diverse" specifically means different from me.

I feel it's good companies are looking for more diverse people to fill their jobs, I can't do them all.

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

#445

Post by imoverclocked »

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, 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.

I suspect the unease you perceive with people using different terms for blindness are unease with their own attachments to those words. Fighting to keep using words with established meaning is laudable IMO. I still use "literally" as not "figuratively" despite the media-dulled connotation.

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

#447

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

jimbokun wrote: post #319
low_tech_love wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes. An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. I…

It’s important to remember, however annoying they are, their side is losing. Look at Dave Chappelle, who was the attempted target of cancellation and Netflix and people buying tickets to his shows completely ignored it. Or JK Rowling, who has been cancelled over and over again, but the latest video game based on her IP is incredibly popular. Twitter doesn’t reflect the real world.

On the other hand, I can't write "sanity check" without getting on HR's naughty list.

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

#448

Post by usrbinbash »

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 historically charged, and also non-inclusive to people who prefer unordered data.

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

#449

Post by quickthrower2 »

farnsworth wrote: post #230

Only tangentially related but I think it's interesting that just as we popularized the word "Ms.", and I think it makes perfect sense not to refer to women primarily by their marital status, we sort of worked around the issue by... largely just not using title/last name anymore. Right? I don't think I've referred to anyone by a title since my grade school teachers, and at least in my industry and corner of society, i…

Right. Except when you apply for a bank account, loan, passport, drivers license, enter a contract and so on.

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

#450

Post by fidgewidge »

bnralt wrote: post #264
low_tech_love wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes. An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. I…

I came to realize that this is the case with advocacy groups. These groups will never want to say, "Hey, things aren't that bad anymore. We're working on some small problems, but honestly, we solved most of the stuff we were concerned about." Everything always needs to be in perpetual crisis. Wikipedia always needs to be in danger of shutting down. Political enemies are always supposed to be one step away from destro…

Yeah. Over time this has killed my interest in charitable organizations, sad to say. I just don't trust them anymore because I think if I donate to an apparently well defined cause it'll actually just be embezzled and put to use hiring hard left activists who spend all their time harassing normal people in pursuit of their deranged ideology. The prevalence of dumb language purity guides amongst these organizations just reinforces that feeling. Nowadays I'm much now likely to donate to crowdfunders for the victims legal fees.
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