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Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

itcommunity.stanford.edu

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Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#681

Post by rayiner »

Everyone should read Musa al-Gharbi’s analysis of the purpose of these kinds of lists. It’s written in the context of racism and “micro aggressions” but is more broadly applicable: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/

To use one of the examples, Filipinos didn’t get together and campaign to eliminate “the Philippine Islands” from the lexicon. A bunch of white Americans—the people who run Stanford—did that, in order to increase their own power. Maybe some Filipinos assimilated into the white power structure of Stanford contributed, but in no way does that imply any organic demand by Filipino Americans in general.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#682

Post by kennend3 »

rmak wrote: post #612
cipheredStones wrote: post #332

It's pretty remarkable that this conflates: - Well-known slurs like "Jewed" - Outdated, now-offensive terms like "hermaphrodite" - Touchy metaphorical language like "slave replica" - Gendered terms that if you're being assiduous you probably want to avoid, like "manpower" - Words that have long since lost any stigmatizing meaning by virtue of the original use being so ancient ("lame", "dumb", "stupid") - Words that,…

Totally ok to use "incel" but not Karen. Notice how they are fine with using words like "gunman", "conman" but not the positive masculine words like man-made, mankind ... Also no issues with "motherboard" or "mother nature".

Notice it is also missing many other "offensive" terms like :

"Settler" - It actually uses this word a lot in its definitions as to why words are bad, but "Settler" itself is an offensive term used by First Nations against "whites".

"White privilege" is also missing? Again another harmful word thrown around which many consider offensive. Words which include "Everyone" are generally not good because within "white people" there is a wide range of thoughts/beliefs. I'm sure that very poor white people don't feel they have "white privilege"?

When asked to define "white privilege" the SJW's fail miserably.

At the end of the day, given Stanford is in the US and has "first amendment rights" this list itself is utter nonsense.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#684

Post by laserdancepony »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #534

This is a very helpful site - just like I include a goto in every script or application I write to mess with the “goto considered harmful” people, now I have a list of trigger words I can use in variables and comments to mess with the college kiddies. BTW “Balls to the wall” has nothing to do with anatomy, it’s a reference to a WWII fighter plane which had ball shaped handles on the throttle levers, when preparing to…

"Pedal to the metal" comes to mind immediately.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#686

Post by readerbaza »

Chazprime wrote: post #565
yunwal wrote: post #371

Probably what you should take away from this is not “wokism gone crazy” (err, sorry “wild”). The more important lesson here is that the bloat in academic institutions has gotten so outrageous that people start bullshit time-consuming initiatives to justify their positions and the positions of their reports. Absolutely no one will take this seriously including the person who wrote it but they will be able to put it on…

> Probably what you should take away from this is not “wokism gone crazy” Perhaps not, but every year this rhetoric grows more and more aggressive - and thanks to social media - is now leaking into our everyday vernacular. At what point do we say “this is enough” rather than hand-waving it away as yet another excess of academia?

The point was well past when a git branch name became offensive (allegedly).

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#688

Post by MivLives »

tsimionescu wrote: post #494
yunwal wrote: post #371

Probably what you should take away from this is not “wokism gone crazy” (err, sorry “wild”). The more important lesson here is that the bloat in academic institutions has gotten so outrageous that people start bullshit time-consuming initiatives to justify their positions and the positions of their reports. Absolutely no one will take this seriously including the person who wrote it but they will be able to put it on…

You say this, and yet much of the tech industry has taken to removing words like blacklist and whitelist already, even though they have no racial undertones whatsoever. Similarly, the master branch of many projects has been renamed to main, even though it had nothing to do with slavery, and master remains an extremely common term.

Honestly I've been fine with main branch. It's shorter. My problem is it's not consistent because it takes forever for a bigcorp to do something. So now we have repos with a main branch (the current branch) and a master branch (hasn't been touched in the year and half since the switch).

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#689

Post by antegamisou »

outside1234 wrote: post #331

Can we talk about Latinx? This is entirely something that English speakers have made up for Spanish speakers. My wife, who works in healthcare for the state, and largely with farm workers, regales me constantly with stories that essentially have the punchline “Que es Latinx?” in which she has to explain to them that this means them and that it was made up (perhaps at Stanford) out of some crazy attempt to remove -a a…

English speakers from the US that is, btw.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#690

Post by ldh0011 »

> whitespace > Assigns value connotations based on color (white = good), an act which is subconsciously racialized.

lmao what? I am 100% sure I've never met anyone who has a positive or negative opinion of whitespace. Maybe of whether or not it should be syntactically important but most people seem to think it shouldn't be anyways.

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