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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

#881

Post by phlakaton »

kodah wrote: post #210
phlakaton wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great advice for one-on-one groups and small discussions, but provides little help if you're writing for a broad audience and want to minimize blowback. Which is where I think that Stanford guide, and other such guides, come into play, whether I agree with them or not.

> but provides little help if you're writing for a broad audience and want to minimize blowback Does writing a guide or policing language that causes blowback provide help? If you're speaking to a room full of people and half favor this language and half don't then you've only shifted the grievances from one side of the room to the other. There's no easy answers here, but I don't think writing language guides or poli…

If it's truly 50-50, then no. But I don't see any way that a whole 50% of your audience is going to freak out if you change from "homeless" to "person experiencing homelessness," for example.

The guides are probably banking on most of the changes being accepted, however grudgingly. Of course, they may be wrong, and even if there's pushback, they may be convinced enough of the righteousness of their cause to press ahead anyway.

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

#882

Post by skissane »

phpisthebest wrote: post #676
azangru wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem. It's a pretty big cognitive load though, to remember what everyone finds or doesn't find offensive. This is what bothers me about the recent obsession with pronouns - I have enough trouble remembering people's names; and now I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given perso…

We have externalized what used to be an internal issues Offense is a you problem, not a me problem. We have abandoned the axiom of "sticks and stones" and replaced it with "words are violence" or even worse "silence is violence" Today it no longer enough to be "tolerant" you have to actively affirm, support, and validate everything about everyone at all times and support their emotional state no matter the practicali…

> Today it no longer enough to be "tolerant" you have to actively affirm, support, and validate everything about everyone at all times and support their emotional state no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.

That’s absolutely not true though - you only have to affirm/support/validate people’s identities and emotional states when their identity/emotions aligns with the zeitgeist; if those things contradict the zeitgeist, then affirmation/support/validation is somewhere between optional and evil.

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

#883

Post by jopsen »

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 also wish we could call it the "master" branch, renaming the primary branch to "main" is just pointless.

But it's simply less risky and less work to just call it "main".

It doesn't matter, and nobody gains anything from calling it "main" -- but if we call it "master" someone might get offended or waste my time arguing over it.

There is no incentive to insist calling it "master". So similarly, I guess we'll end up calling you "photonically disadvantaged" :)

Or maybe we can give it a positive spin and call it "darkness unimpaired"? (Just kidding of course)

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

#884

Post by JacobThreeThree »

jraph wrote: post #717
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.

> the intention is to divide us Who actually has this intention and why?

The "who" is pretty easy - it's corporate media outlets: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...

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

#885

Post by xhxhxh »

lynx23 wrote: post #877
xhxhxh wrote: post #869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey man, what software do you recommend for screen reading? I'm trying to test my websites on accessibility and I've tried JAWS and NVDA so far (while using Lynx to navigate it) but found them a bit confusing. I'm not sure how one would use them in practice to navigate a site like Hacker news, which is relatively simple. Do you use something else entirely?

I am not quite sure I understand. If you're really trying to use JAWS or NVDA to work with lynx on the web, you are mixing things up. There are basically two worlds for blind users: the "old" text-only terminal interfaces thing which started in the good old DOS days at least for me) and was kept alive in Linux terminal applications. And the GUI world, where you have a screen reader interact with the various elements…

Thank you for the explanation, it's a lot more clear now!

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

#886

Post by skissane »

jopsen wrote: post #883
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 also wish we could call it the "master" branch, renaming the primary branch to "main" is just pointless. But it's simply less risky and less work to just call it "main". It doesn't matter, and nobody gains anything from calling it "main" -- but if we call it "master" someone might get offended or waste my time arguing over it. There is no incentive to insist calling it "master". So similarly, I guess we'll end up c…

Sometimes you end up with a random mishmash of repos, some with the default branch called "master", others with it called "main", and then a handful with something else altogether (e.g. "develop"). Someone pushes for a massive "master=>main" rename – but once you get "master" baked into umpteen dozen ultra-complex CI/CD/testing pipelines, etc, it takes a lot of time to change them all and deal with all the fiddly breakage that results. So people do the rename for brand-new projects, and some of the low-hanging fruit of the existing ones, but the "too obscure" or "too-big-to-deal-with" existing projects get put off indefinitely. And then you are constantly scratching my head trying to remember which one this repo is. Even worse, a few repos someone creates a new "main" branch but keeps an old outdated "master" branch around just to confuse people. Even if your organisation has been so diligent as to finish off the rename everywhere, sooner or later you need to make changes to some open source project you are using which hasn't.

What Git really needs, is some kind of "branch alias" feature. Some config setting like "branch_alias.main=master", and then I could always write "git checkout main", and it would checkout "main" if that exists, and "master" if it didn't (and vice versa). That would solve it in most cases – except for the rarer "we decided to use neither main nor master" and "we made a new main branch but kept an outdated master branch hanging around".

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

#887

Post by JohnFen »

zoklet-enjoyer wrote: post #310

While we're getting rid of words we consider offensive, let's get rid of "consumer." I find it particularly offensive when politicians refer to the public as consumers.

I'm on board.

While we're at it, let's also restrict the use of the word "content", at least when it's only referring to a single type of media.

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

#888

Post by 8note »

erulabs wrote: post #832
wonderwonder wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending. Minorities don't need white Knights to save them, neither do the disabled. If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem. But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide…

The absolute worst incarnation of this is "latinx". Don't worry latin world, the english speaking world is here once again to tell you how backwards your entire language and culture is! The absolute height of "offensive sensitivity" in my opinion. > But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide that a group as a whole needs saving If this isn't one of the core problems with every aspect of soci…

You'd think that, Latinx does come from Spanish speakers, both with the -x and -e endings

https://youtu.be/P3yfGQivroE

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

#889

Post by faeriechangling »

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…

Attitudes around such things vary by disability community, peoples relationship to it (self proclaimed “ally’s” or people who work with the disabled for a living tend to use pained language, people with the actual condition tend not to), and individual differences.

Personally though people using extra syllables to describe me when a more terse way to describe me gets the point across always comes off as condescending. People seem to be utterly obsessed with the connotation of words and if a word starts having a bad connotation they will just replace it with a different usually inferior word and consider themselves heroic for doing so. Blind becomes “visually impaired” making 1 syllable into 5 and ironically making language more complex and less accessible (since the entire point of such language is that it’s so awkward that nobody who isn’t woke will use it allowing it to have a signalling purpose). In reality what such people attitudes come off as is “you’re such weak shit everybody around you should be like me and constantly expend effort to protect your feelings”.

It’s the language of “allyship”, not the language of the disabled most of the time. If people need such terms to feel comfortable with the disabled, I’ll humour them I guess, but I just hope people understand that this language mostly exists for the sake of people who are immensely uncomfortable with the concept of disability and those people tend not to be disabled.

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

#890

Post by lovemenot »

The large majority of reasonable people seem to agree that intention is important when determining whether language use might be abuse, or not.

Intention is fuzzy and unprovable. People can sometimes lie, evade and troll.

Unlike intention, words are black and white, so words can be subject to restriction by motivated people.

My question to the HN community is whether it would be feasible to create an effective classifier for intention? For instance if this sentence contained not "N-Word", but the signifier of that euphemism, it should pass the classifier, since my intention was benign.

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