I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is.
I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.
It was amusing to see the GitLab ticket where they try to orchestrate the change. It’s still going on. At least 100 people involved and multiple tickets open for an entirely pointless change.
Take a look at CIA's "The Simple Sabotage Field Manual" from 1944 (declassified 2008). Under the section "General Interference with Organizations and Production" it recommends among other things:
- "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible"
- "Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions."
This is actually worse. With bikeshedding, once the bored people have finally decided on the color of the bikeshed, everyone just goes on with their life unhindered. With this, once the bored people have decided to make the change, everyone and their mom has to waste time on following or actively resisting the change on their end.
This is amazing, I'm noting this down for future use.
As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it makes you wonder what's really going on while we are distracted by this stuff.
What I find interesting is that there (probably? maybe?) isn't a shadowy CIA-like organisation promoting this stuff, this "tactic" is a naturally emergent property of the woke belief system.
I think I find this more frightening than if there actually were a shadowy organisation pulling the strings: here we have a philosophy, which many well-intended people subscribe to, that causes them to behave like a sophisticated intelligence agency deliberately trying to disrupt a foreign power.
In fact, a lot of that woke stuff actually comes from the CIA.
It's a tactic they first used in the 70s in Europe, when "real" left parties (i.e. the old-school socialist/communist parties, affiliated with the soviet union) started gaining ground.
All of a sudden they started funding a lot of stuff like that, because it weakened/marginalized those parties. Why fight for workers rights when you can fight for LGBT, immigrant, women rights, etc. I.e. the right of fifteen distinct groups that have no power.
Much more recently that tactic was used to destroy the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Same here in germany.
When we hear the word master, most people think of the master in karate kid or the master degree of a university.
I think only in the usa people are so full of hate that they directly think of bad stuff.
I wouldn't say they are full of hate. Slavery has defined the country and has repercussions still.
But I'm really worried about how we import everything American to Germany without thinking twice.
Left newspapers have started to write BIPoC everywhere when it comes to domestic issues. What exactly are the indigenous people of Germany? Even blacks are relatively rare. It would make much more sense to coin an acronym that includes Jews, Sinti and Roma, given our sordid history. But we simply take what American culture has thought up.
We have problems to integrate Turkish or Russian immigrants and their children as Germans, not as people from elsewhere. As well as the refugees from Syria.
Having lived in a mostly Turkish neighborhood for five years (as a German, Turkish landlord, Turkish "housemates" (?)) I think some just don't want to be integrated...
Landlord was pretty chill and I kind of miss being able to just ask anything and he would try to make it happen (including things like repairing car motors).
Housemates were of the mildly radicalized religious kind, with daughters that did not attend the normal school system and are now being married of early.
I don't know if the German "integration system" has failed for the later ... they have the freedom to chose and they chose a path that is different from what is considered "normal" in the "West".
I think "integration" is a sham. Integration implies a give and take, a compromise. It seems actually assimilation or submission is what many Euro countries want.
As a Canadian (Vancouver), I can tell you true integration happens over generations of people working together and respecting each other. In those conditions, it is unavoidable.
If either group lacks respect, the outcome is always conflict.
You put their kids into school together young and they won't know not to be friends until you tell them. That was my experience, anyway.
>It seems actually assimilation or submission is what many Euro countries want.
No we think that forced marriage has no place in Europe, or the oppression of woman's. And yes, that's our culture..so is the freedom to choose your religion and to have free speech. If someone from another culture comes we are happy to integrate it into ours, but NOT when it clashes with our Laws.
>You put their kids into school together young and they won't know not to be friends until you tell them.
And what when they go into different schools (Jewish or Muslim etc), live in different parts of the City (look at Paris or Berlin), and never met someone outside of their bubble until 20 or later?
I said it in another post ... it's not about being forced into something, it's about freedom of choice. And that is something universal, it's just codified in our laws.
It's completely fine if a women decides to become married and have children early ... it's probably not a good choice ... but morally there is no way to reject that.
The problem arises when people never learn that they have a choice ... I have (female) friends from rural Germany that think it's perfectly reasonable to go study and once finished move in with their husband and be the perfect stay-at-home mom.
edit: heck ... I even have friends from larger cities who would just prefer to be stay-at-home moms because that gives an excuse to sloth on the couch for half of the day :-)
The point is, "BIPoC" means specifically "Black, Indigenous, People of Color". It does not mean "immigrants" or "refugees" or "all marginalized groups" or whoever else needs social justice in Germany.
Borrowing that specific term for other purposes is stupid.
As an immigrant, I didn't want to leave my country, let alone integrate where I did.
I was forced to because the government in my country steals and wastes so much money that the economy breaks and you can't make money there.
Still the quality of life is much better at home and I'd rather stay there.
All my friends are immigrants, I couldn care less to integrate here. Ideally I'd just rather live in a town with just immigrants from my country. As long as you keep them out of politics they'll probably won't rob you.
Just like any other immigrants, westeners in Asia integrate do different degrees. Some only hang out with people from their own country and refuse to go to anything but restaurants that serve their own food. While others practically become locals.
Some nationalities integrate more than others. This goes for different European countries even, so it has very little to do with "race".
Interesting.
I also left my country but mostly because there wasn’t really anything left for me there and I met my girlfriend and she was from somewhere else... So I moved to her country.
Her country is clearly superior in almost everything except for weather and food. I like living here and I've made good friends and enjoy my life here.
Now the curious part comes...
I have zero attachment to both countries, their culture and their national identities.
I couldn’t care less about their language or customs. I just see myself has some kind of post-nationalistic person that would much rather speak English with everyone, hang out on the internet and live wherever.
As far as I'm concerned national identities and culture are useless and holding us down as a species. I really wish people could outgrow this nonsense.
I partly feel the same. I agree with you that identification with a country (patriotism/nationalism) is holding us back. However I do recognize that my upbringing has shaped me culturally and similar in my behaviour. Similarly the 3 other countries I have lived in for significant time, which have also formed my personality. I also do feel attachment to those places, but this is much more due do people and the location, not the nation.
I agree with you that the culture I was raised in has had a huge effect on me.
You can take the man of the country but you can’t take the country out of the man.
In hindsight I don’t think I was raised in a particularly enlightened culture. Do those even exist?
I would much rather have us move past dumb social biases and constructs and work together to build a better future and a more universal and cooperative world.
"I would much rather have us move past dumb social biases "
On person's unbiased Baysian predictions based on a lifetime of experience and evidence, looks a lot like biases and prejudice to the delicate of mind.
And they get nasty about it.
So no, there will be no building of a better world.
Generalizations like "chinese people are ..." or "muslims tend to..." are garbage. There is no possible objective truth to any of these since we are talking about billions of people.
You brain might think it’s very smart and clever and has the world all figured out but most likely it doesn’t.
The world is a chaotic system beyond any one's comprehension. All generalizations that are not purely mathematical and 100% abstract in nature are wrong.
I understand and I think that is acceptable. I'd welcome you and yours in Canada. When both groups respect each other, true integration comes over generations of working together.
Obviously we did not respect the Indigenous people and I hope that can me mended through generations of mutual respect.
I think Vancouver is better because of the rich mix of cultures. It's not perfect here but I think it is pretty good. I have seen a Muslim man give his shoes to a homeless man on the bus and walk home barefoot in the rain. I believe anything is possible.
> What exactly are the indigenous people of Germany?
Ha! I remember a drunken night with a north-american colleague; he asked why didn't we have indigenous people here in Europe. Then he suddenly realized the answer: oh, but it is you, you all are!
Of course everyone would have a different feeling towards those words. Every country has their own history. I think it is a positive step in the US going through all these hurdles to address their past. US has the power and the economic leverage to really step to next level, it can afford it.
Every country is different. Developing world wouldn't care about rights, because they have to make cakes as fast as possible, and developed world can spend much time on being fair. It is something we should do.
Is a name change really that difficult for everyone? I remember when I first saw 'main' branch on Azure, yes, I have to slow down a bit, is it the end of world? It means something important for the US, and would be good for the future generation, I think I can afford the personal inconvenience. We, developers, are having the best job in this world, do we really need to get pissed off for this?
> Is a name change really that difficult for everyone?
It's just a complete misunderstanding of the topic. Changing "master" branches simply confuses signified and signifier, and the fact that multiple signified can have the same signifier (like the signifier stool and the signified faeces and a thing to sit on. Removing the word doesn't remove the concept.
If these companies actually wanted to work for diversity, they could just do exactly that: employ more people from other backgrounds, or have extra internships for early orientiation in high school, or fund computer labs schools in poor neighbourhoods and so on.
Edit: As an illustration of how this doesn't affect the underlying meaning: In Germany there's a similar discourse going on, and the result is that the German radical right also started to talk about migrants instead of aliens or foreigners. But they didn't change their attitudes at all! They just adapted to the new word and kept their old concept.
>Is a name change really that difficult for everyone?
So whole world has to change because US has its core problems?
>We, developers, are having the best job in this world, do we really need to get pissed off for this?
do we?
spend thousands of hours of your free time in front of computer just to learn stuff,
then spend 3.5/5 or even more years for degree
then stay competitive / in touch with tech as a part of life style
just to have office/remote job with good pay?
is this "best job"? seems decent, but I wouldn't call it "the best", especially in countries where programmers do not have really outstanding pay like in SF.
Germany is a really bad example though. The German way is to pretend racism just doesn't exist - today is the aniversary of a racist, arson attack that happened in 1994 killing 7 people (one of them pregnant) where the official line is still "the guy was just crazy what can you do ?!".
If you want to transplant the "master"-example, look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts as well as a weird insistance that offensively named streets, underground-stations and (for some reason) pharmacies "must not need to be renamed, why would you even be offended".
Germany is not the example to go with concerning offensive language.
I don't buy the assertion that the German way is to pretend racism just doesn't exist.
There are racists, and fascists, neo-nazis and old-nazis. They do exist, it's just that they don't pose that widespread of a problem in every day life, like it does in other western countries.
I'd say gender (in)equality is something you will encounter much more often in every day life over there.
We've got a far right party that gets around 13% in national elections, in some states around 25%.
We've got a minister of interior that does not want to start a study on racism in the police forces.
That's two of the big issues, that's not even every-day racism where it's hard to get an apartment or a job with a "foreign name", underrepresentation in leading positions or that in some parts you'll get at least hassled for walking with brown skin.
Germany is and always has been extremely conservative and integration/racism is an issue precisely because the largest party always saw imported skilled labor as people that should be forced back "home" again, even with a second and third generation growing up in Germany.
It's about choice ... there are women (also in Germany) that gladly _chose_ to stay at home, _chose_ to prepare meals for their husband and _chose_ to care for the kids.
On the other hand there are women that _chose_ to give their children into daycare weeks after birth to go back to work.
It's not about condemning any lifestyle as wrong, it's about given everybody (males included) the ability to life their live as they want.
Sadly this is far from the reality with median wages being barely high enough to sustain one person, forcing women (and men) to work and robbing them of their agency.
You just showed the problem: Mixing completely different things and pretending it's the same. The parent comment and the parent-parent and the submitted text all talked about something, you come up with something else.
> look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts
Okay I do - and that is exactly the useless actions that the submitted text and this discussion is about. For some reason you just ignore all that was said and just repeat those exact criticized points as if nothing happened.
Well, they parent tried to transplant the word "master" into a german context and noted it doesn't translate. I then gave examples of words that work analogous to the word "master" in English. These things are connected by the concept that "I'm not offended by them, why should anyone else?"
Where these discussions about how Germans call their pharmacies connect to the article is that in both cases the arbiters who decide how things are called are the white - once you start to involve the people that these offensive words are about, you suddenly get a different sense of how important or offensive these words are. There's a recent example of a talkshow where a couple of white more-or-less-celebrities decided that these words are just german heritage, and really what is all the fuzz about ? To appease the ensuing mini-scandal the station organized a roundpanel of people who might be affected by these slurs - and surprise, they really weren't so fond of them.
You are obviously right, changing words by itself doesn't change a thing - but if I can't even count on someone not using slurs about me, I can't expect to respected at all.
> but having went to school there entire years of our history class were dedicated to the Nazis.
To be precise it is about the atrocities committed by the Nazis and how they managed to subvert the society to be able do their crimes. By the way they started early on to change the everyday language.
"Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment" - it was candidly named, if nothing else.
> Indeed, Goebbels initially opposed the term propaganda, recognizing that in popular usage, both in Germany and abroad, it was associated with lies. Even after the ministry had been in existence for a year, he proposed changing its name to Ministry of Culture and Public Enlightenment, but Hitler vetoed this proposal.
See the thing about that is, that it let's you neatly compartmentalize racism to the nazis, and since the nazis don't exist anymore (well, the ones being talked about in history class) there is not racism or antisemitism anymore.
That is of course simplifying it a lot, but Germany as a whole has a problem with right-wing extremism who almost regularely murder people, and a police force who regularly have scandals involving members being present day Nazis, and these Problems not being adressed properly.
So I am not sure learning about The Nazis of the olden days is very helpful withouth showing the reach that these ideologies have into present day Germany.
And I say that as someone who has gone through these years that you reference as well.
The funny thing is, I don't think very many people thought of "bad stuff" before this idiotic culture war planted it in everyone's mind, even if in a negative light.
I would bet that most people didn't have any idea that words like "grandfather" or "blacklist" had (or didn't have) any racist history.
Wouldn't it have been better to just let the words outgrow their history? These words were already dead or dying as racist terms. Not any more.
> In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.
I don't know, but it seems plausible that awareness of the term's origin might well be considerably higher among those whose own father or grandfather was disenfranchised by one of the original grandfather clauses.
I at least was intellectually gratified to learn about it.
"I'm in the USA. I think only in Germany are people so full of themselves that they over-generalize entire nations with their own ignorant assumptions."
That would be a rather rude, dare I say hateful thing for me to say, wouldn't it? In reality, I really enjoyed all the places in Germany I've visited, and most of my interactions with German folk that I've interacted with socially and professionally over the years. I especially enjoyed taking a technical and engineering German language course, so I can appreciate words like "Kaftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung" and "benzinbetriebenes Motorsystem". I wouldn't think to make such a comment about the German people, like you did about people in the USA.
The point I'm attempting to make is that stating blanket negative over-generalizations about any group of people isn't productive, and in this case it's seemingly ironic to me. If you think I'm a hateful person because of pointing that out, then by your definition I am hateful and I'm okay with you thinking that. I obviously disagree, though, and I'm happy to attempt to civilly discuss that with you if you'd like.
It is the only right association because it's the same word coming from "magister" in Latin and which traveled to become maestro in Italian, meister in German, maestre and then maitre in French and finally master in English.
I'm in no way a native speaker - but even I recognize that in English 'master' has - and always had - many different meanings. One of them completely equal to the German 'Meister'.
It is all about context. Question is, why certain groups emphasize - or better: impose deceivingly by altering him - the wrong context to a crystal-clear situation.
In the Netherlands, which unlike Germany was significantly involved in the transatlantic slave trade, AFAIK the word meester never had any connotations of slavery, only of expertise and teaching ability (as in a guild master).
It's still used to refer to a male teacher, particularly in elementary schools, as well as being the title used by lawyers.
Or slavendrijver, which is still a very derogatory way to point out exploitative behavior.
I think an important difference between ex-colonial European powers and the US is that the (ethnic) slavery did not take place on European soil. Most colonies were operated with very few Europeans to oversee, and as such people were not as exposed to it as people in the US, where masters and slaves would perhaps not live in the same part of town, but also not a continent away. So this may explain why those terms seem inoffensive/only have their meaning outside of the slavery context in Europe.
I know it's anecdotal but I've asked my colleagues the same - in a country with a terrible history of this sort too. And turns out I can't find a single person who agrees with Github's decision.
When you think about masters/slaves, do you think about black people only? If so, why?
There are countless examples in the history of the world about slaves, including different ethnics, in every continent. May they have a word on this issue too?
Throughout history, various races struggled from slavery, pretty much the entire spectrum is fully covered across the world. Nowadays there are more people in slavery than at any given time before.
Slavery in Russian empire was de jure abolished about the same time as slavery in US. Not surprisingly, it took even more time for "de facto" changes to happen with various restrictions still being a thing into 1970ies. If anything, kolhoz system was anything but slavery with the government being ultimate owner.
Almost everybody has ancestors that were enslaved. E.g. most Germanic people where enslaved by other Germanic people, or the Romans at some point in time. The only question is how far back you have to look and how far back you can look.
>We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.
I suppose they are not doing it for your feeling's sake. They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.
They've immense power over corporations. It's a flex. It doesn't have to make any sense or to be connected in any way to the people it is allegedly helping.
Insisting to help people is quite insulting, actually. Empowerment means you voice your own grievances. It doesn't mean recruit an army of armchair activists to do it for you.
One have to be careful to not generalize their power, since I hear this a lot. It is strictly restricted to the "cultural sphere", just like a lot of politics itself. It is all about managing affections, not actions. Woke is performative radicalism.
Or to put it this way, if the "woke mob" decided to protest capitalism or even higher/stricter taxes, do you think that anything would change? Probably not, because production for profit it still at the core of every corp while at the same time the woke crowd has a limited understanding of capitalism to begin with (as can be seen by the claims that capitalism is by necessity based on racism). It is the worst of both worlds.
They're not supposed to care about minorities. If they actually made a positive difference- say, lowered the births out of wedlock/divorce rate among black US parents, thereby causing a slew of knock-on effects- if they actually solved the problems they complained about, they'd be out of a job. They're supposed to put on a good performance of caring and wanting to fix things, then make things worse. The best way for a foot soldier to do this is to fervently believe in the cause, and be swept up in the ideology that causes them to be incompetent and solving problems. Most people, of course, are just lying so they don't get fired.
> If they actually made a positive difference- say, lowered the births out of wedlock/divorce rate among black US parents, thereby causing a slew of knock-on effects- if they actually solved the problems they complained about, they'd be out of a job
I get your sentiment, but this seems to be putting the cart before the horse, in multiple ways. Divorce rates and births out of wedlock do not have "a slew of knock-on effects"; they are the effects. There are only two reasons to care about those rates:
- They are easily measured, due to existing government accounting (birth/marriage/divorce certificates, etc.)
- Religious bullshit
I'll ignore the latter, since it cannot be reasoned with.
In the case of divorce, it doesn't happen without reason. Anecdotally, my parents divorced due to alcoholism and domestic abuse; my childhood, social mobility, earnings potential, etc. was improved by their divorce. Tackling alcoholism and domestic abuse may have "a slew of knock-on effects", including lower divorce rates; yet the reverse is not true, e.g. making it harder to get a divorce will not reduce alcoholism and abuse, it would merely subject more children to it for longer.
If we make the charitable assumption that the goal of what you're saying is for more children to receive more help and support, rather than the opposite described above, then that's several levels removed from what you actually said; and each of those levels introduces exactly the distracting, partisan rhetoric that you are arguing against.
- The first level of abstraction is focusing on the US. This seems fair enough, assuming you're in the US. Yet it's still important to note this abstraction, e.g. in the context of foreign aid. For example, it might be more efficient (i.e. give more help to more children) to spend more on foreign aid, since money can go further in poorer countries; alternatively, spending that money domestically might be more efficient (give more help to more children) due to targeting and accountability. If we want to give the most help to the most children, we should base policy on measured impacts; yet this is often framed as a "left vs right" partisan issue (pretending for the moment that the US even has a left wing), which distracts from actually achieving the stated goal.
- Next, you further narrow your focus to the black US population. This also seems fair, as they are a disenfranchised and oppressed group, and hence this focuses on a large number of large issues that need fixing. Even from a purely utilitarian point of view, it may be cheaper (or even reduce costs) to, say, tackle over-policing of black neighbourhoods; compared to tackling some more diffuse, less directly-controllable issue in other populations (e.g. suicide rates in white males). However, it's again worth noting the abstraction: in particular, a large improvement for the minority black population may have less impact than a smaller improvement for a larger population (e.g. the female population). Again, policy should be based on measurable impacts towards the stated goal, and again this has been turned into a partisan circus to distract from real change (e.g. with concern trolling about 'ignoring' white males).
- Next you split the focus between births out of wedlock and divorce rates. I've mentioned the impacts of divorce above; the partisan circus in this case involves 'traditional values', and bleeds into other areas like gay, trans and women's rights.
- The phrase "lowered births out of wedlock" is problematic, since (again) it is very far removed from the assumed goal of 'the most help to the most children', and hence puts the cart before the horse; and secondly it is charged with dangerous ambiguity. For example, lowering birth rates of 'undesirable' demographics (e.g. unmarried black people) could be achieved via eugenics; I'm hoping that is not what you had in ...
It's not for helping minorities. It's for helping the PMC stay on top, by making rules that only people who grew up in the right class and went to the right schools will be able to follow, cloaking that function in a nominal reason for those rules that's unimpeachable. And it does that very well.
Yes, pretty sure that this is a reference to the professional-managerial class. It's a common refrain on the populist left/"dirtbag left" that identity politics are often dishonest class warfare. (I agree.)
They are the woke mob. Who else ever cared about this? It's the doing of the toxic corporate diversity committees who pull this shit to appear like they're doing something against discrimination without actually making any meaningful changes.
I read the parent comment to mean that by pro-actively making changes in an effort you avoid the woke buffoons, while completely ignoring the voices of those who ought matter most, you're admitting defeat and in doing so granting the buffoons yet more power.
I'd argue if someone is feigning offense we should call them out on it, not collectively fucking prostrate ourselves.
This whole fiasco just makes me wonder what the hell is going on in the background while we're being distracted by this... surströmming-level red herring.
> on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.
I'd love to see some demographics around this. When I lived in the bay area, most of my friends were part of this woke / "activist" community. I had some friends who disagreed, but mostly they were terrified to say so for fear of the mob.
Here in Australia, it seems like the demographics are the other way around. I know a few people who are part of the leftist woke / "activist" tribe. But most people I interact with socially think that while racism is a problem, the twitter mobs are a bit silly, and the woke stuff is overblown.
I don't know how you'd measure, but I'd love to see stats on what percentage of the communities in different cities hold this political stance. Is it growing or shrinking? Is it widespread in the west, or is it mostly just a bay area / portland / NY phenomenon - with small satellite groups in other countries?
Think pendulums reacting to their perceptions of each other, maybe.
I work with a Canadian team but American parent company. We see what they are going through and it is definitely different. I think our version of equality is just working together as peers and respecting each other, there is no performative or ablutionary aspect.
For the record, I think parent co. is genuine and seems very diverse too. Views are my own yada yada.
From my subjective and anecdotal perception as someone who interacts with people from many countries, it looks mostly like an US thing at the moment.
The problem is that most of the West tends to imitate cultural and political trends that originate in the US. And this is already being imitated. In most other countries we are not yet seeing a war to the extent we see in the US, but the American situation could be the canary in the coal mine.
My theory is that because the US has been shifting right for decades, parts of the US leftwing has to some extent resigned itself to thought policing and arguing semantics instead of fighting for actual policy changes. When you can't fix the big problems, find some small problem that you can focus on instead. If the US had a leftwing party that occasionally got in power (instead of a two-party system with a centrist and a rightwing party) then lefties would probably spend their effort on making that happen instead.
> Here in Australia, it seems like the demographics are the other way around. I know a few people who are part of the leftist woke / "activist" tribe. But most people I interact with socially think that while racism is a problem, the twitter mobs are a bit silly, and the woke stuff is overblown.
It's going to be funny a few years down the road when the trend comes to Australia before they actually notice.
No, but if GitHub is mentioned in a very angry Twitter thread, and is being targeted by a woke and bored journalist which would write an angry and misdirected article putting the words "racism" and "GitHub" together, is most likely a good enough motivation to avoid a PR disaster
The "woke mob" were chasing them because of the contract with ICE and the police facial recognition stuff that's very profitable and they'd like to continue doing.
The master branch thing was an attempt at misdirection and throwing the mob a bone.
It's a classic PR move. The entire objective was to generate distracting noise.
Policing language is popular among corporations for the same reason oil companies got "woke" about recycling in the 80s:
* It doesn't really change anything and doesn't affect profit margins.
* It affects everybody albeit very lightly and is extemely visible.
* It naturally leads people to shame each other, taking the heat off the corp.
* They can score some progressive points at minimum cost.
At some point if things continue to get worse overall, these games wont work because the "woke mob" (not limited to that particular "group", individuals may share the same opinion on such activities, or at least where the most disgruntled overlaps with most capable) will start to realize what you describe and just figure its more effective to target GH infrastructure/employees/family/friends and officers directly, no need for angry tweets (and not strictly related to GH but other corporations that engage in similar services as well).
They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.
Another example, Bezos recently banned books critical of transgender from being sold on Amazon. And just like that, everyone forgot about Amazon's brutal suppression of union organising activity in their warehouses. Similarly the rest of Big Tech thinks it can toss out token gestures and placate those who are critical of its business practices.
I hate this “woke mob” branding, there isn’t one, there are people who care about social issues who are individuals. Some go too far, I agree, but we should aim to treat everyone, no matter what they believe (yes even if you think they are really wrong) with respect rather than pigeon holing all their views in with a group you don’t like.
Translation: people who see an opportunity to debase others for free and put themselves on a pedestal
Update: We call this class of people Mullahs here in Iran. It's been slowly but surely becoming apparent to us that they are somewhat of a societal parasite.
I actually knew my comment was following essentially the same game-theory as the woke, like almost every single complaint on the internet. The difference in targets' deservability is apparent to me.
Except a lot of those individuals will happily brand you to pigeon hole all your views with a dislikable group, so at this point I think branding them back is fair game.
Okay so now you’re saying you want to get in there and call the other side names just in case. “But but but they started it” is not an argument for anything. I prefer personally to being open to both right wing and left wing ideas and people.
No. I'm saying I don't feel the need to protect any side [+] from being called names. I'm saying people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. That kind of stuff.
[+] note how you just assumed "the other side", and the existence of exactly 2 sides.
These individuals generally share something in common. Whilst I think that "woke mob" may be a bit harsh, arguing that this isn't a group of people (regardless of they themselves think they are a group) is counterproductive. Having a name just makes it easier to talk about this. This isn't about pigeonholing, not any more than labeling people as "far right" or "antifa" is pigeonholing.
That goes for literally any group of people though. SJW, Proud Boys, Antifa, Islamic State, Nazis, the CIA, Drug Cartels. They're all made up of individuals, yet I doubt you want to reserve judgement on individual's membership unless you know what exactly they were doing and do believe for most of those.
But they behave like a mob. The smallest thing can set them off, even them misunderstanding the situation. When they go off, they unashamedly target people's livelihoods. Even if you later have your name cleared, it doesn't undo the damage. The Covington kids are an example that they do behave like a mob.
The alternative interpretation is that they're consciously being malicious.
This isn’t a real thing. It’s an artificial nonsense of social media. It’s nonsense for two reasons:
1a. The number of valid participants is low. It is easy to feel powerful sitting comfortably hidden in your parent’s basement behind a keyboard craving attention and direction. Misery loves company and when such people band together their numbers can appear large compared to something like a real world gathering of persons in a physical space. But it’s not real people in a real space, because that takes considerably greater effort.
1b. The numbers also appear artificially inflated because there is a low effort of repetition, which can appear as false participation, spam, trolling, denial of service.
2. There isn’t any real investment in most of this. Most of the motivation are bored people looking for inspiration to be emotionally concerned. They will point where the carrot leads. That isn’t a movement. A real movement features numerous participants willing to make a personal investment like those criminals that stormed the capital.
The logic according to one Microsoft PM is that if one [white virtue signalling person on behalf of some person involuntary labelled as non privileged] person is offended it's one person too much... It didn't sound well thought out then or now...
What if one black person feels discriminated? What if all black people feel discriminated? I think it's clear that the term blacklist is not discriminatory in origin nor is it used in a discriminating way. If, hypothetically, all black people would feel discriminated then there would be a real gain from changing these words, even if they were never discriminatory to begin with. Still, even in that case, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to give in to "feelings". Feeling discriminated is decidedly not the same as being discriminated and it's a slippery slope when hurting other people's feelings becomes a punishable offence.
So what? There are lots of people of "color" in this world, and most of us don't need our time wasted because some emotionally challenged persons have nothing more productive to do than obsess over how some APIs can conform better to their desires.
The funny thing is that this whole tradeoff of breaking an API to make it better is nothing new; The woke is just bullying everyone by asking the tradeoff to be ignored completely in their favor.
I think this is kindof an important question. "If it's so insignificant, why do you care?".
I don't think it's so hard to understand why some people might be irritated, though. The social attitude that motivates the change to switch away from the term 'master' is not widely held outside of a subset of Americans who are apparently vastly over represented in making these kinds of decisions. It's a bit grating to be saying "consider how others feel" while ignoring how most people feel about it, and making the change made you want anyway.
It's a zeitgeist which results in things like someone complaining that VSCode including a candy cane icon is more offensive than the swastika, and the VSCode repository acceeding this complaint. - I feel if that's where you end up from wanting everyone to feel welcome and included, that you've gotten lost along the way.
Allowing this faux diversity change will only lead to more calls for other faux diversity changes, so the time spent pointing out its vacuousness is well worth it.
Just as security theater isn't real security, diversity theater isn't real diversity. We must stand up and denounce diversity theater and those who profit from it so that we can get focus on diversity efforts that have substance behind them.
I am reminded of Catch-22 about how strong Italy is by not fighting these things, just go with it. Another side will come up and push some other agenda, then just go with that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVWupFBkA8 "“But of course I do,” exclaimed the old man cheerfully. “The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying anymore. But American and German officers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed.”"
Unfortunately I think it is more of a cultural problem than a matter of leadership. The widely used FactoryGirl Ruby gem (the vast majority of Rails setups embed it) was renamed FactoryBot a couple years ago. It's not like my team had a say in this change but overall I was the only one against it but ended up implemented the change, which took about an hour (all our repos + the PRs). Note: technically I was in a situation of harassment.
Not only is your post unnecessarily offensive, you also did not read the OP's post correctly. He did not write that the occupation ended 700 years ago, it lasted 700 years. If my guess for OP's country is correct, it actually ended just 150 years ago.
But what about getting rid of "slave", "blacklist" and "whitelist".
The last two kind of opened my eyes to connotation of black and white, that may be problematic to some. Also I find "allow/denylist" more descriptive, maybe that helps.
>The issue with that is that those words (blacklist/whitelist specifically) have no connotation to race.
Not directly no. But they enforce the unconscious belief that "black == bad" and "white == good". Read up a bit on unconscious/implicit bias [0]. There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening.
Also consider how other industries have approached this problem[1] and how things have changed there.
You can justify pretty much anything with that reasoning. If you follow through with that, you'd have to ban the words "black" and "white" from the language completely, except in a racial context.
> There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening.
This investigation was about seeing faces, not hearing words though.
The 1997 version of the IAT (the test you're talking about) actually used names associated with Black and White American people.
Interestingly enough, there was one paper that concluded that some of the responses to the test was driven by the prior associations between the colours themselves, rather than the racial part.
Should we also stop dressing in black for funerals? Should we stop referring to Black Friday (in Christianity, a day of mourning)? Should we start protesting when Death is represented as dressed in black?
Also, what do blind auditions/interviews (a real change that would make sense in the Software industry as well) have to do with language policing?
I'm not sure if you're adding to what I was saying or contradicting me, but either way, I believe we should be in agreement. Colors have positive and negative connotations way outside of race, they are contextually dependent (your accounting example is very nice, as black is positive while red is negative), and trying to police that is absurd and counter-productive.
I should also mention that I am aware that in Japanese culture (and I believe others in that area, but don't know for sure), the traditional color for mourning is white, not black.
Twitch removed the tag "blind playthrough" because someone complained that it might be offensive to blind people. Of course the person complaining wasn't blind, they just thought they were doing a good deed. Absolute idiots all of them, both the person complaining and Twitch for following with it.
Black Friday is actually an economic thing (day after Thanksgiving in US) the day the companies go into the black/ start showing a profit for the year.
Oops, you're right, I should have researched that a bit...
Still, apparently the origin of the name seems to have more to do with the idea of a "black day" (a day when a disaster occurs), according to Wikipedia:
> The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday originated in Philadelphia, where it was used by police to describe the heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961.
Black has a negative connotation because of its association with death. That is in fact the origin of the term "blacklist" - a list of people associated with the execution of Charles II's father. It's also the origin of the term "black day" - a day of death and, by extension, disaster.
While this association is not in any way "natural" or necessary, and it's not even universal, it is still extraordinarily old - dating all the way to Ancient Egypt and influencing European culture from there to now. And thus, it is extraordinarily hard to remove by playing language games with one word.
> Not directly no. But they enforce the unconscious belief that "black == bad" and "white == good". Read up a bit on unconscious/implicit bias [0]. There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening.
This is a pretty huge jump in reasoning. These things have nothing to do with each other. You might as well be saying "red means stop and green means go, so subconsciously people hate Native Americans". Which is nonsense for many reasons.
Perhaps principally that people can discern racial features from faces without using colors at all.
It's not common usage, but we're supposedly talking about unspoken and unconscious bias, so why aren't any vague linguistic or metaphorical associations fair game? The argument is precisely that you _don't_ directly think of red as related to Native Americans, so it doesn't make much sense for you to say that people don't think about it like that in response. Because well, yeah, the question is whether they _unthinkingly_ make the association.
Let me paraphrase this argument, but correct me if you have a different understanding:
- 'black' and 'white' have some racial associative strength, x, which is sufficient to cause bias in other contexts. I.e. x > r for some threshold r.
- 'red' has racial associative strength kx, for some k < 1. I think we agree that k < 1, since the association is less strong. Where we differ is I am (hypothetically) saying kx > r, still, whereas you (seemingly) think kx < r.
This is a strange argument because we've never actually established the relative values of x or r. Even if we assume the first point is true, it tells us nothing about the second, because kx might still be below or above the threshold.
In fact, we _haven't_ demonstrated the first point anyway, so it's just compounding an already hand-wavey explanation of how things work. If someone can assume x > r with little evidence, why can't I assume kx > r? You might have priors on the size of k because you think 'red' is less strongly associated with race, but we know nothing about x or r, so it's pretty irrelevant. If you can hand wave the first point, you can hand wave the second. As I did.
I'd rather there was no hand-waving. But if that's the game we're playing...
But in some contexts black is bad and white is good. Would you rather move into the light or into the darkness? It's in our genes to prefer the more well light areas much of the time and this is a valuable survival instinct.
> But they enforce the unconscious belief that "black == bad" and "white == good".
No, they don't. What your sources did was bring to light the current stereotypes in people's head, not how they were created. What you want to do is change those stereotypes, not mingling with the words that only communicate the stereotypes. It's about the concepts in the heads, not the words.
If you want to change the stereotypes (which you can't remove, just change), you have to provide different pictures: Showcase black business men/women, talk about the performance of Obama, have high achievers with diverse background do talks in schools, or sports stars do shows with kids, do shows with female arab DJs and so on. In short: Give the brains of people input that forces them to adapt their stereotypes.
This differentiation of signified and signifier often is hard to get right if your own moral system already conforms to the social goal, because in that case the word seems to be equal to the concept/meaning. So we just have to transport to word to transport the meaning, right? But this isn't how language works. Words can only trigger the frame they belong to if the other person already has the concept in her mind.
Just to be clear we talk about the same thing: Words have zero meaning by themselves (and this is not my personal opinion, but consensus in cognitive linguistics).
So you can use words to describe things (like we do right now), and thus hope to invoke mutual understanding, but you can't put a new concept into another person's head by inventing a word. You can trigger a concept already there if the other person already associates a specific meaning with a specific word, though.
So if you want to better the situation for e.g. African Americans in the US, replacing "master branch" with "main branch" has no effect, because a) this master is not the master/slave master - the words may have had identical meaning (I don't know, perhaps both meanings have a common ancestor), but today the word "master" in the context (=frame) of source code respositories means something completely different than master/slave. Just as "slave" in the US doesn't mean "person of slavic origin" anymore.
But more importantly you don't change the stereotype of African Americans this way. That you'll only achieve by constantly pushing different images of African Americans in the relevant contexts, like, off the top of my head, a collective day where every github user with darker skin starts to use a real profile picture on github.
Unconscious bias may well exist and have a meaningful impact on life.
But unconscious bias testing has been shown not to test anything in a consistent manner, being largely unreproducible, and unconscious bias training has been shown not to impact anything much or even consistently impact test results.
Such things appear to be pseudoscience and bordering on a scam.
Something to think about: are you typically prescriptivist about language, or are you more of a descriptivist? If you are a descriptivist (most people are, but you might not be) it might be worth pondering why you're being prescriptivist on this issue.
Technically speaking, this is the opposite - the point is that while a prescriptivist would find the whole thing a bit silly a descriptivist would have a problem with this situation, because it is creating new racial insult (eg, calling something a blacklist in the presence of a black person) where none existed before.
It seems like a mistake to invent racial terms out of whole cloth for no reason. It shouldn't be done.
Linguistic prescription is saying it shouldn't be done because there are rules, and the change breaks them.
I'm not saying that. My position is it shouldn't be done because creating new slurs for no reason is stupid. A prescriptivist and a descriptivist could both agree to that, though they'd disagree with each other on whether the idea of the change is legitimate.
Which is probably a similar position to ccmcarey's original comment. No position was taken on whether the change breaks the rules of language or not, the argument was that either way the change is being bought on by ignorance of both normal usage and the lineage of the word (ie, potentially in defiance of both prescriptivist and descriptivist logic).
This isn't really an issue of prescriptive vs descriptive philosophy. Although the descriptivists will be hopping mad.
None of this helps. All this worthless virtue signalling does is irk people, and make them start ignoring actual societal issues.
Absolutely no one is using words like blacklist in association with black people, in the same way that (almost) no one uses lame in reference to a crippled person anymore.
Do you even know any black people that give a damn about changing words just to appease American black people? Most of my family is black and so are most of my close friends. They would all find this absurd.
Mind you, these are Trinidadian black people, and so we are all the descendents of slaves as well. This is all so condescending and borderline demeaning that white people think that we are so inept that we think such changes would affect literally anything in life.
Do you think there's any relation between the naming of whitelist/blacklist and skin color? I certainly don't. Colors and their associations exist beyond racial identity.
Also, what is the problem in calling the relationship between two processes (one fully controlling the other) master-slave? It's a perfectly suitable analogy and does not have anything to do with any one person's ethnicity or history. I'll go a step further and say that looking at this whole thing entirely in the context of the mistreatment of african americans is unfair to people all over the world who have a history of slavery - as other posters have noted, there are plenty examples of that for people of all races. This is not exclusive to one group of people and no one can claim ownership of the word.
I'm generally not in favor of these changes. Blacklist/whitelist I can kind of see, but then again, why make it about skin color? It's natural that we'd have a connotation of bright things being good and dark things being bad (as in, our surroundings), because we like being able to see.
Any resemblance to words used to describe skin color is coincidental, I think.
My own country has been occupied by foreign forces so hard that it stopped existing for 100 years. It nearly erased our culture and lots of people died. Should I now start telling people that using the word "occupied" in places like "occupied toilet" or "occupation" to mean employment is somehow offensive to me?
Or maybe should I realize that as a literate adult, I have the ability to understand context around the words that are used?
GitHubs decision is a form of cultural imperialism. That's what it really is. Only because the US want's to somehow deal with a dark part of it's history, the rest of the world should not be foreced to adapt their views.
I think you're too naive. This decision makers are not worried about anything but their PR. Your competitor is the Woke mob, although they'll say they do it for you.
Adressing real issues cost money. Making bullshit changes is free.
The culture shock is particularly noticeable for non-anglo people.
I will never go along with that farce, especially when I learned that a bunch of people bullied Antirez for years in order to force him to change the language in Redis.
It serves absolutely no purpose, other than for a group of people to feel like they have an ideological hold on the IT industry. Some of these people are already coming with new lists of "forbidden words" they are trying to impose with the old same excuse of "diversity and inclusiveness". Enough.
We've had a few months to turn off an option in Github to change this behavior. I believe there was even an email that went out and a thread on HN concerning this change. Any conversation at this point is just whinging to the void to farm engagement.
> Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.
So do we know where that decision actually came from?
It does rather smack of presentism, SV companies might be better doing a proper transparent pay / promotion survay to identify discrimination amongst their employees - Based on my direct experience in the UK there will be Discrimination.
Additionally properly identifying the impact of race on ai/ml derived algorithms would be a better use of time.
But of course these would have cost and other implications that companies would not want to do.
In many cases it's more than ridiculous, it
s completely non-sensical. What is the logic behind removing the word "master" even supposed to be?
The problem with slavery is not that there is a word for it, it's that it exists, and used to be very common. By using the word "master" we are not condoning slavery, nobody can believe that. Just like we are not condoning domestic violence by using the word "hit" in "hit song".
For the word blacklist I can see how misguided people could make a case, since the word black is used for something negative. Still ridiculous of course.
Another absurd example: In my project they decided to change the name of a "blackout tool". There is nothing negative about this tool, it doesn't make things worse, it just colours them black.
This is a topic I feel cannot be openly discussed on HN (and basically everywhere else), sadly.
I switched from Github to Gitlab after this change. Political correctness is a great way to know that a company has the completely wrong focus and will be unable to innovate and create good products.
Well, they gave admins the option to change the default branch name to whatever they like, and they've announced they're changing from master to main by default in the next two months or so: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/10/new-git-default-bra...
You may as well stop using Git completely then, since Git itself uses main as recommended.
It has been discussed to death on HN, what are you talking about?
Now for some notes on your comment:
- Gitlab has switched the name of the master branch too
- The point is not that it is harmful or bad to do so, and anyone actually crusading against this change as if it was some kind of a slippery slope leading to the downfall of their subculture or even civilization may want to think about their priorities and sense of hyperbole.
- This is not at all what the article complains about. The author argues that this is essentially a form of virtue signalling that allows essentially overpaid white engineers to pat themselves in the back without putting in actual work and money for diversity, inclusion, and equality; a symbolic change that is not rooted in materialism.
> It has been discussed to death on HN, what are you talking about?
Not without getting downvoted to oblivion for the only reason which is having an opposing opinion.
> Gitlab has switched the name of the master branch too
Yes I have been made aware of that now.
> The point is not that it is harmful or bad to do so, and anyone actually crusading against this change as if it was some kind of a slippery slope leading to the downfall of their subculture or even civilization may want to think about their priorities and sense of hyperbole.
I don't even understand this sentence.
> - This is not at all what the article complains about. The author argues that this is essentially a form of virtue signalling that allows essentially overpaid white engineers to pat themselves in the back without putting in actual work and money for diversity, inclusion, and equality; a symbolic change that is not rooted in materialism.
So.. it's exactly what the article complains about?
GitLab made the change[1] as well unfortunately. I completely agree with everything written in the post as well. The problem with attacking words for cheap points is that it doesn't make a difference to the actual problem and is mainly used to show "aware" and "great" people are.
Yes and no. Git took the terminology from BitKeeper, which did have master and slave repositories. So while there are no slave anythings in git, git uses the term because of the master-slave meaning.
I just want to add a link to this[0] post here as a counterpoint for why changing language _can_ matter.
The author seems to imply that the name change is all about being non-offensive to some people. Since the author doesn't find the language offensive, they conclude that name change is only political correctness or virtue signalling and a hollow gesture. I do not agree with that. Language and words are very powerful in how we perceive the world. A changing vocabulary is part of cultural change.
Everything humans do is part of cultural change, because what humans do is change things.
The post is about prioritisation. Moving the needle in a way that matters, not merely doing something so we can pat ourselves on the back for doing it.
Just because you can change something it doesn't mean you should or ought to. Opportunity cost....
No, it's not saying that at all. You are missing all the nuance.
It's saying that the change which has a small effect is never worth while (and... pay attention now. This is the other part of the post you missed: context)....
*IN RELATION TO* the larger effect which costs the same in time/effort/capital/energy/emotions/stress/give-a-fuck.
Ok, so what is that larger effect that costs the same, then?
The idea that you need to do something that is better before you can do something that is less, even if the cost is the same seems to imply that there is only a limited amount of energy that is expendable on these topics.
As seen from the bucketloads of comments and posts about this OLD issue (the python link is from 2018) it seems there's enough energy going around.
The idea that something can't be good, just because it is not the highest item on a list is nonproductive.
Nobody is saying that X isn't good.
Everybody is saying that X is good, but Y is much better.
So if you want to make a productive choice then go for Y, not X!
At the very least, if you are going to choose X anyway stop trying to persuade everybody else to choose X with you, when they are already focusing on Y. That's just attention-seeking behaviour.
You are extremely uncharitable. There's no point of engaging you further.
> Since the author doesn't find the language offensive
You're missing the point, the author concludes that the companies decide that the language is offensive without asking the people who are supposedly the offended party.
Are you sure about that though? They didn't publish anything about their internal decision making. It is an assumption that they didn't talk to any person of color. The idea of using so called neutral terms is not new: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3243656.stm
See my other comment, the author says the change didn't involve the black developer community. I have no knowledge either way, just emphasizing their point.
Sure. I'm just calling their point into question because I see a lot of people of color that are actively engaged in the evolution of language in the context of slavery. The Rijksmuseum in The Nederlands has changed most occurrences of 'slave' to 'enslaved person' and trying to find out the actual name of the person depicted, among other things. The commission that was responsible for this change was headed by a person of color[0]. This isn't a movement that we are only seeing in Silicon Valley.
As far as I know, most of the changes happening at large companies regarding this have been driven internally primarily by people of color - at MSFT, which owns GitHub, some of these changes were being driven by Employee Resource Groups (affinity groups) which are made up of those who would be affected by the language, for example
From the article, I don't believe this is "the opinion of a white guy":
Being a highly paid software engineer, like most of you reading this, did not stop a bully van flying up the curb I was walking on and 7 City of London police officers pinning me against a wall with guns in my face. They wouldn’t believe it was possible for someone like me to work in central London till one of them searched me and found my work ID. All this because I fit a description. What was this description? I don’t know, black male between 4’11 and 7’4 probably.
I read this whole article, super disappointed. Its nothing but a bunch of assertions about something being offensive without even a small effort to show why it is. This just perpetuates the idea that this is just virtue signaling and has no effects.
> Last summer an(other) unarmed black man was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [...] So, what was tech’s big song and dance? Let’s remove offensive terminology from our collective lexicon. There were several casualties, white/blacklist are examples of words deemed to be too offensive to use.
In my memory this started way before the recent BLM protests - around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced.
> around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced.
The things about the CoCs that really annoyed me:
1. People would literally go around projects and send pull requests just to change the code of conduct to improve the wording even tho no one had made any complaints or anything. Anytime a CoC get added you would see more people mess around with the CoC than the code. It was like people just wanted to look like they were improving things while not actually doing anything.
2. The only blog posts I've seen about CoCs at conferences and stuff have sounded nuts. One was for SunshinePHP[0] where one of the infractions was someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better. They wrote that they told the offender to go to his room to prevent him from being assaulted. But mentions nothing happening about a guy threatening violence for flirting. I would understand if they were threatening violence in response to violence but flirting, nah. Then there was the whole fast.ai[1] thing where the infraction was basically someone was offended on the behalf of someone else who wasn't offended.
>someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better
I don't know what you think flirting is but that ain't it. Your man was being a creep and while I'd agree violence isn't the answer, I'm not at all surprised if he was threatened. (I also wouldn't be surprised if he was just told to back off initially but then pushed the issue because that is what creeps do.)
And if for some reason this still isn't obvious to the reader, here's a top tip for how to avoid getting into a fight: maybe don't insult people.
> I don't know what you think flirting is but that ain't it.
Let's be serious it depends on the context of the conversation. She could have been flirting with him and then when he flirted she said "but I have a boyfriend" and he could had said that and she could have agreed. That is flirting. It could have been what we suspect some guy hitting on a woman and she said "I have a boyfriend" and he said that. I used the word flirting because that is what the source used.
The guy was probably a creep and I am not surprised either but if you're going to have a code of conduct for everyones safety then say someone had to go to their room for their safety tells me your code of conduct isn't for safety but for apperance.
CoC is such a strange document. All I’ve seen it do is sit in a repo as a flag post. When I see a license document it gets me thinking about what intentions the project is released with, but when I see a CoC document all I do is mentally filter it out and go about my day..
One would think it could leave some sense about the maintainer(s) being decent in some way. Instead I’m just left with a feeling of coercion if anything.
It just shouldn’t be necessary to “present” yourself as a decent person as the author of some code.
Some document in a project folder online doesn’t make you or me better people. It seems to me more of a futile (and stupid) gesture if anything.
We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Putting a document in our projects telling others that we are doesn’t really change that.
A standardized way of telling others you are a certain way, doesn’t make you so. It relieves us of putting in the effort if anything.
I'm curious how you plan to run a community without formalizing the rules that are expected to be followed somewhere. Restaurants generally have a sign outlining dress and language expectations, why is it so controversial to document community behavior expectations?
There are a number of internet communities which essentially have this in the opposite form - as in "getting insulted is expected, no we are not going to do anything about it".
This was the de facto Linux mailing list way for a bit, and was somewhat documented in a lot of "how to interact and what to expect on LKML" guides.
Is "don't be a dick" not enough? For a long while there was a group of militant people hell bent on having everyone keep a CoC in their repos and ironically being the more intrusive and rude force themselves. I don't think any such document I've read has had any more substance or achieved much beyond the initial kerfuffle
If everyone is going to act in good faith the whole time, sure, it's fine. But as soon as you get one person acting in bad faith, it all falls apart - see the current Republican Party, for example.
Definitely not. My impression though, is that the people who care about their conduct might read the document, and others will just gloss over it anyway. The energy is better spent elsewhere .
I know this is controversial, but I still love SQLite's old code of conduct (now 'code of ethics'[1]). Its based on some old religious text. If you skip the religious bits, the rest is extremely wholesome. I much prefer it over most projects' CoCs - I've never seen much benefit in spending a lot of words to say "please be civil".
Reading CoCs they are usually full of language that you would expect people would have already learned in Kindergarden. Unfortunately there are too many grown-ups around that seem to not have internalized these things, so while I don't like the patronizing myself, I see some value in writing down a set of "if you wanna collaborate here, please respect these rules".
And while you are right, the code itself doesn't care, there are lot's of interactions around producing that code that are between humans, where behaviour is important.
>Unfortunately there are too many grown-ups around that seem to not have internalized these things
This is true, but they wont read the CoC. And even if they do, they won't follow it. If someone can't practice basic decency, a txt file won't change them. Its an entirely futile effort at best and more likely a virtue signal than actually trying to improve things.
The only thing that works is strict moderation. You don't need a CoC for that.
I agree that a CoC by itself doesn't do anything. But if you want to do strict moderation, you need to put in place some rules that you can use to guide moderation and to make it transparent what the rules ares whch govern this moderation.
Otherwise you end up with arbitrarily enforced rules, created ad-hoc by whoever is doing the enforcing, without a way to know what they are or a way to appeal if you feel wrongly moderated.
Good. Otherwise people will pretend to be a laywer and talk about how _technically_ the rules don't say specifically what they did. Its a waste of time.
But really, in all my time on github and gitlab I have never seen an actual contributor violate common sense and common decency. The only shitty things I have seen have been anon users piling in on issue threads which have gone viral and in that case you just limit the repo to contributors only.
I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word but I can see nothing wrong in "master". Not a single moment in my life I thought about slavery when hearing/seeing the word "master". Should we also rename master degrees perhaps?
It should be noted that of all of the ways master is used in this thread, master bedroom is pretty high up there in bad history and connotation. The etymology derives from the 'master of the house', a term which historically served to diminish the agency of wives, servants, and slaves. I don't know about master/main, but I could definitely get behind renaming master bedrooms.
Company I'm currently working for deals with real estate drawings. We were notified recently that we're changing "Master bedroom" to "Main bedroom" too.
In Dutch (both in .nl and .be), the English term 'master bedroom' was fashionable for a few years, until the stigma of that term carried over from the Anglosphere and it's now being replaced (in the woke areas of the country) with 'ouderslaapkamer', which is literally translated 'parent bedroom'. Although now that term itself is 'controversial' (not mainstream controversial, more in small hardcore circles, so I'm not sure if this will actually become an issue) because (to the best of my understanding of this objection) 'parent bedroom' implies that the 2-parents-with-children family form is normative (you can't make this up if you tried to), which it shouldn't be.
Not sure what my point is, maybe that using 'master' for 'main' is no longer outright commonly accepted usage?
About 'parent bedroom', a lot of houses are occupied by house-sharers these days. Some sharers get the 'parent bedroom', others get the non-parent bedroom but they are all the same age. It makes some sense to change the description.
That's a utilitarian argument (I think?) that I could get behind (not that anyone asks for my opinion on what rooms should be called). From that POV I guess it would be best to just call any room that isn't a kitchen or bathroom just 'room' and let buyers decide. But then again, most people don't have much imagination and like to be shown how space can or is intended to be used, much like how a neatly decorated house sells easier than an empty or cluttered one.
But the objections I read about last summer (tried looking but I can't find it any more) were moral, that the term is also 'oppressive' (not sure if that's the actual term they used, that was the gist of it), basically the same arguments that are made for removing 'master' from Git, language frames our thinking etc.
In the UK, lots of real estate descriptions side-step the problem completely and use terms like 'Bedroom 1' for the largest bedroom and 'Bedroom 2' etc for the 2nd largest.
I'd never heard of any stigma around the word 'master' until today... It's still as commonly used to refer to master bedrooms in Australia as it ever was...
In Ye Olde Dayes it referred to someone who had control or authority over a place, object, craft, etc -- a teacher would be a master for example. It's a common word across European languages, and certainly predated the atlantic slave trade.
Probably descended from the Latin word "magister", which (despite Rome having plenty of slaves) didn't neccersarilly refer to a slaveowner -- indeed many Roman slaves were Ludi Magister -- educated slaves that were teachers at Roman schools
Etymology of "master bedroom" seems to come from "Master's bedroom" in boarding schools, where it was the bedroom that the school master occupied (with Master having descended from Roman times)
That’s my impression too. “Slave” should be replaced with some other more neutral term, but “master” shouldn’t be a problem. There are multiple uses of it in different contexts, but the shared implication is of a definitive source:
Master copy; Remastered (music); Master of Arts/Sciences; Mastery
Etc. None of that implies a master-slave relationship.
The English word “master” comes from the Latin “magister,” which is freighted with thousands of years of meanings and history. The meaning of slaveowner was not one of those meanings until probably the seventeenth or eighteenth century. In Latin, “magister,” never meant the master of slaves (a “herus” most properly, or a “dominus,” an owner of anything with legal title to that thing). Instead, the “magister” was a leader of a group: the “magister equitum” was a cavalry commander, and a “ludi magister” a schoolmaster or classroom teacher. It is from the latter that we have “master” in the sense of an MA (magister artium) degree, which, like the PhD, was originally a teaching license. The use of the English “master” to refer to slavery is comparatively recent and might well not predate the eighteenth century.
I'd be really interested to hear from any black people here - does the idea of having a device or piece of software being called a 'slave' really actually offend anybody?
I'd never subconsciously linked the term with human slaves, only ever really thinking of it as an abstract concept, until people started complaining about it... Part of it may be coming from a different cultural context, not being from the US though...
> I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word
Can you clarify this? If one machine/repo/system acts only on the orders of another, wouldn't "master" and "slave" be clear, descriptive choices of words?
Let's say you had a database based application and a feature to remove a subset of records. You wouldn't call that feature any variant of "ethnic clensing", "genocide" or "Holocaust", no matter how descriptive those terms were for your specific function.
Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln't be used as a description.
There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"
Demon, also spelled daemon, Classical Greek daimon, in Greek religion, a supernatural power. In Homer the term is used almost interchangeably with theos for a god. The distinction there is that theos emphasizes the personality of the god, and demon his activity.
These aren't metaphors, though. For example, a "parent process" uses the term "parent" that's defined as "a source or origin of a smaller or less important part," not "a father or mother," or one of the other half-dozen definitions
One of the definitions of "slave" is "A device (such as a secondary flash or hard drive) that is subject to the control of another". Is that not a metaphor either?
There is no need for the metaphor to be perfect. It should make clear what each device/process/whatever does without confusing people. The exact details aren't that important, understanding the roles is.
On my computer I can open a folder twice without closing it. I can't open a physical folder twice without closing.
With a race condition, no one cares if both processes started at the same time. That's not an important part of the analogy.
Even your point about killing doesn't really fit with the metaphor. Historically, whipping would be the most common punishment.
I do agree with your idea that the metaphor has to be clear. Modbus replace master/slave with client/server, which tends to confuse people used to the old analogy. It's not ideal, but neither is referring back to that time we could trade people.
I don't think it's ridiculous, no. (But I think wincing at some of your examples would be.)
Really I'm not the best person to judge though. I'm happy to be guided by people who experience racism and groups tackling the legacy of slavery. Because those things seem important whereas my terminology preferences for asymmetric nodes in a distributed system, when there are plenty of sensible alternatives, seem less so.
Same here, until this debate surfaced I never thought about slavery when I saw these terms.
What made me think more about slavery was the materials that go into computers like cobalt and sulfur. Someone has to go down into the sulfur mine and get that for us. That's an actual master/slave relationship that is going on right now to power all our fantastic infrastructure.
But so much industry has depended on sulfur for so many years that this debate is much deeper and more complex. The ugly truth is that someone far away has to be enslaved for us to live comfortably.
Bring that debate to the front instead and we might find a technical solution to it.
But it's always cheaper to find a desperate person than to maintain a robot that is being attacked by gas and sulfur daily.
And now I am imagining some video where they go down into sulfur mine and tell one of the miners "We bring great news for you! Github changed the default name of master code branches to something else! Gitlab too! It was kind of a little bit annoying a little but they're doing it anyway!"
Yeah and just think, then we could also tell those people about how a wrongly accused man in not their country was released after charitable efforts to clear his name, in the process overturning a negligent evidence handling process which will make things much better going forwards!
And...it still wouldn't matter to those people at all because it wouldn't change their specific situation!
But the parent argument is valid, you just somehow missed it despite it being descibed and illustrated.
github's action isn't absurd because it doesn't change any random person's situation. It's absurd because of the specific people whose specific situations are not improved.
Note how master is not even the main term used to describe people who had slaves. The term typically used is owner, as in "so and so was a slaveowner."
A Marxist would chuckle at the notion that Microsoft would be removing the word "owner" for being offensive.
>I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word
I disagree, however I'm not a native English speaker. It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working. We can't ban master/slave as a word or we will loose understanding of what it means. Another poster already mentioned that there are actual human slaves in existence today. I once heard in our time there are more human slaves than ever (mostly due to there being more people overall). It is sad that large companies like Microsoft(Github) choose to waste energy on such pointless activities instead of actually doing something about modern slavery.
Microsoft is still in unique position of being able to pressure hardware makers. Why don't they pressure them into at least trying to improve conditions of actual slaves that mine cobalt and other rare materials at the bottom of their supply chain?
Slave means neither of those things. A slave, in technical terms, means a "dumb" worker (meaning it doesn't make its own decisions about how it operates within the greater system) that is controlled by another module in the system (often called a "master").
And no, "worker" isn't descriptive because it doesn't specify the nature of autonomy within the system - oftentimes, a worker might autonomously pick tasks off a queue and perform work offline or something. A slave is directly, actively and imperatively given commands by another entity in the system.
Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait.
"Slave" is the only word that accurately infers the technical operating aspects of such an actor within system's design.
Stop messing with our vocabulary please. We need it to do real work. Bring on the downvotes, because I know the performative woke crowd loves to ignore these facts.
I would have likely upvoted you without the request for downvotes, but sure I guess I'll oblige. Even if it won't convince you to change, maybe I can warn other people you're using such an annoying rhetorical device.
Because the topic is annoying rhetoric. It doesn't do anything to solve the problem of racism or prejudice or poverty or socioeconomic imbalance or guard us against a police state or whatever it is people seek to "fix" with these inane changes.
I'm also very tired of being a labelled a Nazi, hence the tone.
Yes, and a slave database is probably better called a replica. Because that's more descriptive of what it is.
> Secondary means backup or parity module.
Or it could mean the second device on a bus, IDE master/slave for example seems to me to be better as primary/secondary (or even, first/second.)
> Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait.
I dunno, that sounds to me like overloading a word unnecessarily.
> Stop messing with our vocabulary please.
No. Choosing more descriptive words is only a better thing. Stop trying to weirdly limit vocabulary, please.
Slave is the more descriptive word. These aren't my definitions. They have been around for ages. You're the one changing descriptions for your own amusement.
I don't know of any meaning of the "slave" word besides a person doing involuntary labor.
BTW I remember Russians translating master/slave (in the IT context, e.g. primary/secondary master/slave for IDE PATA drives) as the the leading and the led.
Once you agree that one word is apt for removal then you agree with the agenda that the article author roundly rejects.
By going down the road of agreeing to some words to be removed you're then imposing a presumption of guilt on anyone who refuses to remove said words. If I maintain some software that uses the word slave or blacklist and I don't accede to making the changes to remove it, or agree to approve a PR that does the same, then it's presumed I am stubborn or worse still, racist. Despite the usage of the word being completely innocent.
Of course, context is everything, which only proves the point. You cannot systematically ban certain words.
The important thing to know here is that it is not how you interpret the words that matter. Social justice isn’t asking how github or existing developers feel because it isn’t a change that takes their feelings into account.
I’m playing devil’s advocate. I don’t have strong feelings on this specific change, but I can see my line of thinking surprisingly absent in this entire thread.
Though I initially sympathized with the name change from master to main (cause I don't care what it is called), I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause. It is a bit complicated as the name change in itself is not bad, but given the context, and that it distracts from addressing real issues it actually is.
Same thing with plastic recycling, in and of itself it is better than landfill, but as it allows us to feel good and look away from the real problem (plastic is cheap because most impacts are externalized) the recycling of plastic contributes more to the problem than to the solution. I know people who traveled around the world about once a year, own a big house and altogether have a pretty big impact that could easily be reduced, but they do recycle plastic and think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.
I think such a change generates awareness. A lot of problems linger in the tech sector I'm not really aware of. The write up of the article author sheds light again on biased recruitment in the tech sector. Something that appears to be a fundamental problem with the education sector in the US being broken.
If someone decided they don't care about bias in the tech sector because the default git branch name was changed, they weren't going to and didn't care to start with.
This feels like a strawman - the issue isn't people deciding they don't care about bias because of this change, but rather that if tech companies are bending over so much as to make such an insignificant change to avoid seeming biased against minorities then how could bias in the tech industry exist at all?
I'm confused by this question, aren't you essentially asking, "how can a problem exist if some people are presently taking actions that try to mitigate that problem?"
The hate I've seen generated by ham-handed thought-and-speech policing is hate against the people doing the policing and hate against people standing up against the policing, not hate against the people the policing is ostensibly protecting.
So no, it's not revealing existing hate. It's actively generating new hate.
The hate against the people "doing the policing" and the hate against the "people standing up to the policy" were already there. Hate doesn't spring parthenogenically from the void, it has to be seeded and nurtured and cultivated and be vomited out only when the time is right.
Voicing a disagreement does not require or beget hate.
I really don't think so. Most obviously because those two groups did not even exist as entities most people were conscious of until recently.
> Hate doesn't spring parthenogenically from the void
Of course not. But it sure can be seeded and nurtured, as you note, by actions people take. And far too many people have been taking various actions that look to me as if they are designed, intentionally or not, to seed and nurture hate. And fear, for that matter. Which are not unrelated things: hate and fear are deeply intertwined and beget each other.
> Voicing a disagreement does not require or beget hate.
That is most certainly true. At the same time, a disagreement _can_ be voiced in a way that begets hate, and all too often is (e.g. via attacking the person, not the idea). And suppressing disagreement can absolutely beget hate. I feel like both are on the rise, unfortunately.
But it is good awarness? The major awarness people get from this cases is not about actual problems, but about very questionable wording-problems and behaviour of certain people. Not sure whether this at the end not creates more hate&blind eyes than important awarness.
I have the same issue and it's frustrating, but I understand. Last time I checked we don't even recycle the plastics here in the US. They get packed up and sent over seas which is even worse.
Less so since many of the target countries stopped accepting it. But the issue is that the stuff you could make by recycling these categories is of such low quality that nobody wants to buy them.
This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they're only capable of doing one thing full stop. I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
> think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.
Well, I guess they're more environmentally responsible than if they weren't recycling plastic. It's better to do something, however small, than nothing, surely? (And I doubt their environmental footprint even registers in the grand scheme of things - it's industry we need to shame, not individuals for the moment.)
[1] Who wasn't already heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery, etc., I suppose.
> I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
Surprisingly, human minds do seem to work that way. After doing a "good" deed, we're liable to believe that we've done our part, and owe society no further action. Even if our good deed didn't actually change anything.
> After doing a "good" deed, we're liable to believe that we've done our part, and owe society no further action.
Yet people keep on recycling and switching their lightbulbs after they do the first one (a "good" deed.) People keep protesting even after they've succeeded in one protest. etc.
People will naturally continue with their existing behaviour, but I think the GP was saying that once people have adopted a behaviour to aid cause X they sometimes stop looking for other "gooder" behaviours addressing the same issue.
> imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they're only capable of doing one thing full stop
A lazy and overused argument. No one said only one thing can be done. Fact is time and attention are resources and by doing some thing you allocate less of them to other things.
To turn it into a specific example, in a large enough company, to make the master->main change you have to: announce it, update the repo, update the documentation, update the CI, update any automation around code, then everyone has to update their local copies. It takes time that costs the company real money. You can calculate that amount and ask the company to donate it to an organisation which can influence real change instead of renaming.
Furthermore, it's human's psychology that once you've done such "token good deeds", you feel good about yourself and less inclined to do some real thing, right now. Not everyone is subjected to that mentality, but I think most do.
There is a chasm between “doing something like this distracts from more effective options for change” and “people can only do one thing at a time”, and arguing the latter when someone says the former feels disingenuous.
For example, in California, due to long term drought, urban water usage legislation was enacted. Urban water usage in California accounts for less than 10% of the state’s total usage, so a 20% reduction, at significant personal impact to urban residents, has a sub 2% impact on total use. However, it also gives the appearance that the legislature is actively engaged in addressing the problem of water conservation to under-informed voters without compelling those legislators to address agricultural and manufacturing uses (and their organized lobbying efforts).
The problem with “every little bit helps” mentalities is that they enable perverse outcomes when coupled with limited information decision making, finite resources, and multiple concerns to balance. All of this leads to the politically optimal (and thus career sustaining) option set being deeply suboptimal application of resources.
> I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
This is exactly what people do. WAY too many people do "feel-good" charity work. They just pick something that's visible, easily partaken and then decide they're "helping" and go about their lives feeling better.
Like donating clothes to Africa, which actually harms the local economy[1][2]. As does dumping tons and tons of food without proper end to end oversight.
Or having a demonstration in a public location, bothering the end-users or workers of a business. Because it's easy and good publicity. They don't attack the people on top who actually make the decisions, because it's hard and boring work.
Americans at large are heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery.
Our President still lives in a house built by enslaved peoples. Our Congress still legislates in a Capitol built by enslaved peoples.
That fact remains true, and is the prima facie evidence that all Americans have profited from our legacy of slavery, and that we aren't all that concerned with tearing down that legacy and eliminating the harms to folks that those monuments contain... instead a plaque or statue explaining the role of the enslaved peoples is enough.
Ironically, the solutions prescribed here are themselves virtue signaling: in that they do nothing to actually right the wrongs of the past.
As a practical way to help, I want to call out organizations like DonorsChoose. Find a Title I school or one with high economic need, and chances are high that a) more of the students are people of color; b) they don't have an effective or well-resourced PTA; c) their asks for resources are for basics that you'd assume would already be provided for. For those who want to make an actual difference, I'd highly encourage supporting an organization like this, and I'm pretty sure their communities would appreciate it more than tearing down the White House. https://www.donorschoose.org/donors/search.html?moderateHigh...
I didn't prescribe any solution- I'm not advocating tearing down the structures in a symbolic act to try and placate people. I'm pointing out the fact that all Americans stand today on the shoulders of an ancestry which enslaved peoples, and which we bear the onus of eliminating the traces of that power imbalance from our society, not just saying "hey, we don't mean master THAT WAY, you know?"
> this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause
The root cause can't be addressed by the same people who reap the benefits of this system, because it's so deep in its core that it would require substantial change, possibly breaking the system itself.
You don't. Nobody does. The plastic you "recycle" gets turned into lower grade plastic and so on until it gets landfilled. For plastic, the only way is down.
Steel, aluminium and glass are examples of materials that are recyclable.
I separate plastic so it can be either burnt together with my other trash, or shipped to Turkey where god knows what environmental crime is committed with it. An extremely small percentage might be melted into some low grade park bench. Absolutely zero plastic will be turned into high quality plastic pellets for industrial as a substitute for new plastic. It does not make me feel good, but not doing it makes me feel worse.
I just voted today for real change. Voting matters, plastic "recycling" doesn't*
* if you live in a place where you have meaningfully different options, not just two flavors of the same
> I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause
Came here to express similar opinion and your articulation has succinctly and perfectly captured it so I'll just add to it.
Over the years I've come to realise that effecting real change to address the root cause is hard. It almost certainly won't be done by private corporations; the changes need to be enforced by (and at) institutions that are answerable to communities e.g., right to quality education, a humane law enforcer. Not only is change going to be hard but slow as well. However with more and more institutions getting privatised (private jails, contracted police force etc.,) whose sole motive is to earn more profits I don't see how anything is going to improve in the near future. So what ends up happening is every atrocity against oppressed community gets hijacked by these private mega-corps as they sense PR opportunity.
To take another example; Diversity & Inclusion. We do all the song and dance at the workplace to make it more diverse. But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it's excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person. The reasons are obvious, the entire education system (and society to an extent) is so rigged against oppressed community that it takes a miracle for one of their community to even make it to resume-writing stage. Instead of addressing the problem at the root cause (make it easier for them to get high quality education, lead a decent life) every corporation makes a big PR-noise around D&I while in reality the work place continues to be non-diverse. Net result is we end up having debates like "why should we reduce interview bar", "it's unfair to the deserving candidates" while completely being blind to the root cause of the problem.
> But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it's excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person.
I agree based on my personal experiences.
One of the concrete suggestions by the author of the blog post really strikes me as a step that we could implement, but we don’t: drawing from non-traditional backgrounds. And it’s because it’s an uphill battle. Much easier to do some low hanging fruit.
I’m not a minority in tech, but coming into my current job I had a semi-traditional background. Even getting first rounds was a struggle, only ameliorated by having a professional network of tech people, which is very much not something that you can expect a non-traditional candidate to have.
Seriously, my “get to phone screen” rate without network referrals was around 2-3%. With referrals was about 60%. That’s how bad it gets. So now when it’s in my direct control I go out of my way to look for non-traditional backgrounds in the pipeline and give them the benefit of the doubt during resume screening, paid for in hours I spend interviewing instead of programming
Off-topic, but I really enjoy products whose packaging I can dispose of well because it's all paper and/or metal. I buy Celestial Seasonings tea because there's no foil, and I can compost the tea bags. But there are still plenty of products that I only find in plastic, like frozen fish. I mainly shop at Wal-Mart because I'm poor. Does anyone have any tips for someone on a low budget?
For smaller scripts, this is trivially resolved. For larger scripts, this is a bug, and the script should be updated with a more flexible solution that doesn't rely on hardcoded branch names.
>Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants?
Specifically how would you define non-traditional, and in your opinion why should this non-traditional segment of people get a separate funnel?
If your funnel isn’t catching certain groups then you need to do something as you’re missing the opportunity to hire talented people from those groups. Why shouldn’t that be another funnel?
I’m not the OP but am “non-traditional” - didn’t do CS at university, worked in sales before moving to programming.
I don’t want a separate funnel thank you very much. I know some companies will reject my CV because of my education - that’s fair enough. I know some interviews will be harder for me. I prefer the risk of being filtered out early or having tough interviews over the lingering suspicion that I am a non-traditional hire.
it should be noted that git (the binary) is also in the process of deprecating `master`.
This is the message I get on my machine when running git init:
hint: Using 'master' as the name for the initial branch. This default branch name
hint: is subject to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all
hint: of your new repositories, which will suppress this warning, call:
hint:
hint: git config --global init.defaultBranch <name>
hint:
hint: Names commonly chosen instead of 'master' are 'main', 'trunk' and
hint: 'development'. The just-created branch can be renamed via this command:
hint:
hint: git branch -m <name>
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/test
I get this on version 2.30.1 so presumably a 2.30 change. I don't think they're planning to move to main for definite, just that they're preparing people to stop treating `master` as always the default branch
> init: provide useful advice about init.defaultBranch
> To give ample warning for users wishing to override Git's the fall-back for an unconfigured `init.defaultBranch` (in case we decide to change it in a future Git version), let's introduce some advice that is shown upon `git init` when that value is not set.
I wouldn't say it's in the process of deprecating "master". It's just reminding user that they shouldn't plainly assume that the default initial branch is, or will always be, named "master".
Why do you think this means that git is deprecating master?
Similarly, GitHub claims that git is making similar changes, and links to a "Statement" that actually says the opposite, and a code change that also does not include anything like making that change (both are from June 2020). Since GitHub's claim is obviously in error, I wonder if it's malice or incompetence.
Is there some other evidence that git is going to deprecate master?
Eliminating the usage of words with offensive connotations from the English language is double plus good.
edit:
Downvotes and the wording of some responses make me concerned that some folks may be unaware of the reference. Doubleplusgood is a newspeak word used in the book 1984. Newspeak is a language that is used to eliminate the ability for people to express unapproved thoughts because there are no words with which to express the concepts to others.
I get the feeling sometimes that language is unstable in the absence of outside forcing.
Stupid, moron, retard. People start using them as a pejorative and so a new neutral term is required.
Lavatory, toilet, water closet, bathroom. People don't like talking about poo so they keep using euphemisms to describe the room where it happens. This one is a favourite of mine as some people find 'toilet' distasteful despite it being the furtherest from the actual action taking place.
Very, literally. Not sure where this one is headed, but if it's happened at least twice, it'll shift again some time.
Are we doomed to keep shifting language to keep up taboos and keep the meaning of words which naturally will shift?
Slaves exist today. What else would you call it when the economic system makes people desperate enough to walk into a sulphur hole barefoot to carry chunks of sulfur out that will be used in all sorts of industry, including the making of circuit boards for switches and computers that power the infrastructure we're using right now?
The argument of the author is that he feels like tech is ONLY doing the name changes and is congratulating themselves about being inclusive afterwards.
I agree with this observation. For reasons that the author has articulated far better than I would in this comment, so please read the whole thing.
It’s the politician’s syllogism -with the added benefit of the ‘something’ being effectively free (no new headcount), though all the more visible by virtue of it being an annoying find and replace exercise all the line engineers get to participate in.
Read to the end, and the author suggests SWE apprenticeships - I support the idea, but by contrast, it isn’t free, and would require some actual effort by line managers, so...
This explains my WTF moment when teaching a class full of students to push to the github classroom using push -u origin master and it being rejected and having to use main!
Yeah. For my own projects, and/or on my own command-line, I don't care what "ma<tab>" resolves to. "main" is not a terrible choice.
But as a teacher, the way this makes all the existing guides and tutorials wrong means I have to waste 15 minutes of my semester (about 1%) explaining this.
In short, the main effect of this change is to very slightly raise the barrier to entry for new developers.
On the other hand, for the non/new developers I’ve interacted with [non-US], “master” was a confusingly jargonistic name that has raised eyebrows for years. Being the “main” branch seems a much plainer, obvious name, and I think it’s an improvement entirely separate from any social reasons.
Is it an empty gesture? Maybe? Does it cost more than a couple of seconds for making things clearer and making a minority of people people happy? No.
It probably wasted more integrated time across all the people reading this article than just shrugging and changing it does.
> So while the tech community was rushing around, trying to do their best impression of a black square post on Insta I remember thinking, “oh for fucks sake, they’ve completely missed the point”. Why? They forgot to talk to people who are actually members of the black community.
In practice, big techs don't care about POC, they care about mobs.
"Inclusive" words is just what make mobs happy and it's cheaper to do than being accused of discrimination for real reason: POC representation in big tech.
Changing a default branch name is cheaper than try to fix the real world.
That's the point, and that, unfortunately, the reason why the situation will never change: Because we act only on the exposed representation; movies, text on web site, etc.
Nowadays, POC is more widely used in French than naming a community directly by its skin color.
"It is a black neighborhood" -> "It is a POC neighborhood"
Are you sure? It cannot be very widespread. I've been living about 10 years in Paris and never heard "quartier de personnes de couleur" (POC neighborhood). Not a single time! Yet "quartier chinois" or "quartier arabe" are very common. But maybe my social circle is not very representative...
It's a strange thing, I've been having to do training sessions explaining that instead of saying "blind people" you have to say "people who are blind" because the former apparently projects more about their identity when it's important to underline that this attribute does not define them
Basically there's a movement to shift from inheritance to entity component, wanting to implement people with has-a descriptions instead of is-a descriptions. This enables data oriented optimizations so that society executes more efficiently & can be more easily extended as new requirements are submitted by the mob
Or ya know, not making someone’s disability the leading term you use to describe someone. That what’s most important is their personhood and they’re not defined by some single dominant aspect. And that their disability isn’t part of their identity but is just a fact about them.
Language doesn’t do multiple inheritance well so has-a descriptions are easier to work recognizing that people are multifaceted.
Don't worry I'm in full agreement, OOP is a terrible paradigm ever since it left Alan Kay's original inception which was closer to the has-a message passing paradigm that survives today. Rust's is a pleasure to use with traits instead of classes. Go's interface model is nice too, like a static duck typing. I've always preferred lots of interfaces in C# to abstract classes
I'm sure it depends on the person and the disability, but I'm diabetic and would much rather be referred to as that rather than "a person with diabetes". That's just exhausting.
Diabetes itself is awful. Whether or not it's the leading descriptor makes no difference with that, and I'd rather just use the non awkward terminology ("I'm diabetic" rather than "I'm a person with diabetes".) It would feel almost patronizing if everyone started referring to me that way.
Furthermore, for all that people apparently care about the accumulated effects of microaggressions... Suppose that, every time someone refers to your group—I'll use blindness for an example—they think "blind people—oh wait, I'd get in trouble for saying that, um, I mean, people who are blind". Might this develop a Pavlovian association of "blind people" = "uh-oh, might get in trouble"? Which, in turn, might lead to subtle resentment, mistreatment, and/or avoidance of blind people? It seems that, to rationally recommend one moniker over the other, one has to consider all the costs and benefits, and I don't think I've seen advocates of "person who is X" address this one.
Eh, I think it's common enough for people to say they feel like they're walking on eggshells because of all the sensitivity stuff, and I think I've seen a few people say that they now feel uneasy around minorities because they're afraid to encounter one who's been taught to have a chip on their shoulder and might throw a fit at the smallest microaggression. It's not a hard connection to draw.
The social justice crowd is unlikely to address it because, with their norms of discussion, mentioning it will likely attract mockery and redirection: "Oh no, we must protect the feelings of the poor white people! How oppressed they are! I'm sure it's just as bad as having ancestors who were enslaved and lynched!" The term "white fragility" might be used; in feminist circles, it might be "what about the menz!?". There's an instance in this thread (flagged) of someone mocking someone who complained about inconveniences. I generally term this "Look at these oppressed people; your complaint is invalid".
These argumentative norms seem to prevent the social justice crowd, as a group, from making decisions of the form "Let's make a minor effort to avoid needlessly offending the people that we're nominally trying to win over".
Depends if the actual reason you are talking about them is that characteristic, right? So talking about black people precisely on race topics seems necessary, whereas if you are talking about a particular neighborhood, it seems unnecessary and racist.
It is the currently accepted term on the Euphemism Treadmill. In my lifetime alone I have seen it go through colored people (perhaps the original source of your discomfort? and the "CP" in "NAACP"), Negro, black, Afro-American (which was brief but it doesn't mean I didn't have to rename a lot of anchor texts when the academic departments changed names to ...), African-American, then back to black, people of color, now finally capital B Black, with "people of color" apparently now a broader term of usage.
That's a pretty un-generous interpretation. This whole thread revolves around the idea that changing a label is a hollow gesture. The author of the parent comment seems to be making the same point about terms like "Afro-American" and "People of Color".
> Is “person of color” an okay thing to say in US?
I'm not English native so that could be the wrong term, not trying to offend anyone. In this context, I mean "discriminated persons/peoples".
IIRC, I saw this on the rules of r/publicfreakout (stating that videos representing "POC" would be moderated). For me "POC" means "Proof Of Concept", so I asked and discover it was about "Person Of Color" and so I use this on English spoken Internet.
But I agree, it's a weird term and I never use this in my native language. Each country have different way to talk about racism and discrimination because each country have it's own racism and discrimination problems.
Yes. Just think of it as a formalism - it's the currently culturally accepted term if that's the group you're trying to reference.
Lots of languages have a fuzzy formal/casual split where usage is both context-based and a matter of respect, though I think the US is more unique in (1) the degree of energy focused towards coming up with formal names for demographic groups and (2) making them out of words that are also used casually.
It’s been a self label for some time. Given the fact that there is a lot of horizontal aggression built into The System, getting everyone to pull in more or less the same direction is progress in its own right.
The terminology seems to be shifting to BIPOC, to include Indigenous peoples. I haven’t heard an a explanation for why Black is also split out.
Great question about the term "people of color". Reminds me of when Apple posted on their home page, "Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. For equitable education. For a more just justice system. And for Black and Brown businesses.". The part that particularly rubs me the wrong way is the term "Brown" people. And it’s uppercase. Who wants to be called a "Brown" person? I’ve never heard anyone called that before in my life. It’s incredibly degrading and reductionary. If I am Mexican or Indian, the last thing I want to be labeled is "Brown". Thanks for reducing me down to a single divisive term. What is perplexing is that somehow this term is ok and so is "black" and "white". But saying "yellow" or "red" is offensive. This inconsistency is absurd. Those that are pushing this language somehow think they are morally superior to those of the past. But in reality, they have stepped right into their way of thinking — seeing people by "color" and categorizing society based on it.
Big tech better make sure that they don't fly too close to the sun. The sun being socialist takeover of the U.S. (i.e. true progressives, whose links to socialism are undeniable, taking over the democratic party). Because most of them would not came out of that transformation unscathed.
POC means people of color, aka non-white, yes? There's a lot of Indian and east Asian representation in the tech workforce. You should be more specific about what you mean.
> I just don’t appreciate the idea that we as software engineers can now sit back and believe we’ve made some kind of positive change, coz we haven’t.
Boom.
So I'm indirectly asking a black software engineer by virtue of reading the blog: What are the things that should be done instead? Not a lot we can do it about stop and search. How do we actively bust bias? He slams the 'meritocracy' meme: I know that is widely backed here. So what can be done instead?
> Personally, I have no attachment to any of these words.
Sadly, I think a large proportion of people absolutely have a very strong attachment to not changing anything. Who will agree with you on this front but be against anything more substantial? I've been told on this board that the only racism is antiwhite.
>Inevitably there will be some of you in the audience asking, “Well what do you want them to do? They’re trying their hardest, help them with some solutions!!”.
>I don’t want this post to be about The Solutions™ but here’s one for your noggin; there is this a significant intersection between career changers/developers coming from non traditional backgrounds (i.e. people with no CS degree) and minorities. Put your money where your fucking mouths are and hire these people. Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants?
Well I think heavy industry will do better weathering the wave of tech articles helpfully suggesting laughable solutions to non-problems. They don't share the same weakness to slacktivist pull-requests.
For the lazy, here [1,2] are some wiktionary links. Assuming these are correct, wow, this makes the whole main vs master thing seem even more silly.
> SLAVE: From Middle English, from Old French sclave, from Medieval Latin sclāvus (“slave”), from Late Latin Sclāvus (“Slav”), because Slavs were often forced into slavery in the Middle Ages.[1][2][3][4][5] The Latin word is from Byzantine Greek Σκλάβος (Sklábos), see that entry and Slav for more.
> ROBOT: Borrowed from Czech robot, from robota (“drudgery, servitude”). Coined in the 1921 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek after having been suggested to him by his brother Josef, and taken into English without change.
Well that ruins the fun of the surprise a little... but I guess people can still look forward to real plot twist: who the "masters" were. Hint: it wasn't the Moops!
Lots of good points made in this. We have eradicated the usage of the exclusive terms in our team not recently but well before 2014. It's a cultural change to be precise. We are very conscious of the biases that could arise. In fact, during hiring we specifically ask the recruiters to look for diverse pool of engineers.
Still I concur with the OP's statement that the percentage of African American in the tech industry is marginal (in the US, not sure elsewhere). I don't know what we can do about this. But we have to change as a society and as individuals.
Doesn't telling the recruiters that suggests they should take a skin color or gender when making their decisions? That sounds pretty bad to me and would be illegal in my country.
I look at it the other way. The recruiters may not be inclusive by default. By explicitly informing the recruiters to be inclusive we remove the bias they have as well.
I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote.
It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate.
For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, watching people be vicariously offended without asking if context in question is offensive, and the obsession with signaling instead of meaningful action.
the point is that it was identified as an area of change at all, when given the reasons for doing so it is completely vacuous and existing in the absence of other change, but being used to satisfy a checkmark of change and self-congratulate.
I would disagree. I think the "woke" stuff is a more active movement to solve all of the 1% of the issue, while ignoring the 99% that actually effects peoples' lives (how universities perpetuate classism, living wages for people doing 'un-skilled' work, revitalizing disadvantaged communities that perpetuate historical racial injustices, etc.).
Displays of misplaced white guilt like this - while bizarre psychologically - don't really harm or help anything.
As a white dude, I feel extremely proud because my ancestors abolished slavery.
Oh wait no I don't, because feeling shame or accomplishment for something your ancestors did hundreds of years ago that you had zero control over is a completely ridiculous concept.
I don't understand how that little line could be so misinterpreted so wrong. I'm not ashamed of being white, I'm ashamed of asshats running around gunning for cheap SJW points while ignoring the real issues. We can do better. Master/slave, blacklist/whitelist etc has no relation to race at all so it's a completely pointless act. But instead this is taking center stage just so people can post "feelgood" LinkedIn/Twitter posts to make them feel better about themselves, or company PR blog posts like GitHub and GitLab while doing nothing to change the actual status quo.
What gives you the right to feel ashamed on behalf of someone else's actions, just because you're of the same race as them? Shame on you, virtue-chaser.
As someone whose ancestors annihlated his other ancestors I'm not proud at all, nor do I feel guilt. It's a tragedy as old as human history. We can't forget those horrible things, but we can't bury them either, we are an imperfect species and we have to live with it. Burying words under a rug doesn't fix anything, only diligence and real egalitarianism will.
As an independent who has both democratic party and liberalism as my part of my makeup I have to say this overcompensation from the far left is nuts. It's some kind of white man's guilt complex. I believe everyone is created equal and we have to always be diligent about keeping that at the forefront, but the terms master/slave and their ilk (in english) were around looooong before the whole white/black slave travesty happened. The same with white/black list. Until I hear some prominent black leaders sayign the community at large has an issue with it then I don't really care what some blogger or guilt stricken white people say. It's overcompensation and cancel culture all rolled into one.
In all fairness, this sort of silly business is more representative of the "Twitter left", comprised of cogs in a perpetual rage-inducing machine, than it is of "leftists" whose main objective is to address the limitations of capitalism, at varying degrees of willingness to work within the system vs burn it down.
Of course, our media is run by billionaires so they capitalize on the identity politics to divide everyone and avoid having any real debate about economic policy, which is the only thing that really matters.
I would so much rather be debating about the best way to roll out UBI than whether to call something "main" or "master".
This is some technocrat fiction that has failed time and time again. There are towns in the US right now which actively reject help if it's not coming in the form of "more coal jobs" (which aren't coming back regardless of how much coal mining is actually on).
Economic incentives don't change people's minds, they motivate them to double-down on their biases.
Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that such people have been duped by channels like Fox News into doubling-down on a way of life that is simply not possible anymore.
What I'm saying is that if Fox and CNN (for instance) devoted the same air time to good-faith debate about the causes for, impact of, and solutions to wealth inequality and our changing socioeconomic landscape as they do reading Twitter comments live on air, we might be in a better position than we are today.
Billionaires capitalize on identity politics and political division because it gets them advertising dollars. That's it. While I agree that economic policy certainly merits more discussion, an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about "the elite" isn't any more productive than an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about white people.
The rich aren't a single monolithic entity and it doesn't make sense to treat them as such. George Soros is an obvious example. Unless if you have concrete evidence, a blanket anti-rich narrative only serves as a vector for another rich person to inject their ideology. Plenty of people think that Donald Trump's feud with Bezos was proof that he was on the side of the working class.
The rich aren't, but the companies they run practically are, from a political standpoint.
Basically all large, multinational corporations now make their company logo rainbow for pride month, and all release the same sounding official statements about racial inequality on a regular basis, etc. etc.
It's almost impossible to find a large corporation that doesn't do this now. And their statements are so bland and generic that they are almost all identical, and completely interchangeable.
That's the symptom and not the cause. When people treat virtue signaling the same as positive change, it's natural for corporations to exploit that. It's a cheap way of building goodwill.
Billionaires aren't all colluding, but their incentives are aligned, and they do individually use their money to advance a political agenda that regular people who don't own TV networks are powerless to push back against.
See: Rodger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Bill and David Koch
Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?
This specific instance seems like an overreaction of some in both corporate and social media culture. One poster already pointed out that this is likely more about corporate fear of getting targetted by a vocal but ultimately small 'woke' crowd (there, another label, but at least a bit more specific than just generally someone who wishes to achieve basic goals like welfare, equality, and regulation of private industry). It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
In debates like this sometimes a small number of loud, well-meaning but naive people get much more influence than they should for fear of the other being painted the bad guy, while a significant number of people who are actually affected by the underlying issues don't get heard at all.
I believe the main point of the person you're replying to is that it's a relatively small, vocal minority of people on Twitter who care about this stuff, and the media snowballs it into a big ugly controversy for clicks. As far as I know, this is true also of the following examples of "the right" "cancelling" stuff:
* Colin Kaepernick and kneelgate
* calls to boycott Starbucks for celebrating an inclusive holiday season, rather than Christmas in particular
* republican voters "cancelling" Mitt Romney and other republicans for being vocally anti-Trump, even though their political principles have not changed
I can think of at least one more serious example that goes beyond just a vocal minority: The long, ongoing fight to teach children about LGBTQ issues in public schools. Teachers can be fired for simply revealing to their students that they have a same-sex partner.
Not long ago, too, was it career-ending for a Hollywood actor to come out publicly as LGBTQ. Ellen comes to mind as an example.
Am I? I personally haven't met a single left-leaning adult who doesn't think Twitter's "cancel culture" has gotten out of hand. However, I've never lived in the bay area, where I understand things may be different.
Can you say anything to demonstrate to me that it really is more than just a vocal minority of people?
Perhaps we have different definitions of "cancel culture"? I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it. I do think the master vs main issue is silly, though. I'm not sure where you draw draw the line between "cancel culture" and "social consequences for toxic / abusive behavior in public".
People on the right participate in cancel culture all the time. It is truly deafening to hear them complain about things they do from their pulpits at FOX, Congress, and Senate.
Anyone who watched TV in the late 90s and early 2000s should be very familiar with how right-wing[0] cancel culture works thanks to organizations like the AFA.
Hi. I'm a single left-leaning adult who doesn't even think "cancel culture" exists. It's a right wing propaganda word. Please realize that "I haven't met a single..." is not a good assessor for anything. I for example haven't met a single person that doesn't think the vocal minority in this case is the twitter mob that tries to brainwash themself into the believe that there is a left wing mob with an united agenda. I am not convinced that I can conclude from that that I am in the majority.
The argument "I haven't met a single..." is equally as strong as an unqualified "You are misinformed.", which I was responding to. Note that I asked for clarification :)
Since I have you here, would you mind elaborating a bit more about your stance on "cancel culture"? I'll also elaborate a bit more on my stance.
I think most people would agree that mobs by definition have no united agenda. It's a bunch of disorganized people with their own goals and motivations who all briefly get fired up about the same topic. Twitter mobs are a tornado of confirmation bias, where people in echo chambers spin up hot takes of current events to confirm their own worldview. The amount of meaningful debate that can be had in 280-character chunks is negligible.
When people talk about "cancel culture", my impression is not that they think there is any sort of coordinated attack on right-leaning figures by prominent left-leaning figures -- only fringe conspiracy theorists believe that George Soros is sending out weekly lists of names that should be "cancelled" this week.
It's that they believe Twitter is a place which has developed a culture of criticizing and ridiculing other users, public figures especially. I think it's undeniable that any time a public figure missteps, a vocal minority of people (e.g. angsty teenagers) on Twitter calls for the person to be fired or otherwise deplatformed, even before they have a chance to respond. Some people also receive death threats.
So, I don't think it's unreasonable to label that sort of behavior as "cancel culture". To me, it clearly exists, but there is room for debate about how prevalent it is, as well as how good vs bad it is.
I think we agree that "cancel culture" is not as prevalent as Fox / MSNBC would have their viewers believe. Twitter magnifies the opinions of their angry users to drive engagement, and then news organizations pick it up to serve one political narrative or the other.
Personally, I have seen many positive examples of public figures being called out for toxic or abusive behavior, and I'm all in favor. Louis CK was "cancelled" for extremely-scummy-but-not-necessarily-illegal behavior. Heck, #metoo is all about cancelling rapists, and that's a good thing! I also think that the JK Rowling controversy was for good cause, and led to both productive [1,2] and unproductive public discussion.
However, to me, the whole master vs main debate is silly. I don't see it as a driver of positive change.
My stance is: "Cancle culture" does not exist. The behaviour you describe existed before and there is no new development, that indicates the need of a new word. Death threats are not okay and that's totally independent of them being within or outside of something you call "cancel culture". And criticism doesn't get more or less reasonable if it is framed with "cancel culture".
I'm from germany. Here the phrase had a short burst of infamy as a comedian ("Dieter Nuhr") claimed people want to "cancel" him. By now the word is rarely used. And the discussion is better for it.
The only successful "cancelling" I witnessed was a left leaning twitter account, that was about fascism in austria. The woman behind it got death threats against her children and deleted the account. I think the use of the phrase "cancel culture" in this case is playing down the problem.
And if public figures try to silence criticism by the use of the phrase, than it's playing up the problem.
When and where - if ever - "cancel culture" is a useful term I don't know.
It is interesting you call it the "master vs main" debate. The problem is the combination of the words master and slave. You - maybe unconsciously - left the word slave out.
And there is not really a debate. I do not believe anybody was bullied to change that. It was a decision that was made independently. And now in the aftermath people shout about it as if it is utterly impossible that this could have happened without some mobbing or a big "culture" that made this a unjust decision. Because: "I know not a single adult that like that change." Well, maybe the majority likes it. The majority just does not participate in online discussions, so it's invisible. Hard to tell.
edit: I've re-read your comment, and I'm no longer sure which "side" of this you fall on, I think my point stands alone anyway, so I'll leave it:
You've not met me, but I'm a left-leaning individual who thinks the drama about "cancel culture" is mostly invented.
There's lots of people doing crappy thing on the internet generally and on twitter in particular.
In a world where you can get anonymous death threats for pretty much any reason, I've not seen any evidence that "the left" or "cancel culture" is an actual problem in this regard beyond the baseline of people being nasty when anonymous.
I have seen people, often on both sides of the same issue, point to unpleasant people on the other side and make some kind of argument that "those people" are all crazy. Some of the individual stories are horrifying but I've never found any of them convincing at the level of settling the argument (whichever argument it is invoke in). It's just used as a way to circle the wagons against the other side.
Indeed. My point is that "cancel culture" is a problem on Twitter, since Twitter intentionally amplifies the voices of the people who participate. So, "cancel culture" on Twitter is not representative of how real people on "the left" (or "the right") feel about current events.
For instance the vast majority of working professionals I know don't get themselves regularly involved in political arguments on Twitter, since they see it as unproductive.
So it is simultaneously true that:
* cancel culture is "a thing" on Twitter, in the sense that it's easy to find examples
* cancel culture "doesn't exist", in the sense that no one you are likely to encounter in real life is ok with cancelling people for tweets they made as a teenager
“cancel culture” isn't an actual thing, it's just the new term the Right has come up with for replace “political correctness” to make, almost word for word, the exact same complaints they've been making since the 1980s about the left doing...exactly the same thing the right has always done as much as it can get away with to everyone who publicly disagrees with them.
Yes, large portions of the company I work for fall into this category. 4 out of 7 in our team fit the description.
> I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it.
That is cancel culture.. its just not an example of cancel culture run amuck which is what the problem has always been, not cancel culture itself which is widely accepted by most people for the most egregious behaviors.
Voters don't cancel their representative, they select the one they think will represent their wishes. Even removing someone from the office when the voters believe they no longer represent their interests is not cancellation, it is how democracy works. You don't cancel your lawyer if he misrepresent you, you fire him.
To clarify, I think you're right, and that all the disagreement about cancel culture really boils down to semantic arguments about what the word "cancel" means and whether it is subjectively fair or unfair in a given situation. I would argue that voting someone out of office is a democratic way of literally cancelling them.
I think that the most widely accepted definition of "cancelling culture" is suppressing someone that has opinions different than yours. For example you can cancel a comic that has different political views. Opposing to that, when you have someone representing you, either a voted politician or hired attorney, it is not cancel culture if you disagree and want to be represented by someone else.
What if a comedian loses his audience because views of his come to light that his audience doesn't support? It's no longer profitable for him to go on tour, or for studios to offer him roles on tv, etc.. Is that cancel culture or not? I'd argue that it's cancelling, but not the "bad" kind.
If you say it's not cancel culture when a majority of people change their mind about someone, then you're saying that almost by definition cancelling is when a small minority of people have the power to deplatform someone who missteps. So, it's not accurate to say that "the left is ok with cancel culture" (for instance) since only a small group of people are going it who are not representative of the larger population.
Ask the same question: what if people don't like the local restaurant food (new chef puts too much salt) and they lost the patrons? Is that cancel culture? No. Cancel culture is when you want to close the restaurant for everyone when the owner's daughter refused to date you versus not eating there because you don't like the food, but you don't interfere with others eating there because they like the food. It's "I don't buy" vs "close them down".
The exact same thing can be said about what people refer to as "cancelling". It's not whether they're banned from Twitter, losing their contract or are voted out of office that constitutes the cancelling, but why they were.
Mitt Romney was not attacked for not representing conservative/republican values, but for going against a mob/cult (of personality). That is as "cancelling" as it gets, regardless if it leads to him being voted out in Utah or not.
Criticizing a politician for not representing the values people believe he holds is not canceling. If that is the case 3/4 of congress has been canceled.
Romney is persona non grata in the national GOP now, which is exactly what being cancelled is: to be ostracized. His values haven't moved anywhere from eight years ago when he was good enough to be president, so something else must have changed.
He is not ostracized in the way I would consider it. As far as I know Republicans still work with him, are willing to let him sponsor bills, etc. My understanding is he is still invited to Republican lunches as well.
I think we are working with two different understandings of cancellation. He will almost certainly lose his next election though.
>he was good enough to be president
Well not good enough since he lost to Obama. Just because you win a primary doesn't mean the majority actually supports you.
>so something else must have changed.
I think people forgot what his views were. People have nostalgia and remembered they thought he was better than Obama which turned him into a more mainstream conservative in their mind. I think there are other things at play like Romney being a Morman and also having name recognition.
People on the right don't have the power to really cancel anything anymore. Some on the right may attempt to cancel stuff, but it is mostly not effective.
>Colin Kaepernick and kneelgate
Kaepernick wasn't canceled by the right. He just wasn't the best player out there and didn't get onto another team. He now is making millions from Nike and other deals all without playing the game. If this is what be canceled is like I would gladly sign up.
>calls to boycott Starbucks for celebrating an inclusive holiday season, rather than Christmas in particular
There was an attempt but nothing happened. As far as I know Starbucks' revenue didn't even drop (but I haven't really looked into it). Again a complete failure of a cancellation.
>republican voters "cancelling" Mitt Romney and other republicans for being vocally anti-Trump, even though their political principles have not changed
Romney still has his senate seat and is still on all of the committees he was original on. There is no cancelling here, unless you mean voting out a politician is canceling.
>The long, ongoing fight to teach children about LGBTQ issues in public schools.
This is a bit more complicated. Some people believe it is more than just an objective teaching that LGBTQ people exist and you should treat them as any other person but more of encouraging people to engaging in such behavior. Some people also accuse the schools of focusing on random LGBTQ people or assuming people's sexuality when they weren't married in history class instead of focusing on more important people or just the facts. I don't think I was in school when this was going on so I can't really comment on what it is like.
> Teachers can be fired for simply revealing to their students that they have a same-sex partner.
I have only seen this in private religious schools. In theses cases the teacher agreed to publicly follow the church's teachings and they failed to follow their employment contract. You shouldn't work for a church if you disagree with the church's teachings.
>Ellen comes to mind as an example.
Are you saying Ellen was canceled for being LGBTQ? I am pretty sure she is being attack for being abusive to people who work / worked for her.
They successfully got the NFL to ban kneeling, you might remember someone saying "Get that son of a bitch off the field".
Liz Cheney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy have successfully been censured by the GOP, and motions are in progress against the rest that defected from the Trump cult.
The NFL would have almost certainly done it themself since the NFL was losing viewers massively. Just not watching a show is not canceling in my view. If that is the case then almost everybody is canceling almost everything else.
>you might remember someone saying "Get that son of a bitch off the field".
Last I checked Trump can't cancel any NFL player.
>Liz Cheney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy have successfully been censured by the GOP
I agree these are [partial] cancellations, but members of the GOP being censured by the GOP is not really the same as organization you did not choose to be a part of cancelling you.
Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left? I don't.
Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd? I know very few. Almost all of them who speak on the topic, speak in unequivocal support of "woke" ideas and talking points.
If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it. You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd to not be counted as racists.
It's in everyone's power to start extinguishing the extremes. Until then, I'll take silence on your nearest extreme as your tacit approval of it.
> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?
Certainly. The majority really. That's in the Netherlands, but compared to the vocal internet crowd most people I know who vote on parties left of the political compass worry about climate, animal and human welfare, and inequality. Rarely will someone go all 'woke' and demand changes like this.
Haha, GP specifically assumed US in the first line of his comment and then got responses from the Netherlands and twice from UK. Yeah, it's largely an American phenomenon so far but I wouldn't be too happy about it because American culture exports these things all over the world and Hollywood is among the most woke.
While you're protesting this notion on HN, plenty of your countrymen are learning English from some of the wokest trash on Netflix.
Perhaps they chipped in because GPs phrase "Assuming the US" is not a very clear way of saying they want to talk specifically and exclusively about the US, or they thought it fair to broaden the discussion?
I don't see how your sweeping generalisation in the last paragraph adds to the considered discussion here either.
Ha I saw that too. But there’s nothing European HN users love more than commenting with their super well-informed takes about the US, so it should have been expected.
Yeah, the US is such an exceptional country that you can only have opinions about it when you're actually American - I hope you do see that this view is rather short sighted? Especially given that the US itself has no qualms with interfering in foreign politics all over the world.
The reason we chafe at this is because those opinions usually distill and treat us as a singular group. Like one of us saying “the British believe,” for example, prefaced behind something the Welsh and English disagree on.
Not your fault, though. Our internal borders are meaningful. We lie to ourselves that they aren’t, and the rest of the world goes with that. Minnesota, Michigan, and Mississippi may as well be different countries for all they have in common.
It’s ironic that you did exactly what I mentioned is the problem while responding to a comment where I pointed out I’m aware of, and sensitive to, subtle cultural differences within Britain. I’m at least n=1 for giving a nuanced shit about people outside our borders, but that didn’t fit your reductionist narrative. I get it, but I don’t respect it.
> Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left? I don't.
I'm in the UK so maybe it is different, but lately "woke" is anyone that is seen as an enemy of the far right. Including those who are on the right of the spectrum, but just not as far as those throwing the "woke" label around.
Totally agree. Everyone who's not far right is woke and everyone who isn't far left is racist, if you listen to Twitter etc. That's intentional, gotta make moderates afraid to speak up, leaving the discussion to extremists, bot farms and professional opinion havers.
But I was talking about a more agreeable definition of "woke". Many people on the left are very comfortable with this subculture, just like many people on the right are very comfortable with Trump. I very rarely hear people on the left saying anything against the woke culture, so in my mind it's very reasonable to equate or at least strongly affiliate the two.
Many people are not ok with either. We just left social media a decade ago but still somehow have to put up with its bullshit leaking out all over the internet.
I'm in the UK so maybe it is different, but lately "woke" is anyone that is seen as an enemy of the far right.
I am also in the UK and there is lots of hand-wringing about "the extreme far right" but if you gently probe what people mean by "extreme far right" they mean "Brexit" or "not electing Jeremy Corbyn".
I expect in a few months the term "ultra extreme far right" will enter the lexicon, and we'll keep adding superlatives as the term "right-wing" becomes more and more diluted and gradually encloses the entire population except for a few Momentum die-hards.
I've certainly seen many outside the Momentum bubble being labelled 'Tory' (e.g. Lib Dems as 'yellow Tories', Blair/Starmer as 'red Tories', etc.), but you're speaking pure hyperbole.
"Extreme far right" is reserved for the likes of NationalFront/BNP/UKIP/BritainFirst/BrexitParty/Reform/whatever they're calling themselves these days (plus their goons like EDL, DFLA, People's Front of Judea, Judean People's Front, etc.)
It saddens me to see this sort of word-muddying (especially on HN), since it makes it easier to deflect this sort of crap:
> Is Rustie Lee "ultra extreme far right" in your opinion?
No. In my opinion, Rustie Lee is not "ultra extreme far right". I don't see why you're asking though, since I didn't call UKIP "ultra extreme far right" either; or any one or thing, for that matter. So I don't know what point you're trying to make; that racists will always fall back on the "I have a black friend" defence?
In any case, I deliberately avoided referring to specific individuals, since that often devolves into he-said/she-said accusations, and metaphysical circle-jerking about the 'true intent' of this or that. Tangentially, it's useful to the far right when discussions around them or their tactics devolve into such petty bickering, since it's a useful distraction towards easily denounced anecdata (hence putting their audience more at ease with the bigotry, and hence nudging the overton window a little more). After all, it's no coincidence that white supremacists deny the existence of systemic racism (unless it's against "whites", of course).
Whilst bringing up a person (or, to reduce circle-jerking, the outcomes of their actions), is fair game in a discussion about people's actions; I would recommend against pivoting an existing discussion towards some person or other, as you've done, since that can help to entrench far right memes (e.g. that racism is only about individuals, etc.).
With that in mind, I would point out that I am not the first to put UKIP in the same list as the BNP; UKIPs founder did the same (he cited the party's increasing racism and ties to the BNP as the reasons he left in the late 1990s).
Yes, for a few years the Brexit Party was the I'mNotRacistBut Party. It looks like they've now been rumbled (hence becoming unelectable), so they're rebranding as Reform, which might last for another few years.
The previous I'mNotRacistBut Party was UKIP (featuring Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as advisor for racially-charged issues, and denounced as racist 24 years ago by its own founder)
Before that the BNP was scoring a few percent in general elections.
And around and around it goes, all the way back to Mosley's blackshirts.
Nigel Farage left UKIP for that very reason. The Brexit party is fairly moderate and would be described as center-right, just shy of the conservatives.
The Brexit Party was just a face-saving rebrand for UKIP. It didn't take long for the mask to start slipping, with the party's founder resigning after retweeting racist posts from far-right figures.
Of course, Farage himself may denounce such things:
> I set the party up, she was the administrator that got it set up.
Friendly reminder that it's very easy, and very common, for racists to disavow their racism when it's expedient to do so (e.g. an extreme example https://youtu.be/zcoYKuoiUrY?t=1568 )
>I am also in the UK and there is lots of hand-wringing about "the extreme far right" but if you gently probe what people mean by "extreme far right" they mean "Brexit" or "not electing Jeremy Corbyn".
Yeah, the funny thing about the UK is hearing from a country where the center-left party bombed an election precisely because it couldn't throw away its woke wing on two big "woke" issues (Brexit and antisemitism), and hearing that "anyone who's not far-right is woke". Well no. Keir Starmer won his place as head of Labour precisely by his willingness to reject further coalition with the "wokes", when Corbyn had been unwilling to really oppose them at all.
It feels odd to portray the 2019 election as lost on "wokeism", or that Corbyn let that policy take over. By the end, Corbyn was the target of that crowd, being branded as an anti-semite for what amounts to "being too critical of Israel", and "being leader while being seen as too soft on others accused of anti-semitism".
Aside from that, the 2019 election was really a Brexit election. Labour failed to pick a side, and the Conservatives were promising to get Brexit done and were early enough in the negotiations that they could promise it would be a soft brexit or maximum brexit depending on which crowd they thought would hear their comments.
What is "far right"? Is there "near right"? "middle-reach right"? 'Far right' is just a BS title used to 'adjust' the perception of people that anyone not left wing is crazy extremist nutjob.
>Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left?
Yes. The majority of them are performative liberals.
>Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?
Yes. There is infighting to an extent but it's really not hard to find leftist critiques of what you call woke culture.
>If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it.
I highly doubt bad faith actors would care about what people on the left are doing. Sure hasn't stopped you from mischaracterizing them all this while.
>You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding as to who "the left" are. The majority of actual (not what passes for American left) leftists will agree that disowning "Trump and his crowd" is the same kind of performative wokeness that you accuse liberals of. Disowning and denouncing for appearances does nothing because it doesn't tackle the root cause that allowed a movement like Trump's or the larger right to come to power.
I didn't mean "disowning" as performative act but as an honest expression of preferences, including in-person and online discussions and voting choices.
The general population publicly expressing their honest moderate views and opposing the extremes is not "for appearances". It's the core of what's missing in today's public debate, dominated by far left/right activists, bot farms, and personalities/celebs.
My point is, the (American) left is justly associated with wokeness because they are its primary visible supporters. Maybe it's because those on the left who don't support it just don't speak up, in which case, my message is: please do. I'm not just going to assume your existence.
>as an honest expression of preferences, including in-person and online discussions and voting choices.
As I mentioned, I've seen plenty of this, but with filter bubbles being what they are, it's hard to fault someone for not coming across them enough.
What I'm saying is that it's not that they (we?) don't exist, more like you don't come across us because of xyz reasons that are getting harder and harder to pinpoint as discourse is manipulated each passing day.
I also broadly agree that nuance is missing in the "modern debate", which causes bad faith interpretations like everyone on the left being either "woke police out to cancel everything you love" or "stalinists looking to establish USSRv2" and everyone in the right being "uneducated white people who don't know what's best for them" or outright Nazis. I wanted to push back against this kind of monolithic interpretation, hence my previous comment.
> ... but as an honest expression of preferences, including in-person and online discussions and voting choices.
Isn't that really dangerous though?
eg if you're unlucky enough to become targeted by some of the more "out there" people, they can do career-and-effectively-life ending things by blowing it out of proportion, getting it in the media, etc.
Associating the Democrat with "wokeness" is the same as assiociating Republicans with trump supporters and "Storm the Capitol" crowd.
It's an easy way to discredit your political opponent.
Also, i am sightly offended when people call the Democrats "left". I've talked to a real "leftist" (and by that i mean, sightly left on european political board), he felt forced to join the democrat to have a shot at a representative position, and some support for his flyers, but he agreed with my broth: the democrat would be barely center in europe.
And honestly, the far right and the conventionnal right have only themselves to blame for the right of the woke/cancel culture. They are the one who started to open up the overton window, they can't start crying when their politicals opponent do the same.
There are "left" parties in the US too, like Gloria La Riva's PSL.
The Democrats push for what can at best be termed social democracy, even though real social democracies in Europe would still be to their left after they fulfilled most of their campaign promises. Left right and centre are kind of reductive categorizations but social democracy is left of centre.
>Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left?
The best I've seen is sentiments along the lines of "yeah that's overkill" which is about equivalent to what fiscal conservatives and libertarians were saying about the moralizing christian right back when those clowns ran the show.
People don't generally speak out against people who make their positions look like a reasonable middle ground. Woke crap makes basically every mainstream left position look reasonable by comparison so of course they don't want it to die. It makes them look good.
Well everything in the US currently is extremely polarized. Very few people on either side are going to criticize groups on their side, as they are spending all their energy fighting the other side.
The way to improve things is to speak "truth to power", and the moral way to do it is to always "punch upwards".
I've been riling against Trump, Bannon & Co for the past 4 years. Before that I've been vocal about Obama's reign of terror, his broken promises of closing gitmo, and his drone wars. No doubt in my next 4 years I'll be hurling insults against Biden.
There is no need to add disclaimers or enumerating all things that a comment doesn't stand for. Doing so not only makes for "boring reading" but also looks like the person feels very insecure.
>" Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?"
Bill Maher is a fairly prominent liberal who has been vehemently anti-woke. This is regular fodder on his Friday night HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher as well in his regular standup comedy.
The question wasn't "Do you know any people on the left who aren't woke?" The question was "Do you know of anyone NOT on the left who is woke?" I.e., wokeness is a problem of the left.
> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?
There's a lot of them. But do you really expect them to do it all the time? Disavow every single misinformed but loud person? (Why don't you actively speak against Ted Bundy - are you supporting serial killers?)
For example I can argue with my mom who says she's a feminist because women are better than men. Or I can spend that time preparing a lesson for the local programming club for kids. Why would I choose the first option? Who would benefit?
Disavowing Trump is massively different - a single, elected person with power. Taking that position and bringing it to their local representatives would be worth the effort.
What is this "the left"? Bernie Sanders, by far the most left leaning of the democratic presidential candidates was hugely against the narrative that Trump voters were racists.
Noam Chomsky has an extremely long track record of being extremely consistent in his support of free speech and open debate in a way that the most obsessive first amendment types would rarely stick to.
Amongst the more left leaning people I know there was a hugely negative attitude towards the CNN/MSNBC style coverage of the past 4 years that fixated on Trump and conspiracy theories and gotcha stories.
Every side is gonna be smeared, it's much more important to look at what they're actually trying to offer people. And offering nothing but vague platitudes tends to be worse than offering lies, as Hillary's pretty vapid 2016 campaign showed. This move by github seemed to bring more attention to them working with ICE and the like than anything else that I could see.
$15 min wage was super popular in Florida, Trump won Florida by a significant margin. Had the dems actually offered this obviously popular thing and stood by it that state could've turned out very differently as it'd force Trump to take a side on something that mattered to people.
Even this article that we are commenting on seems to me to be a _leftist_ critique of liberal/moderate virtual signalling, and is calling for them to actually do things that matter for anti-racism.
> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd? I know very few. Almost all of them who speak on the topic, speak in unequivocal support of "woke" ideas and talking points.
This article we are commenting on is an example of this.
> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology
I don't have the experience of any other group doing this. I agree that it is not inherently a political ideology.
The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal. I think it is important to say that because I know people in other parts of the country that see these as insults and would be surprised to know that people commonly self-identify as these terms.
I find that this group thinks their behavior is better and more helpful than apathy, "silence", and the idea of rampant exclusionary hate from the right. When its really not better, its different, but its not more helpful. There is absolutely a constant threat from people afraid of bird watchers in a park, people that blend into their ranks and are willing to weaponize their understanding of race, two seconds after donating to the Democratic Party.
The problem lies not in that you are wrong in concluding that these people are adherents of leftists ideologies (most are), but that you are falling for the pars pro toto fallacy: people who think that 'master' is an offensive word to use in a source code repository are 'left/liberal', thus all or most of 'the left/liberals' are such people.
You are saying 'this group thinks' as if all people who would identify as adhering to leftist ideologies (from the extremes to common social democracy) act like this. You are trying to stuff people into boxes: you are either team A or team B. That is polarization; something we can sorely do without.
The problem lies that there is not enough (any?) push back from this kind of garbage (and specifically in this case) from the 'left/liberals'.
There needs to be push-back if they [those left/liberals not in this camp] want to disassociate. But where is it? I don't think there is appetite for this argument.
I know many of left/liberal-types (in the Bay Area) all who either believe, or accept this as silly but somehow think it is meaningful to some people and so should be gone along with...
Again, availability bias. The people screaming the loudest about this are also screaming the loudest about other Left/Liberal issues. The normal left-leaning folks don't get heard. It's pretty natural to conclude that this group represents the whole.
I'm also convinced that the screamers aren't really interested in stopping black people from being offended (let alone actually harassed/murdered). I think they're much more interested in getting recognition for fighting the fight.
I think you're right. I'm an independent and I'm guilty of doing this to right and left leaning folk, but I've done it because I believe that the people screaming will only listen to people within their ideological interests. It was my way of making them accountable for their compatriots that are loud enough for me to notice. I've also stopped doing this because it's not really effective. People don't feel like they should be responsible for outliers and I somewhat agree, but don't know how to solve the problem of vocal trouble makers.
>The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal.
I don't think Microsoft do claim that, nor is that really why they did this.
Microsoft is a profit seeking entity that is trying to maximize its profit and goodwill (an intangible asset) at the same time.
Thus for them the best moves are those which:
* Have minimal cost.
* Distract people away from profitable dirty laundry which doesn't attract goodwill (e.g. concentration camp contracts).
* Buy them some goodwill among some people - especially through the mechanism of "outrage marketing" (people who by dint of attacking "the right" when they attack this will naturally defend Microsoft - a bit like how Nike used colin Kaepernick).
They did this because "change master to main" appeared in a local maxima that maximized these three conditions.
This is being reflected all around the corporate sphere because what applies to Microsoft applies to a lot of other companies.
Yeah, that definitely seems to be a big part of it. And I don’t understand. Okay so your company is the target of some activists on Twitter for a few days. End of the world? Maybe I just can’t understand what it’s like to lead a big company.
Just abut the only company to handle one of these situations in a way that seems rational to me is Trader Joe’s. Some people on Twitter decided that having a burrito labeled “Trader Jose” was a horrendous form of cultural appropriation and demanded the company change all products with this kind of word play in branding. TJ’s considered it and just basically said “no, move along” and the whole woke twitterverse moved on to some other target.
Agree completely. But you have to understand the mindset of everyone involved.
The marketing/PR people in any organisation care passionately about what other people think of the organisation - naturally, because it's their job to care about this.
Journalists are insanely influenced by what other people are saying and love nothing better than a nice piece of juicy controversy to get those ads clicked.
Stock markets are notoriously twitchy about rumours and "public perception".
Most corporate CEO's got to that position by climbing a greasy pole where what other people think of you is literally the most important factor in your climb.
So almost everybody involved in making these kinds of decision are exactly the people most vulnerable to being bullied like this.
But if you can resist - there's only a few thousand Twitterati who will bother even trying to enforce any kind of boycott, and they're probably not your customers in the first place. It's completely ineffectual if you can just ignore it.
Yes great points. Another factor that I hadn't considered until recently (can't remember who pointed this out) is that most C-suite employees / executive editors at media co's / deans at universities are probably in their 50's and are in what is arguably the most financially critical parts of their life ... as in, they have a big mortgage (or two), need to be contributing significantly to their retirement, are likely staring at at least a few VERY expensive college tuitions, etc. They're levered up both literally and figuratively. The cost of losing a job in this situation is a serious threat that likely has many taking what they feel is the safest path to keeping their job, and many times that is whatever that really loud crowd is demanding.
True. Also, office politics means that senior management at large organisations tend to be very risk-averse (the old "try not to be in the room when a decision is made" trope).
Telling the geeks in the IT basement to change the name of the "master branch" on that "git" thing that the organisation apparently uses, so that thousands of angry people (some of them journalists at large media organisations) aren't shouting at you on Twitter seems like such an easy choice to make ;)
a) modern corporate culture trying to make employees take on the company they work for as part of their personal identity
b) young, liberal people working in PR departments who would be horrified if anyone personally called them racist / sexist / homophobic etc
These people go to work, see some random account on twitter saying "<your company> is racist" and a) and b) combined makes this feel like a personal attack on them that they have to defend and social signal against.
This is the most likely explanation I have come up with, because as you said, none of this really makes sense from a logical business perspective.
I think when individuals or even companies roll over, it's because the mob's attack can be quite scary. It's easy to point at the people who stay their ground and say, "see, they didn't cave and did just fine."
But that's an obervation we make in hindsight, and without knowing it was like for the targets. At the time, their phone is probably ringing off the hook, media are calling, etc., and they have no idea when the attack will end or if people are getting fired, advertisers withdrawing or any of that.
I'll applaud anyone, left, right or other-vectored, who stands up to mobs, though. I'm not a fan of the phrase "cancel culture," but it gets one thing right: it is a cultural development, both the culture of outrage and the culture of appeasing the mob. The injustice of a, outraged mob declaring itself judge, jury and executioner only works if targets try to appease them. So while the culture of outrage is a hard problem because it's diffuse, anyone who refuses to accept that injustice is has an outsized effect in pushing back against the appeasement side of it.
I've been on the sharp end of a minor version of this, and you're right, it's scary. I only coped by not paying attention to it all and buckling down to deal with the things that matter. And alcohol, which helped, though it cost me in other ways.
> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?
> It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
If you combine both the statements, you are committing a no true Scotsman fallacy.
I don’t think so. It’s not that no true Scotsmen are idiots, it’s just that the idiots are not representative. Maybe 10% of Scotsmen are idiots. The other 90% are fine.
This is a soft form of the same argument. Whatever may be the proportion of those people, the community still has to own up to it if this portion exists.
When it comes to political ideology invoking a no true Scotsman is not always invalid.
As an example, as a leftist I can say: “A socialist revolution without social justice is not socialist”. Yes, this is a no true Scotsman fallacy, but here I am merely disavowing a subgroup of people that might share my economic believes that workers ought to take over the means of production, but fail to see that the racial injustice in our economic system is part of the problem. In my view, if you don’t see that, you are not a real leftist.
Calling welfare or regulation "basic goals" is misleading: the first is not basic as there is no right to welfare, but forcing others to support welfare while regulation is not a purpose by itself, it is a means to achieve specific goals.
Seeding wrong ideas in what seems to be a neutral context is not nice™.
Slavery as class struggle seems a popular method of argumentation, but it's hard to pin down that logic when any discussion of it generates anger instead of explanation.
Cultural left, ie, "woke" and economic left are two very, very different things. Americans have this wonderful way of completely slaughtering their political terms.
> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?
That's missing polsci 101, left/right exist, that's why they have names, not the opposite.
This goes way beyond just trying to get ahead of a potential PR disaster. I can think of nobody out there in non-nerd world that would've raised a stink about the word "master" being used in some programming context, just like they haven't raised a stink about the term MC. This is ultra-woke privileged white tech lefties who truly do feel like their fighting for social justice by doing this kind of thing.
I'm very familiar with this as I spent 10 years in prison. The term "Uncle Tom" is not used by black men in prison. They say "house n-word" (except not n-word of course). It's about the most offensive term possible.
It basically means a "house slave" that was well-treated and is therefore sympathetic to or on the side of the white man. The anytonym is "field n-word", a slave that worked in the fields, which I probably heard more often as people sometimes identify as that term. E.g., if a guy is talking to his buddy who has a nice ("cadillac") job situation, he might say "I'm just a field n-word."
hi, for anyone looking for something to vicariously offended about, this is a racially insensitive comment to be offended by, colloquially (but not academically) called a "racist" comment.
this person is referring to a dichotomy in the black American slave caste, where people that worked in the fields were considered different than people that worked inside the house. the adjectives being "house negro/n**r".
It is used to invalidate the opinions of someone proclaimed as "black" that doesn't have consensus with a community that is pretending to be amorphous.
There have always been black Americans privileged enough to choose causes like any other American, while being lumped into the identity politics from all factions of the country. Even Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail (1953) references this.
I don't speak for anyone, and I am aware of black American people in my life that did bring up the "master/slave" terminology in computing as problematic and offputting and insensitive. The people in my life are of an older generation than me. The github issue, as this article points out, does not have a "slave" context only a master. To some that doesn't make a difference.
I am speaking for myself and like I said I agree with what the person in London wrote.
My response here might be poor (difficult subject, not a great writer), but I'm genuinely interested in your opinion.
"Microsoft stops selling software to American police departments" is a good response to BLM. "Microsoft changes 'master branch' to 'main branch'" is pointless deckchair-reshuffling that signifies nothing.
By applauding the change of a noun that has the most tangential possible relationship with slavery, aren't you letting them off the hook of doing anything substantive?
I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US. It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US.
There are. The Democratic Socialists of America has grown a lot over the past few years. They even managed to get four member elected Congress this last election cycle.
It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
I have no evidence, but I suspect McCarthyism and the following hard crackdown on leftists that followed during the cold war greatly slowed down this "natural" growth. It took a generation removed from the cold war for this growth to start up again.
DSA isn't no-quotes-left. It has gone full steam into identity politics if you ask me (I'm not American, but this is just based on what I've been seeing from them, correct me if I'm wrong). I don't mean that in a negative way and I'm not making any judgements of morality or anything, but no-quotes-left has a class conscience, today's left has an identity conscience (gender, ethnicity, etc). Both fight for equality (new left also for equity) but the ideology has shifted from a class struggle to a new kind of struggle that has replaced the nobility and bourgeoisie for the white cis male, and the proletariat for BIPOC, women, gender non conforming, etc.
The DSA is a mix. It has grown in leaps and bounds, but before it did that it was this kind of small social democratic organization with a kind of unique politics that came from Michael Harrington, and was more interested in being a bit of a left wing lobby inside the Democrats.
With the rise of Bernie Sanders and a new generation of people getting into socialist and left wing politics, it became quite a bit broader and larger and vibrant. And my impression is it became of a centre of gravity for other left tendencies in the US to coalesce.
There's quite a few different groupings in there these days. I don't think you can make a broad generalization like you did here.
Apologies for the broad generalization (as I said, correct me if I'm wrong, and I stand corrected here). That being said, if what you say is true, it's a pity that either the main stream media's reporting doesn't reflect that diversity or that the louder voices don't leave space for the rest of viewpoints.
Agreed. I'm a far-left (libertarian) communist in America, and from what I've seen/read, the DSA is effectively the slightly-left wokish arm of the Democratic party. Think "public healthcare" with a big dose of "what are everyone's pronouns?!"
They're more concerned about trigger words and identity politics than dismantling capitalism.
IIRC up-thread I wrote complaining about "woke" leftists who are "three times as strict on culture-war issues as on economics", and I was referring precisely to today's DSA. As a supporter of the Harringtonite social-democratic class-struggle approach, what the org has become kind of disgusts me.
Not necessarily - Bernie Sanders runs as an independent and just caucuses with the Democrats (same for Angus King, the other independent in the Senate, although he's not of the DSA). However, it doesn't look like anyone in the House is an independent, so maybe Bernie's the only one that does that.
Maybe because the country is blocked in a two-party systems? In other democratic countries, you do not have "the left" represented by one single entity. You instead have a multitude of political parties that can negotiate with each others to push for their political goals. That makes the political landscape dynamic, new parties are created, reorganized, disbanded all the time.
In the US, if you are generally more aligned with the democratic party but see some changes you disagree fundamentally with, you either suck it up or give up your ideals and switch to the complete opposite (republican party).
It's because of the 2 party system we are stuck with.
Democratic Socialists, Social Liberals, NeoLibs, and NeoCons(because of the Republican party's shift to the right) are all stuck under one party, so the biggest group controls the entire thing.
They are. For example Seattle has a council member from the Socialist Alternative party. There are a few Democratic congress representatives that are socialists (both in state and national level). Some socialist policies have successfully been pushed by socialist party members (e.g. the current medicare for all bill has around 100 democratic house members backing it up).
However the confinement of the current democratic system in the USA today simply doesn’t allow for third parties to gain national traction. There are mathematical models that proves this fact. For the real left to get socialist parties to the national assembly some democratic reforms needs to happen first.
Perhaps, in the spirit of sharing useful insight within these kinds of discussions, as a black American you could educate me about something?
For context, I am neither black nor American, I have little time for woke virtue-signalling and fake outrage, but I do want to be properly respectful of others whose background and sensitivities aren't necessarily like my own. With that in mind, I often find socially acceptable terminology around race confusing.
For example, take the word "color". I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable, nor why one of the most prominent advocacy groups still uses the former term in its name. There is so much unconstructive commentary about this particular example that it's hard to figure out what the relevant history and genuine sensitivities are here. Can you enlighten me?
It's just symbolic, and still part of a consensus forming continuum based on advances in communication across large landmasses.
Black people in America are from many different cultures and are simply people that noticed that they had a shared experience of being excluded from institutions and even entire states.
The terminology simply comes from individuals taking initiative in the moment and saying "they treat everyone that looks like us all the same and we need umbrella terms to acknowledge our shared circumstance so that its easy to refer to ourselves". Other non-black people already had terms for us and these terms were typically also used in the pejorative. Many people consider "black" to be an affliction even today. So what you have is that some black people reject those older terms, some people try to repurpose and "take back" those older terms, some people create new terms, most terms are still in use.
These aren't scientific terms, but they do permeate into academia to convey a shared concept. So there isn't much to read into it except learning what the consensus is, and the history of why it is. But trying to merge it into the lexicon based on pattern recognition with other words will only confuse you.
Thank you, that's an interesting reply. Again perhaps this is my own lack of informed perspective, but I had always imagined that grouping all "non-white" people together under a single term was part of the problem. It seems like an act that diminishes the distinct cultures all being lumped in together, as well as the obvious racism if the whole group was then treated as somehow inferior or less worthy. But from what you wrote, it seems like at least some people in the affected communities do find these kinds of umbrella terms useful, as a form of solidarity and recognition of shared problems? But then even within those communities not everyone agrees on which terms are useful for positive reasons and which have too much negative baggage or pejorative history, and that's how we get the apparent contradictions like "colored people" being socially unacceptable, but not in the context of the NAACP, and at the same time "people of color" being socially acceptable?
yeah mostly accurate, but a lot of people would not agree with me for saying so :)
but lets look at your example source of cognitive dissonance, NAACP:
The NAACP has done historically monumental things on behalf of a group of very different people that were being excluded as if they were the same. It comes from a different era and different motivated individuals taking initiative. It predates a different individual pushing “African American” much later on. That predates such rampant subsequent immigration and population growth in the US where enough people find African American to be so ambiguous to the point of ridiculous, while there are many slave descendants that take pride in the term and make it their whole identity (or have it forced on them like many black people in other English speaking countries with no American parents, this is particularly comical to me), whereas others who may also be slave descendants adopt black American or other adjectives and identifiers. With the NAACP there is no utility in changing that acronym and no need to or drive to, like a landmark. It wouldn’t surprise me if they arbitrarily did change the name on their own, but there is no talk or consensus amongst its beneficiaries to do so (unlike other landmarks).
> the obvious racism if the whole group was then treated as somehow inferior or less worthy
Well, yes, this is how the group forms in the first place. It's made up of people who don't have an identity in common other than the one that's forced upon them of "non-white" by the white people discriminating against them.
Note that in countries which aren't white-majority you don't generally get a group of people holistically identifying as "people of colour", even if the same ethnicities would do so in the US. Instead you get different forms of racial discrimination.
Similarly LGBT+ merges a group of people with very different identities and practices, the primary thing they have in common is receiving the same kind of abuse from the same people.
> I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable
Scott Alexander explains this as a way for upper-class people to maintain their privileges: "The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying "colored people" is horrendously offensive but saying "people of color" is the only way to dismantle white supremacy."[0]
“Indeed, what is acceptable for white people to call African Americans and for black people to call themselves has evolved over the last century. The standard term has shifted from “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “African American” as people sought to redefine themselves and their place in America.
Now, in 2020, “people of color” often is used to refer to the collective group of non-white Americans. It is offensive to single blacks out as “colored.” That, in part, is because of the painful segregationist history associated with the term prior to the mid-1960s. “Colored-only” restrooms and water fountains are examples of harmful relics of the Jim Crow South that black people had to fight, and die, to remove from American culture.”
It also doesn't explain why "black" was preferred for a time, then it was verboten, and now it's preferred but you have to capitalize it. Nor does it explain why "African-American" was required for a time even though many Black people don't identify as African, and it's obviously completely inappropriate to apply to a Black person who has never left the UK, but that's what was required nonetheless.
Scott Alexander's hypothesis explains all of that. Constant change is what makes fashion fashion, and fashion is a very effective way to discriminate between the in-group and the out-group.
Jesse Jackson took initiative in the absence of other civil rights leaders and chose a term, African American. It’s really not that complicated. Just like people can acknowledge that BLM would be shitty branding and exists in the absence of other civil rights leaders, there is no committee and now its just about correcting people.
Scott Alexander is condemning woke culture in the essay you quote but the specific reason woke culture cycles through words is the euphemism treadmill.
This is an example of the "Euphemism Treadmill." Words that refer to things that some portion of society hold negative views about acquire negative connotations over time. These words are then discarded by polite society for clean new words without the baggage. E.g. latrine to water closet to toilet to bathroom to restroom, or retarded to mentally handicapped to developmentally disabled. See: https://aeon.co/essays/euphemisms-are-like-underwear-best-ch...
White guy here, just wanted to chime in and say HELL YES, you nailed it bro. There's more of an emphasis in "tech" toward appearing "woke" than ACTUALLY SOLVING THE FUCKING PROBLEM. You nailed it with "you/they don't see us as equals [...]".
The most important word in the term "African Americans", to me, is, "AMERICANS". You're in this with us. You're our friends, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. We're in this TOGETHER. And this woke-ism bullshit is just that: bullshit.
Changing a primary branch name from "master" to "main" isn't solving the damn problem. Execs want to do this to earn PR points and wash their hands of the issue of a lack of representation and equality in the industry as a result. It's cheaper than actually giving a shit. But the reality is that socioeconomic barriers to entry into high paying STEM roles amongst our African AMERICAN friends/colleagues is a very real problem that needs to be addressed on both a cultural and economic level.
Ya'll are every damn bit as capable as the rest of us and I'm fucking tired of seeing you thrown under the bus in this industry, especially under the guise of "woke"-ism. It's time we start tearing down these PR stunts as the falsehoods that they are and insist on real, monetary, quantifiable and results-driven investments in black communities that are damn well deserved.
And to my colleagues in the industry that are non-black (especially white): it's time we stand up and "get their back" for our black friends, colleagues and family members. We're in this together, and it's well past time we stand up for our fellow Americans. This bullshit charade needs to stop and WE have the power to move things forward into an era of REAL representation and fairness, and as such we have a RESPONSIBILITY to do it. Enough talk - it's time to act.
It's not an American import, or absurd to have an identity composed of both a nationality and ethnicity. Really, it's up to the individual - there are many 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants to the UK or Europe that value their cultural origins and ethnicities. Absolutely those people are British, but many, if not most will not wish to erase their heritage for the sake of 100% assimilation into the host culture.
I should have expected such a reply. Your comment is exactly what I expect from white collar professional that works an office job.
It is an American import and it is absurd. It also causes division. e.g Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross. I've seen a lot of guys in working man's pubs get quite angry and this sort of resentment is always hand waived away as "racism" when that isn't the problem at all.
Many developers don't spend time with the lower classes / those that aren't university educated which have to deal with the worse parts of immigration. They only see the positive aspects of it.
BTW the same happens with the British in the South of Spain btw. The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.
This is rich. Britain colonized half the world, imposing it's culture on dozens of societies around the world while exploiting their labor and natural resources, but god forbid modern day migrants to the UK dare display the flag of their homeland and cherish the traditions of their parents. Meanwhile chicken tikka masala is hailed as Britain's national dish. I suspect your xenophobia is a personal foible, not a British sensibility.
> This is rich. Britain colonized half the world, imposing it's culture on dozens of societies around the world while exploiting their labor and natural resources, but god forbid modern day migrants to the UK dare display the flag of their homeland and cherish the traditions of their parents.
This old nonsense. This is the problem people like you will constantly bring up the past and won't let anyone forget about it. None of the people that were involved with that are alive today. Also BTW every country and people have invaded and colonised one another if you go far back enough in time. Are we going to start blaming the Italians for Caesar massacring the Celts and the Gauls? When do you want to stop? 50, 100, 500, 1000 years?
> I suspect your xenophobia is a personal foible, not a British sensibility
When did I claim I had a problem with people having another flag up? I didn't say that. I said the labourers in the pub tend to and it has nothing to do with xenophobia (which is you basically euphemism calling them/me racist btw).
If you re-read my comment I actually said that someone would just claim it was racism and not actually try to understand what the real issue is. You did exactly that and you didn't even direct it at the right person. You can never have a sensible discussion about these issues because mid-wits will scream racism almost as it were some Pavlovian reaction.
BTW I am actually a xeno-phile. I actually have lived all over the globe and have only recently come back to the UK.
Flop on the field all you want, no one called you racist. Your insistence that foreigners can't continue to identify with their own culture while also embracing a new one is aptly described as xenophobia. If you want to have a sensible discussion, lets start by engaging with what is actually said instead of what we wish was said.
You actually implied it heavily by calling me xenophobic. You know full well they are synonymous. I am not stupid, so don't play silly games with me please.
> Your insistence that foreigners can't continue to identify with their own culture while also embracing a new one is aptly described as xenophobia.
Nope. I never insisted that at all. I never even mentioned foreigners. You keep on twisting what I am trying to explain and trying to pervert it into something you wish it to be.
I said that this sub dividing people in the *same nationality* by *race* is an American import to the UK (and from what some of my Belgian and French friends have told me) a import into some parts of Europe as well. It isn't typically done in the UK, France, Belgium and I suspect it is the same in many of the other European countries.
Then I said that working class labourers (not all of them white btw) don't like it when 2nd/3rd or 4th generation immigrants aren't patriotic or don't try to assimilate (like their parents did). I then said these concerns / complaints will always get hand-waived away by people as "racism" when the real problem is a feeling of disrespect. Just like you have.
It got nothing to do with xenophobia as the people I am talking about are British.
> If you want to have a sensible discussion, lets start by engaging with what is actually said instead of what we wish was said.
I do. So if you could actually respond to what I said and refrain from this behaviour (which you are now accusing me of) that would be great. Pointing the finger at me, when it is actually you is disingenuous.
Virtually every story is flamebait to somebody, so 'why bother' arguments that justify going straight to hell can't be valid.
How HN works is that commenters need to resist provocation and focus on substantive, thoughtful discussion no matter how divisive the topic is. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. This is something we're working on learning to do as a community. Most commenters in this thread are demonstrating that it is possible. Accounts that fuck with that process by casually setting fires or stoking them are particularly harmful, so please don't do that here.
In terms of whether an article is on topic, the criterion is not "might someone take it as flamebait", but "is it intellectually interesting and substantive enough to support thoughtful discussion". More explanation about that if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
> Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross.
That's not anti-foreign culture, but it is insulting to be born in the UK and not see it as your homeland. Or would you be okay with me raising a British flag in India and claiming I was British, if my parents happened to move there before I was born?
> Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross. I've seen a lot of guys in working man's pubs get quite angry and this sort of resentment is always hand waived away as "racism" when that isn't the problem at all.
No that's absolutely racism.
> The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.
This is also their racism.
A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.
I never mentioned the race of the labourers. Many weren't white btw. But from your comments you are assuming they are. That btw is racism.
> No that's absolutely racism.
Why? Care to explain? I never mentioned the race many weren't white btw that were making a similar complaint.
> This is also their racism.
So Spanish people who are basically white are being racist against other white people? Is that what you mean? That isn't racism.
Or British (not all British people are white) are people being racist against Spanish people? Or are you using Hitler's definition of what "white" is which means Northern European.
Either way this is non-sensical.
> A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.
What are you on about? Nobody said anything about that. I said there are people in Spain that are English that don't assimilate with the local population which is Spanish.
You presume a lot about me sir. I'm happy to engage in your ideas, but play the ball not the man.
I'm actually sympathetic to your views, and feel strongly that immigrants should respect and participate in the host culture as much as possible. That requires effort on both sides, of course, and the blame doesn't always lie with the host Western culture as is often unfairly characterised.
My only point was that I don't see that maintaining a link to your heritage and cultural/ethnic distinctiveness as _necessarily_ incompatible with assimilating and participating fully into the host nation and enriching it in the process. This isn't an argument for neoliberal multiculturalism by the way, which I view as mostly a policy disaster, that hurts the working classes and immigrants the most.
That sounds great, but in practice doesn't prevent people from receiving racial abuse or discrimination because of what it says in their passport. There's definitely a faction of people who think that if you're not white you're not British, regardless of what it says in your passport. And the Shamina Begum case proves that there's some support for this: the government can simply remove your British nationality if you're Bangladeshi despite her being born in London.
She joined up with ISIS not the best example to bring up. She gave it up there and then. It not like she hooked up with some bad lads and got into a bit of hijinks.
The faction of people that don't believe you are British if you aren't white has to be minority of people. Most of the people that may have brought up the subject are in their Winter years now. Pretending that Enoch Powell is still popular is a nonsense and tbh is nothing more than virtue signalling IME.
> She joined up with ISIS not the best example to bring up.
She's the perfect example. If a full on British person like Nigel Farage does a heinous crime (or make it apples to apples, he joins ISIS) would they take his citizenship away?
If she was born in the US, it would be unthinkable.
The citizenship concept is a requirement for modern life. If a person has their citizenship revoked, what are they to do?
They are illegal where they are, and they are illegal where they go. To my knowledge, there's no processes in any country for becoming a citizen without a preexisting citizenship from another country.
Back to this specific example, if she had wanted to come back and denounce ISIS; what should the UK offer her?
What about if she wanted to come back and face trial; what should the UK offer her?
In the end, just to point out the obvious, revoking citizenship is completely unneeded. If she comes back, charge her with her crimes. If she travels, extradite her. If she stays, let the leopards eat her face.
> If they were born in the US, they would have just been assassinated by drone strike instead like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki.
Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.
Well they shouldn't have been let back in anyway. I also have no sympathy for a woman that said she felt nothing when she saw severed heads (of people executed by ISIS). Also there are claims that she enforced some of the Sharia laws and wasn't a passive member of the Caliphate.
She revoked her citizenship when she left.
> Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.
No there is a different legal treatment for people that join a rogue state which literally wants to destroy yours. I don't care about these people. Her supporters can cry racism all they want, It isn't racism. We don't want terrorists back in the country.
You keep avoiding the answer in the guise of "well I would have done X". The question is simple, how come she lost her citizenship but other ISIS fighters of British ethnicity didn't?
> She joined up with ISIS not the best example to bring up. She gave it up there and then.
While I do see your point (not British myself, but in Switzerland we had a few ISIS cases as well), I'd like to offer a different viewpoint as well: Our countries messed up at some point in their life - education, mental healthcare support, whatever; something went wrong when one of our citizens feels obliged to join something as heinous as ISIS. After all, we also feel like that with every other terrible criminal - murderers, rapists, etc.; our societies believe in their right to find the right path again, why not someone who joins ISIS?
I’m not arguing for the continued power grab of the home secretary here (who is abhorrent), but the UK does not have birthright citizenship like the US does, so the same set of rules do not necessarily apply.
Anyone born in New York is American, not everyone born in London is British.
The empire caused all sorts of citizenships to appear; citizens of the Empire were "British" right up until the point where they actually started moving to Britain, causing that right to be taken away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Ugand...
The very concept of nation is quite euro-centric though.
Most of the rest of the world definitely thinks in terms of ethnic and racial groups, and has done so for thousands of years.
I am in the UK, which geographically is part of Europe. That not how we think here and that is a good thing. I don't want our politics to become racialised like it is everywhere else. All it seems to do is bring division and hatred and unfortunately it has imported from America.
If people don't want politics to be racialised, they need to get better at shutting down the blatent racism of the press, police, and major political parties.
Some of it is imported, but the UK is quite capable of its own characteristically British racism, most recently directed against Poles and Romanians.
It may be a European concept but the concept of a nation state is a good one. When it works, it unites everyone as one group. Humans have a psycholical need for a group identity. Better to unite diverse individuals behind a flag, than to form groups based on ethnicity.
Or is Emmanuel Macron also wrong when he also said (and I am paraphrasing) "They are Frenchmen" when an American Talk show host said that Black people won the World cup for France?
In our secular societies you are what your nationality is and your race is irrelevant (or should be considered to be) in the eyes of the state and in the UK it is considered rude to bring up someone's race (other than identifying them).
I will accept that we aren't perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good. Bringing up areas of Europe which I obviously wasn't referring to and have been politically unstable for decades now is disingenuous and simply missing the overall point to be a smartass.
The Balkans are but one recent example. European history is littered with "you might live in the same place and speak the same language but you're not like me because a couple hundred years ago your people were from X".
Europe has the same problems the US does just spread across fewer skin tones.
The recent wars in the Balkans are the result of too many nationalities in too little land, and they didn't involve significant numbers of African immigrants (who typically had the good sense of emigrating to other parts of Europe).
In Europe, France and Romania are different countries, so you don't have "Romanian Europeans" living in France. "African American" isn't solely about skin color, but also about a shared history, migration path, acculturation, and regional population concentration. It's as much a valid "sub-nationality" of American as "Midwestern" or "Californian".
Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.
> In Europe, France and Romania are different countries, so you don't have "Romanian Europeans" living in France.
I never claimed there were Romanians Europeans living in France. I claimed that if you were happened to be Black and British you were still seen as simply British (until relatively recently). The same is generally true in other parts of Northern Europe as well, I have discussed this with Belgians, Germans and Frenchmen online and they all tell me similar things.
I am complaining that this nonsense of saying you are a White <Nationality> or a Chinese <Nationality> or Black <Nationality> idea has been imported from America. It doesn't make sense here.
> "African American" isn't solely about skin color, but also about a shared history, migration path, acculturation, and regional population concentration. It's as much a valid "sub-nationality" of American as "Midwestern" or "Californian".
I don't care what they do in the USA. That is their business. It isn't a thing here and it shouldn't be. Just because we speak English in the UK, doesn't mean we are like Americans.
> Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.
> In Europe the notion of someone being a African Frenchmen or a African English is absurd.
Yes, but
> You are your nationality.
Only if you're a nationalist. Many believe in cross-national or non-national collective identities, e.g. the identity of being a wage worker.
In other cases - it's groups oppressed by the state. The Catalan and Basque come to mind; and there are the Roma ("gypsies"), who are not territorially-defined.
Wait a second. In Germany we had work related immigrants (dominantly Turkish) in the 60s. The descendants (2/3/4 generation) of these immigrants are still classified as such (and share attributes about the black community in the US). I do not remember a proper title ... but that is just my brain right now.
I think important to distinguish between the radicals and the reasonable people. I would consider myself left but find this change ridiculous. Similar to e.g. how the American concern around blackface is pushed around the world and has madethe dutch Zwarte Piet or German equivalents 'offensive' (even as they probably relate to charcoal burners ('Köhler') [1]).
You equate the few radicals that see some issue there with all 'on the left' which is presumably 50% of any population.
Similar to veganism: the joke is that vegans are all very vocal about being vegan. But reality is that you simply don't notice all the ones that aren't vocal about it and silently love their lives or focus on other issues. Its just an issue of availability bias [2].
No, I equate it as an accurate criticism of the left.
As in, it isn’t an inaccurate criticism. It would be nice if the various camps just acknowledged their criticisms based on accuracy.
Yes, a few predictably present radicals does make it an accurate criticism. It would be more difficult to predict this kind of behavior from people identifying as “the right”. They do other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the latter, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the former that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform.
> Traditionally, Zwarte Piet is black because he is a Moor from Spain. However, since the late twentieth century the common explanation of Zwarte Piet's blackness has been that it is due to the soot on his body acquired during his many trips down the chimneys of the homes he visits. Those portraying Zwarte Piet usually put on blackface and colourful Renaissance attire in addition to curly wigs and bright red lipstick. In recent years, the character has become the subject of controversy.
Lol I'm not American and people have already pointed out problems with your reasoning as regarding to the American "left". No one has pointed the most obvious flaw though: what's the alternative? So you walked away from the "left" and went where?
Does the "right" even care about racism?
Granted I don't know much about American politics; in Europe though, I don't really see right wing parties having an issue with racism, or sexism or even poverty.
Maybe Trump & the Republicans really see black people, women, minorities as equals. Oh wait...
Its actually not a statement about what I personally do, it gives context to why black Americans and other minorities would and have, at the surprising surprise to seemingly everyone.
The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your own snarky comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.
"left" indeed -- I have been a pretty radical socialist since I was 16. (Well, at least on paper, I haven't been done activist work for years) ... And I don't recognize myself in this "left" that people keep talking about. I think it's hilarious to call CNN "left" or think that anybody in GitHub leadership is "left" for relabeling git branches. Plz. It's just a proposterous strange (and uniquely American) partitioning of the world.
If you define "left" as anything "not far right" then, yeah, ok, of course it's going to include a bunch of liberals who are not interested in any real structural change in the political-economic system and so are obsessed instead with changing how people speak.
So I just don't use the word anymore if I can. I'm not "left wing", I'm a socialist... Unfortunately "socialist" also seems to mean something weird to many Americans, too. (That anybody could with a straight face call Obama or Biden socialist just boggles my mind...)
If you want to understand why Biden and Obama are called socialists, I suggest you do some reading of the Anarcho-Capitalist literature (Anatomy of the State is the most obvious) or maybe listen to someone like Peter Schiff.
I don't agree with their philosophy as I believe it to be unrealistic but their criticisms and descriptions of what the state is and isn't is valid and why some call it socialist may make more sense to you. Hans Herman Hoppe (I am sure someone will quote mine him to smear him after I've mentioned him and haven't read any of this books) even called Democracy a soft form of communism.
Biden and Obama are called socialists because Americans were trained to fear communism and socialism during the Cold War. There is nothing about their political stance that is socialist. Conservatives have just learned that they can score easy points by calling anyone left of Ronald Reagan a marxist
> There is nothing about their political stance that is socialist.
Yes there is. There is a tonne of stuff that is explicitly socialist. In the UK my boss (who is from the UK) has recently said that the Biden Administration is more socialist than the previous administration. The news here has said it.
It got nothing to do with the cold-war. It is to do with their policies.
If there are quite a lot of people outside of the US that consider him to be much more socialist (and there are quite a few) than Trump, then it cannot just be "American conservatives" that are claiming this.
If it is redistributing wealth, it's socialist. Taking taxpayer money from person A and paying it out as a subsidy (even if laundered through a private company) to benefit person B is socialism.
Anytime you are redistributing wealth under the threat of the government's right to licit first use of force, you're engaging in socialism.
Socialism as defined by socialists is social ownership of production.
What you're describing is socialism as defined by its libertarian intellectual opponents, and that's a pretty broad definition (any taxation followed by spending is socialism? That's pretty odd... so all military and police forces are socialist?)
So, fine, if that's what you choose to believe, but it's certainly not a policy proposal that is advocated by actual socialists. Even the soft left wing of the Democratic party found/finds the ACA objectionable.
In fact it's explicitly the kind of policy that liberals advocate in order to avoid socialist policy measures and to avoid being called socialists.
“ Socialism is a political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
You should read the rest of that wikipedia article instead of just the first line.
There are many variations discussed in the article. What you should look for are the market varieties of socialism, especially the ones where the objective is to achieve socialism by following peaceful mechanisms of achieving socialistic goals instead of achieving socialism via revolution.
Its actually not a statement about what I personally do, it gives context to why black Americans and other people of color would and have, at the surprising surprise to seemingly everyone.
The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.
And lets be honest. Changing one word that annoyed a few dozen of people because they think of slavery, well, thats a lot of change just because a shit excuse, that will not matter in the end.
Absolutely. The paternalism that's shown toward black Americans by white Americans on the left is so obvious. They're treated like children. This patronizing stance toward blacks is like a continuation of the general pre-Civil War ethos of the Democrats. You "took care" of your slaves, too. They were your "property", after all. But of course, you didn't really want to help your slaves in any real way, lest they forget their place.
I really appreciate this post. Somehow I think the media and its funders are trying to drive the wedge between similarly thinking people as hard as they can.
As an outsider, watching Americans complain about political fatigue is fascinating, and informative. Very clearly there is a pervasive feeling that the political apparatus of America is ineffectual. But instead of seeking to become engaged, many are sucked in by media rhetoric that assigns blame to a menacing adversarial out-group.
> It's not pervasive corruption that's to blame, it's the evil culture of people not like you and their corrupt representatives!
We have this where I live, but thankfully we also enjoy a fair amount of mobility; it's less common to be entirely surrounded by those who vote the same as you, and most ridings have flipped between two or three parties over the coarse of most constituent's lifetimes. While the ethnic diversity of the ridings has generally increased over the same time.
Americans could use more political diversity; you're choosing between neocons and neoliberals, and fighting visciously against each other to do so.
Yeah the whole thing is really becoming a meta-commentary on the entire US political system. If it weren't so bizarre and dangerous, it would be really fascinating to watch (speaking as an American). On some level, many are subconsciously realizing the majority of both parties represent essentially the same geopolitical worldview that neither left nor right really agree with anymore (for different reasons). If this were a different country I'd predict a major political realignment on the horizon, but given how ingrained the respective neo-con/liberal ideologies are in the political infrastructure here ... I just don't see it as likely without something catastrophic happening to force the issue.
>you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think
To switch things around for perspective:
"There's nothing wrong with being white and you should be proud of your race."
Yep, if a black person told me this it would be patronizing, and if a white person told me this I'd assume they're racist. Swap white for black in my quote, and it's what the white community in the US is effectively telling the black community, if not in such obvious terms.
It's precisely because of systematic racism that we white people get to share our "sage advice" on how to combat racism, while being almost totally ignorant on the subject. It's proof of privilege and hideously condescending.
Do you think that there's a difference with using "master" for the main branch vs using "blacklist" for stuff you don't want in your system? Or are they equally non-offensive to you?
Please let "blacklist" and "whitelist" die. I'm not sure whether the terms carry racial baggage or not, but I don't need to be. I have to repeat the logic of which means which in my head every time. It's as bad as "false negative" and "false positive" -- which means what, again?
"allowlist", "blocklist", "denylist", whatever. They all mean something. I know that "blacklist" is used in a number of areas (blacklisted authors etc.), and I don't have much trouble understanding it there, but those uses also come with a whole set of connotations that don't necessarily apply to lists of URLs or whatever. It's a stretch too far for my brain to be able to hop over without thinking it through.
(For the record, I'm also all in for "false alarm" in place of false positive, and "missed bug"/"undetected flaw" for false negative in the context of static analysis where it makes sense.)
it will take more than a piecemeal approach of rewriting the English language to address prejudice
it is part of an effort of acknowledging that things white are seen as good or less bad, and things black are seen as bad and worse, and this is consistent across the language
this particular approach of extrapolating that towards skin color and ethnicity is just as misguided
but I could have seen it coming: when I’ve used the words in context before, it becomes clear people have had race on their mind the entire conversation that they try to make a poor joke about the irony of me using those words. Seemingly for their own comfort.
Not exactly what I would call privilege, in America.
As one who leans towards the left, I can reassure you that I've never told anybody what to think, nor have I been vicariously offended, and I barely communicate anything to anybody, which renders my "signaling footprint" pretty darn small. I'm doubtful that those are fair generalizations, and skeptical of critical signaling theory.
I read about the GitHub name change, then completely forgot about it until I saw this HN thread. At the time I think I asked our internal Git guru if this was going to change anything, and he said don't worry about it.
My concern is that a few gaffes from here and there are combined into some unifying characteristic of my "wing," when most people simply take little or no notice of them.
I think you're right about that. Coupled with the fact that extremes from both "wings" are, despite being quite small, very loud and have the megaphone of the news media and social media to make them seem larger than they really are.
Mixing the politics of the day with business is bound to result in a bunch of low-effort “equal justic initiative” black and white styles block divs.
The best thing a company can do the way I see it is to _dedicate_ a cut of regular profit to a black charity. Like, on a regular basis.
Money can affect serious change in the right “hands”.
JUST MOVE MONEY TO BLACK CHARITIES OR ASSOCIATIONS. ITS CALLED DIVISION OF LABOR. Then, do your best to be inclusive intentionally. That’s the answer IMO.
Reminds me of the Netflix film, White Tiger. A liberal Indian-American woman comes to India, pretends to care about how the lower castes of India are treated as slaves, but in the end, is just going through the motions and leaves a servant with pocket change. In the end, not treating them as people, but as objects to funnel their morality and values.
Malcom X said it the best. The White leftist liberal is the biggest oppressor in the room. By declaring they speak for the oppressed they've essentially silenced them.
I think speaking for the oppressed is better than actively oppressing people though. While there is always more that could be done, hanging out a BLM banner is better than...supporting suppression of black voter rights. Though I understand some people use signaling -in place- of action, which is neutral at best, it's better than active oppression.
In reality the current approach just alienates the people in power with the ability to do something meaningful.
People that werent going to do anything meaningful, but still wont. Except now they wear black and blue versions of the American flag in a specific counter protest.
While the actual person of color has to listen to your ilk proclaim rewriting the language is so progressive and for that person no matter what their life experience has been, and also wonder about how much the “silent” people resent them because they think it’s we’re going to cancel them.
Hope that people can further refine how the energy and sentiment is directed. I feel like we’re close, but people are still so out of touch.
the thing is the CCP has been indoctrinating your youngest from the 80s. pikachu surprise face when they start touting the propaganda they were taught in their younger years.
A "liberal" is supportive of capitalism, despite nominally calling for some regulation. Liberalism is broadly in the tradition of Adam Smith. The US Democratic party is primarily liberal.
A "leftist" believes in abolishing capitalism, either through enormous reform, an inherent collapse, or radical action. Leftism is broadly in the tradition of either Karl Marx or Pyotr Kropotkin. There is no significant leftist party in the US, although the SWP and CPUSA still nominally exist.
X believed that true racial justice is unachievable under capitalism. He was distrustful of liberals because he believed their attempts at gentle reform would hold back the "true" path to racial justice, placating his Black compatriots to the realities of capitalism and the necessity for revolution.
He did a substantial amount of advocacy with the Socialist Workers Party, so he was obviously fine alongside white people as long as they shared his economic beliefs. MLK also shared many of these beliefs ("Letter From Birmingham Jail", "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?").
The actual (socialist) American left (think AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren) calls this liberalism, and complains that it is more about posturing than actual change. So this is only a criticism of the left if you are very far to the right.
what sucks more is Github creating default main branch on repo creation. It's an unwarrented hassle to rename it and if you don't rename it, you will definitely try to push to master and then realize the mistake and push to main, every effing time.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 738 ms ] threadI live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.
- "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible"
- "Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions."
As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it makes you wonder what's really going on while we are distracted by this stuff.
What I find interesting is that there (probably? maybe?) isn't a shadowy CIA-like organisation promoting this stuff, this "tactic" is a naturally emergent property of the woke belief system.
I think I find this more frightening than if there actually were a shadowy organisation pulling the strings: here we have a philosophy, which many well-intended people subscribe to, that causes them to behave like a sophisticated intelligence agency deliberately trying to disrupt a foreign power.
It's a tactic they first used in the 70s in Europe, when "real" left parties (i.e. the old-school socialist/communist parties, affiliated with the soviet union) started gaining ground. All of a sudden they started funding a lot of stuff like that, because it weakened/marginalized those parties. Why fight for workers rights when you can fight for LGBT, immigrant, women rights, etc. I.e. the right of fifteen distinct groups that have no power.
Much more recently that tactic was used to destroy the Occupy Wall Street movement.
I wonder what is different now. The woke movement doesn’t seem to get any weaker, even as it adopts more and more identity groups.
But I'm really worried about how we import everything American to Germany without thinking twice.
Left newspapers have started to write BIPoC everywhere when it comes to domestic issues. What exactly are the indigenous people of Germany? Even blacks are relatively rare. It would make much more sense to coin an acronym that includes Jews, Sinti and Roma, given our sordid history. But we simply take what American culture has thought up.
We've had our first trans kid on what would be the equivalent of Oprah's show audience-wise just a few days ago.
Landlord was pretty chill and I kind of miss being able to just ask anything and he would try to make it happen (including things like repairing car motors).
Housemates were of the mildly radicalized religious kind, with daughters that did not attend the normal school system and are now being married of early.
I don't know if the German "integration system" has failed for the later ... they have the freedom to chose and they chose a path that is different from what is considered "normal" in the "West".
As a Canadian (Vancouver), I can tell you true integration happens over generations of people working together and respecting each other. In those conditions, it is unavoidable.
If either group lacks respect, the outcome is always conflict.
You put their kids into school together young and they won't know not to be friends until you tell them. That was my experience, anyway.
I'm all for give and take but I wouldn't want the "give" to result in backwards steps for woman's rights being imported from the countries of origin
No we think that forced marriage has no place in Europe, or the oppression of woman's. And yes, that's our culture..so is the freedom to choose your religion and to have free speech. If someone from another culture comes we are happy to integrate it into ours, but NOT when it clashes with our Laws.
>You put their kids into school together young and they won't know not to be friends until you tell them.
And what when they go into different schools (Jewish or Muslim etc), live in different parts of the City (look at Paris or Berlin), and never met someone outside of their bubble until 20 or later?
BTW:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia_in_Canada
I said it in another post ... it's not about being forced into something, it's about freedom of choice. And that is something universal, it's just codified in our laws.
It's completely fine if a women decides to become married and have children early ... it's probably not a good choice ... but morally there is no way to reject that.
The problem arises when people never learn that they have a choice ... I have (female) friends from rural Germany that think it's perfectly reasonable to go study and once finished move in with their husband and be the perfect stay-at-home mom.
edit: heck ... I even have friends from larger cities who would just prefer to be stay-at-home moms because that gives an excuse to sloth on the couch for half of the day :-)
>The problem arises when people never learn that they have a choice
Exactly, that's the problem with the bubbles like (Ghettos/Banlieues), and "special" schools.
Borrowing that specific term for other purposes is stupid.
I was forced to because the government in my country steals and wastes so much money that the economy breaks and you can't make money there. Still the quality of life is much better at home and I'd rather stay there.
All my friends are immigrants, I couldn care less to integrate here. Ideally I'd just rather live in a town with just immigrants from my country. As long as you keep them out of politics they'll probably won't rob you.
That town was in your country which you fled though.
Some nationalities integrate more than others. This goes for different European countries even, so it has very little to do with "race".
Her country is clearly superior in almost everything except for weather and food. I like living here and I've made good friends and enjoy my life here.
Now the curious part comes... I have zero attachment to both countries, their culture and their national identities. I couldn’t care less about their language or customs. I just see myself has some kind of post-nationalistic person that would much rather speak English with everyone, hang out on the internet and live wherever.
As far as I'm concerned national identities and culture are useless and holding us down as a species. I really wish people could outgrow this nonsense.
In hindsight I don’t think I was raised in a particularly enlightened culture. Do those even exist? I would much rather have us move past dumb social biases and constructs and work together to build a better future and a more universal and cooperative world.
On person's unbiased Baysian predictions based on a lifetime of experience and evidence, looks a lot like biases and prejudice to the delicate of mind.
And they get nasty about it.
So no, there will be no building of a better world.
You brain might think it’s very smart and clever and has the world all figured out but most likely it doesn’t. The world is a chaotic system beyond any one's comprehension. All generalizations that are not purely mathematical and 100% abstract in nature are wrong.
Perhaps a quick reread of the site guidelines is in order.
Obviously we did not respect the Indigenous people and I hope that can me mended through generations of mutual respect.
I think Vancouver is better because of the rich mix of cultures. It's not perfect here but I think it is pretty good. I have seen a Muslim man give his shoes to a homeless man on the bus and walk home barefoot in the rain. I believe anything is possible.
I don't think this is true. What percentage of White Americans, during the period of slavery, owned any slaves? Was it even 1%?
It is one facet of American history yes, but it is very far from the "definition" of the country.
Ha! I remember a drunken night with a north-american colleague; he asked why didn't we have indigenous people here in Europe. Then he suddenly realized the answer: oh, but it is you, you all are!
Every country is different. Developing world wouldn't care about rights, because they have to make cakes as fast as possible, and developed world can spend much time on being fair. It is something we should do.
Is a name change really that difficult for everyone? I remember when I first saw 'main' branch on Azure, yes, I have to slow down a bit, is it the end of world? It means something important for the US, and would be good for the future generation, I think I can afford the personal inconvenience. We, developers, are having the best job in this world, do we really need to get pissed off for this?
It's just a complete misunderstanding of the topic. Changing "master" branches simply confuses signified and signifier, and the fact that multiple signified can have the same signifier (like the signifier stool and the signified faeces and a thing to sit on. Removing the word doesn't remove the concept.
If these companies actually wanted to work for diversity, they could just do exactly that: employ more people from other backgrounds, or have extra internships for early orientiation in high school, or fund computer labs schools in poor neighbourhoods and so on.
Edit: As an illustration of how this doesn't affect the underlying meaning: In Germany there's a similar discourse going on, and the result is that the German radical right also started to talk about migrants instead of aliens or foreigners. But they didn't change their attitudes at all! They just adapted to the new word and kept their old concept.
So whole world has to change because US has its core problems?
>We, developers, are having the best job in this world, do we really need to get pissed off for this?
do we?
spend thousands of hours of your free time in front of computer just to learn stuff, then spend 3.5/5 or even more years for degree
then stay competitive / in touch with tech as a part of life style
just to have office/remote job with good pay?
is this "best job"? seems decent, but I wouldn't call it "the best", especially in countries where programmers do not have really outstanding pay like in SF.
If you want to transplant the "master"-example, look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts as well as a weird insistance that offensively named streets, underground-stations and (for some reason) pharmacies "must not need to be renamed, why would you even be offended".
Germany is not the example to go with concerning offensive language.
There are racists, and fascists, neo-nazis and old-nazis. They do exist, it's just that they don't pose that widespread of a problem in every day life, like it does in other western countries.
I'd say gender (in)equality is something you will encounter much more often in every day life over there.
We've got a minister of interior that does not want to start a study on racism in the police forces.
That's two of the big issues, that's not even every-day racism where it's hard to get an apartment or a job with a "foreign name", underrepresentation in leading positions or that in some parts you'll get at least hassled for walking with brown skin.
Germany is and always has been extremely conservative and integration/racism is an issue precisely because the largest party always saw imported skilled labor as people that should be forced back "home" again, even with a second and third generation growing up in Germany.
It's about choice ... there are women (also in Germany) that gladly _chose_ to stay at home, _chose_ to prepare meals for their husband and _chose_ to care for the kids.
On the other hand there are women that _chose_ to give their children into daycare weeks after birth to go back to work.
It's not about condemning any lifestyle as wrong, it's about given everybody (males included) the ability to life their live as they want.
Sadly this is far from the reality with median wages being barely high enough to sustain one person, forcing women (and men) to work and robbing them of their agency.
What exactly do you know about "the" German way?
> look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts
Okay I do - and that is exactly the useless actions that the submitted text and this discussion is about. For some reason you just ignore all that was said and just repeat those exact criticized points as if nothing happened.
Where these discussions about how Germans call their pharmacies connect to the article is that in both cases the arbiters who decide how things are called are the white - once you start to involve the people that these offensive words are about, you suddenly get a different sense of how important or offensive these words are. There's a recent example of a talkshow where a couple of white more-or-less-celebrities decided that these words are just german heritage, and really what is all the fuzz about ? To appease the ensuing mini-scandal the station organized a roundpanel of people who might be affected by these slurs - and surprise, they really weren't so fond of them.
Or see this article about a campaign to rename a trainstation: https://isdonline.de/umbenennung-der-mohrenstrasse-mehr-resp...
You are obviously right, changing words by itself doesn't change a thing - but if I can't even count on someone not using slurs about me, I can't expect to respected at all.
I don't know if and where you've been to Germany, but having went to school there entire years of our history class were dedicated to the Nazis.
To be precise it is about the atrocities committed by the Nazis and how they managed to subvert the society to be able do their crimes. By the way they started early on to change the everyday language.
> Indeed, Goebbels initially opposed the term propaganda, recognizing that in popular usage, both in Germany and abroad, it was associated with lies. Even after the ministry had been in existence for a year, he proposed changing its name to Ministry of Culture and Public Enlightenment, but Hitler vetoed this proposal.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ministry-o...
That is of course simplifying it a lot, but Germany as a whole has a problem with right-wing extremism who almost regularely murder people, and a police force who regularly have scandals involving members being present day Nazis, and these Problems not being adressed properly.
So I am not sure learning about The Nazis of the olden days is very helpful withouth showing the reach that these ideologies have into present day Germany.
And I say that as someone who has gone through these years that you reference as well.
I would bet that most people didn't have any idea that words like "grandfather" or "blacklist" had (or didn't have) any racist history.
Wouldn't it have been better to just let the words outgrow their history? These words were already dead or dying as racist terms. Not any more.
And, policing language generates a spectacular amount of distracting, harmless (to Microsoft) controversy.
Faulty pattern recognition machine at blame.
> In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.
I at least was intellectually gratified to learn about it.
That would be a rather rude, dare I say hateful thing for me to say, wouldn't it? In reality, I really enjoyed all the places in Germany I've visited, and most of my interactions with German folk that I've interacted with socially and professionally over the years. I especially enjoyed taking a technical and engineering German language course, so I can appreciate words like "Kaftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung" and "benzinbetriebenes Motorsystem". I wouldn't think to make such a comment about the German people, like you did about people in the USA.
It is all about context. Question is, why certain groups emphasize - or better: impose deceivingly by altering him - the wrong context to a crystal-clear situation.
It's still used to refer to a male teacher, particularly in elementary schools, as well as being the title used by lawyers.
A slave owner was simply a slavenhouder.
I think an important difference between ex-colonial European powers and the US is that the (ethnic) slavery did not take place on European soil. Most colonies were operated with very few Europeans to oversee, and as such people were not as exposed to it as people in the US, where masters and slaves would perhaps not live in the same part of town, but also not a continent away. So this may explain why those terms seem inoffensive/only have their meaning outside of the slavery context in Europe.
There are countless examples in the history of the world about slaves, including different ethnics, in every continent. May they have a word on this issue too?
I suppose they are not doing it for your feeling's sake. They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.
Insisting to help people is quite insulting, actually. Empowerment means you voice your own grievances. It doesn't mean recruit an army of armchair activists to do it for you.
Or to put it this way, if the "woke mob" decided to protest capitalism or even higher/stricter taxes, do you think that anything would change? Probably not, because production for profit it still at the core of every corp while at the same time the woke crowd has a limited understanding of capitalism to begin with (as can be seen by the claims that capitalism is by necessity based on racism). It is the worst of both worlds.
I get your sentiment, but this seems to be putting the cart before the horse, in multiple ways. Divorce rates and births out of wedlock do not have "a slew of knock-on effects"; they are the effects. There are only two reasons to care about those rates:
- They are easily measured, due to existing government accounting (birth/marriage/divorce certificates, etc.)
- Religious bullshit
I'll ignore the latter, since it cannot be reasoned with.
In the case of divorce, it doesn't happen without reason. Anecdotally, my parents divorced due to alcoholism and domestic abuse; my childhood, social mobility, earnings potential, etc. was improved by their divorce. Tackling alcoholism and domestic abuse may have "a slew of knock-on effects", including lower divorce rates; yet the reverse is not true, e.g. making it harder to get a divorce will not reduce alcoholism and abuse, it would merely subject more children to it for longer.
If we make the charitable assumption that the goal of what you're saying is for more children to receive more help and support, rather than the opposite described above, then that's several levels removed from what you actually said; and each of those levels introduces exactly the distracting, partisan rhetoric that you are arguing against.
- The first level of abstraction is focusing on the US. This seems fair enough, assuming you're in the US. Yet it's still important to note this abstraction, e.g. in the context of foreign aid. For example, it might be more efficient (i.e. give more help to more children) to spend more on foreign aid, since money can go further in poorer countries; alternatively, spending that money domestically might be more efficient (give more help to more children) due to targeting and accountability. If we want to give the most help to the most children, we should base policy on measured impacts; yet this is often framed as a "left vs right" partisan issue (pretending for the moment that the US even has a left wing), which distracts from actually achieving the stated goal.
- Next, you further narrow your focus to the black US population. This also seems fair, as they are a disenfranchised and oppressed group, and hence this focuses on a large number of large issues that need fixing. Even from a purely utilitarian point of view, it may be cheaper (or even reduce costs) to, say, tackle over-policing of black neighbourhoods; compared to tackling some more diffuse, less directly-controllable issue in other populations (e.g. suicide rates in white males). However, it's again worth noting the abstraction: in particular, a large improvement for the minority black population may have less impact than a smaller improvement for a larger population (e.g. the female population). Again, policy should be based on measurable impacts towards the stated goal, and again this has been turned into a partisan circus to distract from real change (e.g. with concern trolling about 'ignoring' white males).
- Next you split the focus between births out of wedlock and divorce rates. I've mentioned the impacts of divorce above; the partisan circus in this case involves 'traditional values', and bleeds into other areas like gay, trans and women's rights.
- The phrase "lowered births out of wedlock" is problematic, since (again) it is very far removed from the assumed goal of 'the most help to the most children', and hence puts the cart before the horse; and secondly it is charged with dangerous ambiguity. For example, lowering birth rates of 'undesirable' demographics (e.g. unmarried black people) could be achieved via eugenics; I'm hoping that is not what you had in ...
You mean the professional-managerial class? Or something else?
I'd argue if someone is feigning offense we should call them out on it, not collectively fucking prostrate ourselves.
This whole fiasco just makes me wonder what the hell is going on in the background while we're being distracted by this... surströmming-level red herring.
I'd love to see some demographics around this. When I lived in the bay area, most of my friends were part of this woke / "activist" community. I had some friends who disagreed, but mostly they were terrified to say so for fear of the mob.
Here in Australia, it seems like the demographics are the other way around. I know a few people who are part of the leftist woke / "activist" tribe. But most people I interact with socially think that while racism is a problem, the twitter mobs are a bit silly, and the woke stuff is overblown.
I don't know how you'd measure, but I'd love to see stats on what percentage of the communities in different cities hold this political stance. Is it growing or shrinking? Is it widespread in the west, or is it mostly just a bay area / portland / NY phenomenon - with small satellite groups in other countries?
I work with a Canadian team but American parent company. We see what they are going through and it is definitely different. I think our version of equality is just working together as peers and respecting each other, there is no performative or ablutionary aspect.
For the record, I think parent co. is genuine and seems very diverse too. Views are my own yada yada.
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/why-are-you-like-this
I don't know if iView works overseas, but I think the show is on Netflix too.
The problem is that most of the West tends to imitate cultural and political trends that originate in the US. And this is already being imitated. In most other countries we are not yet seeing a war to the extent we see in the US, but the American situation could be the canary in the coal mine.
LOL no
You have a moderate right and a far right party by now.
Even in 2016, an analysis between Hillary Clinton and Theresa May showed some of Clinton's views were to the right to those of May.
It's going to be funny a few years down the road when the trend comes to Australia before they actually notice.
Yes, it is definitely the "woke" who do this, and you are absolutely not projecting.
What are they going to do? Stop using GitHub? Good f ing riddance
The master branch thing was an attempt at misdirection and throwing the mob a bone.
It's a classic PR move. The entire objective was to generate distracting noise.
Policing language is popular among corporations for the same reason oil companies got "woke" about recycling in the 80s:
* It doesn't really change anything and doesn't affect profit margins.
* It affects everybody albeit very lightly and is extemely visible.
* It naturally leads people to shame each other, taking the heat off the corp.
* They can score some progressive points at minimum cost.
Same mechanism, different era.
Another example, Bezos recently banned books critical of transgender from being sold on Amazon. And just like that, everyone forgot about Amazon's brutal suppression of union organising activity in their warehouses. Similarly the rest of Big Tech thinks it can toss out token gestures and placate those who are critical of its business practices.
Translation: people who see an opportunity to debase others for free and put themselves on a pedestal
Update: We call this class of people Mullahs here in Iran. It's been slowly but surely becoming apparent to us that they are somewhat of a societal parasite.
Edited: removed snark
Edited: removed snark
[+] note how you just assumed "the other side", and the existence of exactly 2 sides.
The alternative interpretation is that they're consciously being malicious.
1a. The number of valid participants is low. It is easy to feel powerful sitting comfortably hidden in your parent’s basement behind a keyboard craving attention and direction. Misery loves company and when such people band together their numbers can appear large compared to something like a real world gathering of persons in a physical space. But it’s not real people in a real space, because that takes considerably greater effort.
1b. The numbers also appear artificially inflated because there is a low effort of repetition, which can appear as false participation, spam, trolling, denial of service.
2. There isn’t any real investment in most of this. Most of the motivation are bored people looking for inspiration to be emotionally concerned. They will point where the carrot leads. That isn’t a movement. A real movement features numerous participants willing to make a personal investment like those criminals that stormed the capital.
The funny thing is that this whole tradeoff of breaking an API to make it better is nothing new; The woke is just bullying everyone by asking the tradeoff to be ignored completely in their favor.
I don't think it's so hard to understand why some people might be irritated, though. The social attitude that motivates the change to switch away from the term 'master' is not widely held outside of a subset of Americans who are apparently vastly over represented in making these kinds of decisions. It's a bit grating to be saying "consider how others feel" while ignoring how most people feel about it, and making the change made you want anyway.
It's a zeitgeist which results in things like someone complaining that VSCode including a candy cane icon is more offensive than the swastika, and the VSCode repository acceeding this complaint. - I feel if that's where you end up from wanting everyone to feel welcome and included, that you've gotten lost along the way.
Of course there is a balance – too much fighting back and the cure becomes worse than the initial problem.
Just as security theater isn't real security, diversity theater isn't real diversity. We must stand up and denounce diversity theater and those who profit from it so that we can get focus on diversity efforts that have substance behind them.
But what about getting rid of "slave", "blacklist" and "whitelist".
The last two kind of opened my eyes to connotation of black and white, that may be problematic to some. Also I find "allow/denylist" more descriptive, maybe that helps.
It's not an issue. The etymology of the words have nothing to do with race.
Trying to get people to change them _creates_ that link.
There are real issues that could be focused on to bring about effective change. Not this.
Not directly no. But they enforce the unconscious belief that "black == bad" and "white == good". Read up a bit on unconscious/implicit bias [0]. There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening.
Also consider how other industries have approached this problem[1] and how things have changed there.
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/meet-psychologist-ex...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
You can justify pretty much anything with that reasoning. If you follow through with that, you'd have to ban the words "black" and "white" from the language completely, except in a racial context.
> There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening.
This investigation was about seeing faces, not hearing words though.
Interestingly enough, there was one paper that concluded that some of the responses to the test was driven by the prior associations between the colours themselves, rather than the racial part.
Why would you do that? I can wear a black shirt without "badness" being implied.
Also, what do blind auditions/interviews (a real change that would make sense in the Software industry as well) have to do with language policing?
I should also mention that I am aware that in Japanese culture (and I believe others in that area, but don't know for sure), the traditional color for mourning is white, not black.
You were thinking of Good Friday.
Still, apparently the origin of the name seems to have more to do with the idea of a "black day" (a day when a disaster occurs), according to Wikipedia:
> The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday originated in Philadelphia, where it was used by police to describe the heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961.
Why would you do that? Wearing black does not imply that a person is bad. "Blacklist/whitelist" implies that whatever is in the list is bad/good.
While this association is not in any way "natural" or necessary, and it's not even universal, it is still extraordinarily old - dating all the way to Ancient Egypt and influencing European culture from there to now. And thus, it is extraordinarily hard to remove by playing language games with one word.
This is a pretty huge jump in reasoning. These things have nothing to do with each other. You might as well be saying "red means stop and green means go, so subconsciously people hate Native Americans". Which is nonsense for many reasons.
Perhaps principally that people can discern racial features from faces without using colors at all.
That's pretty strange reasoning. Unless you mean to imply that "red man" is in common usage for a male Native American?
Let me paraphrase this argument, but correct me if you have a different understanding:
This is a strange argument because we've never actually established the relative values of x or r. Even if we assume the first point is true, it tells us nothing about the second, because kx might still be below or above the threshold.In fact, we _haven't_ demonstrated the first point anyway, so it's just compounding an already hand-wavey explanation of how things work. If someone can assume x > r with little evidence, why can't I assume kx > r? You might have priors on the size of k because you think 'red' is less strongly associated with race, but we know nothing about x or r, so it's pretty irrelevant. If you can hand wave the first point, you can hand wave the second. As I did.
I'd rather there was no hand-waving. But if that's the game we're playing...
Not everything is about skin color.
It depends. Am I trying to sleep or stay awake?
No, they don't. What your sources did was bring to light the current stereotypes in people's head, not how they were created. What you want to do is change those stereotypes, not mingling with the words that only communicate the stereotypes. It's about the concepts in the heads, not the words.
If you want to change the stereotypes (which you can't remove, just change), you have to provide different pictures: Showcase black business men/women, talk about the performance of Obama, have high achievers with diverse background do talks in schools, or sports stars do shows with kids, do shows with female arab DJs and so on. In short: Give the brains of people input that forces them to adapt their stereotypes.
This differentiation of signified and signifier often is hard to get right if your own moral system already conforms to the social goal, because in that case the word seems to be equal to the concept/meaning. So we just have to transport to word to transport the meaning, right? But this isn't how language works. Words can only trigger the frame they belong to if the other person already has the concept in her mind.
Words can also be used to put those concepts in people's minds.
So you can use words to describe things (like we do right now), and thus hope to invoke mutual understanding, but you can't put a new concept into another person's head by inventing a word. You can trigger a concept already there if the other person already associates a specific meaning with a specific word, though.
So if you want to better the situation for e.g. African Americans in the US, replacing "master branch" with "main branch" has no effect, because a) this master is not the master/slave master - the words may have had identical meaning (I don't know, perhaps both meanings have a common ancestor), but today the word "master" in the context (=frame) of source code respositories means something completely different than master/slave. Just as "slave" in the US doesn't mean "person of slavic origin" anymore.
But more importantly you don't change the stereotype of African Americans this way. That you'll only achieve by constantly pushing different images of African Americans in the relevant contexts, like, off the top of my head, a collective day where every github user with darker skin starts to use a real profile picture on github.
But unconscious bias testing has been shown not to test anything in a consistent manner, being largely unreproducible, and unconscious bias training has been shown not to impact anything much or even consistently impact test results.
Such things appear to be pseudoscience and bordering on a scam.
It seems like a mistake to invent racial terms out of whole cloth for no reason. It shouldn't be done.
> It shouldn't be done.
That's linguistic prescription. "This word means what it means and if you change it you're incorrect".
I'm not saying that. My position is it shouldn't be done because creating new slurs for no reason is stupid. A prescriptivist and a descriptivist could both agree to that, though they'd disagree with each other on whether the idea of the change is legitimate.
Which is probably a similar position to ccmcarey's original comment. No position was taken on whether the change breaks the rules of language or not, the argument was that either way the change is being bought on by ignorance of both normal usage and the lineage of the word (ie, potentially in defiance of both prescriptivist and descriptivist logic).
This isn't really an issue of prescriptive vs descriptive philosophy. Although the descriptivists will be hopping mad.
Absolutely no one is using words like blacklist in association with black people, in the same way that (almost) no one uses lame in reference to a crippled person anymore.
Do you even know any black people that give a damn about changing words just to appease American black people? Most of my family is black and so are most of my close friends. They would all find this absurd.
Mind you, these are Trinidadian black people, and so we are all the descendents of slaves as well. This is all so condescending and borderline demeaning that white people think that we are so inept that we think such changes would affect literally anything in life.
Stop it. Please.
Also, what is the problem in calling the relationship between two processes (one fully controlling the other) master-slave? It's a perfectly suitable analogy and does not have anything to do with any one person's ethnicity or history. I'll go a step further and say that looking at this whole thing entirely in the context of the mistreatment of african americans is unfair to people all over the world who have a history of slavery - as other posters have noted, there are plenty examples of that for people of all races. This is not exclusive to one group of people and no one can claim ownership of the word.
Any resemblance to words used to describe skin color is coincidental, I think.
Or maybe should I realize that as a literate adult, I have the ability to understand context around the words that are used?
Oh hey you offended me by implying my skin color means bad.
Adressing real issues cost money. Making bullshit changes is free.
The culture shock is particularly noticeable for non-anglo people.
http://antirez.com/news/122
It serves absolutely no purpose, other than for a group of people to feel like they have an ideological hold on the IT industry. Some of these people are already coming with new lists of "forbidden words" they are trying to impose with the old same excuse of "diversity and inclusiveness". Enough.
So do we know where that decision actually came from?
Additionally properly identifying the impact of race on ai/ml derived algorithms would be a better use of time.
But of course these would have cost and other implications that companies would not want to do.
The problem with slavery is not that there is a word for it, it's that it exists, and used to be very common. By using the word "master" we are not condoning slavery, nobody can believe that. Just like we are not condoning domestic violence by using the word "hit" in "hit song".
For the word blacklist I can see how misguided people could make a case, since the word black is used for something negative. Still ridiculous of course.
Another absurd example: In my project they decided to change the name of a "blackout tool". There is nothing negative about this tool, it doesn't make things worse, it just colours them black.
I switched from Github to Gitlab after this change. Political correctness is a great way to know that a company has the completely wrong focus and will be unable to innovate and create good products.
Well, they gave admins the option to change the default branch name to whatever they like, and they've announced they're changing from master to main by default in the next two months or so: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/10/new-git-default-bra...
You may as well stop using Git completely then, since Git itself uses main as recommended.
The default branch name in Git, as of v2.31 (released two days ago), is master.
Has this changed?
Now for some notes on your comment:
- Gitlab has switched the name of the master branch too
- The point is not that it is harmful or bad to do so, and anyone actually crusading against this change as if it was some kind of a slippery slope leading to the downfall of their subculture or even civilization may want to think about their priorities and sense of hyperbole.
- This is not at all what the article complains about. The author argues that this is essentially a form of virtue signalling that allows essentially overpaid white engineers to pat themselves in the back without putting in actual work and money for diversity, inclusion, and equality; a symbolic change that is not rooted in materialism.
Not without getting downvoted to oblivion for the only reason which is having an opposing opinion.
> Gitlab has switched the name of the master branch too
Yes I have been made aware of that now.
> The point is not that it is harmful or bad to do so, and anyone actually crusading against this change as if it was some kind of a slippery slope leading to the downfall of their subculture or even civilization may want to think about their priorities and sense of hyperbole.
I don't even understand this sentence.
> - This is not at all what the article complains about. The author argues that this is essentially a form of virtue signalling that allows essentially overpaid white engineers to pat themselves in the back without putting in actual work and money for diversity, inclusion, and equality; a symbolic change that is not rooted in materialism.
So.. it's exactly what the article complains about?
You have no idea why people downvote things. I find these discussions trite and boring.
Ah ah. You didn't believe you could run away, did you?
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/10/new-git-default-bra...
1. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/10/new-git-default-bra...
Master/Slave nodes and ports are to be found in a lot of hardware.
No one in their right mind ever would think of it in terms of horrible atrocities of the past. It’s a technical term. That’s where it ends.
Humans are a shitty bunch.
The author seems to imply that the name change is all about being non-offensive to some people. Since the author doesn't find the language offensive, they conclude that name change is only political correctness or virtue signalling and a hollow gesture. I do not agree with that. Language and words are very powerful in how we perceive the world. A changing vocabulary is part of cultural change.
[0]: https://mokacoding.com/blog/main-vs-master-xcode-12/
The post is about prioritisation. Moving the needle in a way that matters, not merely doing something so we can pat ourselves on the back for doing it.
Just because you can change something it doesn't mean you should or ought to. Opportunity cost....
It's saying that the change which has a small effect is never worth while (and... pay attention now. This is the other part of the post you missed: context)....
*IN RELATION TO* the larger effect which costs the same in time/effort/capital/energy/emotions/stress/give-a-fuck.
That's just how prioritisation/choice works.
The idea that you need to do something that is better before you can do something that is less, even if the cost is the same seems to imply that there is only a limited amount of energy that is expendable on these topics.
As seen from the bucketloads of comments and posts about this OLD issue (the python link is from 2018) it seems there's enough energy going around.
The idea that something can't be good, just because it is not the highest item on a list is nonproductive.
So if you want to make a productive choice then go for Y, not X!
At the very least, if you are going to choose X anyway stop trying to persuade everybody else to choose X with you, when they are already focusing on Y. That's just attention-seeking behaviour.
You are extremely uncharitable. There's no point of engaging you further.
You're missing the point, the author concludes that the companies decide that the language is offensive without asking the people who are supposedly the offended party.
[0]: https://www.parool.nl/ps/hoofd-geschiedenis-rijksmuseum-ik-w...
Here we go (this took under 5 seconds for me to Google)
https://dev.to/afrodevgirl/replacing-master-with-main-in-git...
Now there's duelling anecdata and the OP provides no suggestions on how to reconcile them.
I don’t think anyone expects “main” (“develop”, “default”, “trunk”, ...) to ever become the default branch name.
"So if this change did not really even attempt to involve the black developer community..."
This is like some dude from Vermont telling me I should use latinx as it's more inclusive -- linguistic colonization eh
Being a highly paid software engineer, like most of you reading this, did not stop a bully van flying up the curb I was walking on and 7 City of London police officers pinning me against a wall with guns in my face. They wouldn’t believe it was possible for someone like me to work in central London till one of them searched me and found my work ID. All this because I fit a description. What was this description? I don’t know, black male between 4’11 and 7’4 probably.
Oh course being inclusive is good. That's not the argument here.
In my memory this started way before the recent BLM protests - around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced.
The things about the CoCs that really annoyed me:
1. People would literally go around projects and send pull requests just to change the code of conduct to improve the wording even tho no one had made any complaints or anything. Anytime a CoC get added you would see more people mess around with the CoC than the code. It was like people just wanted to look like they were improving things while not actually doing anything.
2. The only blog posts I've seen about CoCs at conferences and stuff have sounded nuts. One was for SunshinePHP[0] where one of the infractions was someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better. They wrote that they told the offender to go to his room to prevent him from being assaulted. But mentions nothing happening about a guy threatening violence for flirting. I would understand if they were threatening violence in response to violence but flirting, nah. Then there was the whole fast.ai[1] thing where the infraction was basically someone was offended on the behalf of someone else who wasn't offended.
[0] https://geekyboy.com/archives/1179
[1] https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/
I don't know what you think flirting is but that ain't it. Your man was being a creep and while I'd agree violence isn't the answer, I'm not at all surprised if he was threatened. (I also wouldn't be surprised if he was just told to back off initially but then pushed the issue because that is what creeps do.)
And if for some reason this still isn't obvious to the reader, here's a top tip for how to avoid getting into a fight: maybe don't insult people.
Let's be serious it depends on the context of the conversation. She could have been flirting with him and then when he flirted she said "but I have a boyfriend" and he could had said that and she could have agreed. That is flirting. It could have been what we suspect some guy hitting on a woman and she said "I have a boyfriend" and he said that. I used the word flirting because that is what the source used.
The guy was probably a creep and I am not surprised either but if you're going to have a code of conduct for everyones safety then say someone had to go to their room for their safety tells me your code of conduct isn't for safety but for apperance.
One would think it could leave some sense about the maintainer(s) being decent in some way. Instead I’m just left with a feeling of coercion if anything.
It just shouldn’t be necessary to “present” yourself as a decent person as the author of some code.
Some document in a project folder online doesn’t make you or me better people. It seems to me more of a futile (and stupid) gesture if anything.
We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Putting a document in our projects telling others that we are doesn’t really change that.
A standardized way of telling others you are a certain way, doesn’t make you so. It relieves us of putting in the effort if anything.
/idealistic early morning rant over
Is this mutually exclusive to stopping people doing bad things and being bad people though?
There are a number of internet communities which essentially have this in the opposite form - as in "getting insulted is expected, no we are not going to do anything about it".
This was the de facto Linux mailing list way for a bit, and was somewhat documented in a lot of "how to interact and what to expect on LKML" guides.
If everyone is going to act in good faith the whole time, sure, it's fine. But as soon as you get one person acting in bad faith, it all falls apart - see the current Republican Party, for example.
> Be a help in times of trouble.
> Do not return evil for evil.
I will try, for you SQLite! :D
[1] https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
This one is similar to "be conservative in what you say and liberal in what you accept from others"[1], but worded better.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
And while you are right, the code itself doesn't care, there are lot's of interactions around producing that code that are between humans, where behaviour is important.
It's not much different from the guidelines that exist for this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I mean, that is a kind of code of condcut, too.
This is true, but they wont read the CoC. And even if they do, they won't follow it. If someone can't practice basic decency, a txt file won't change them. Its an entirely futile effort at best and more likely a virtue signal than actually trying to improve things.
The only thing that works is strict moderation. You don't need a CoC for that.
Otherwise you end up with arbitrarily enforced rules, created ad-hoc by whoever is doing the enforcing, without a way to know what they are or a way to appeal if you feel wrongly moderated.
Good. Otherwise people will pretend to be a laywer and talk about how _technically_ the rules don't say specifically what they did. Its a waste of time.
But really, in all my time on github and gitlab I have never seen an actual contributor violate common sense and common decency. The only shitty things I have seen have been anon users piling in on issue threads which have gone viral and in that case you just limit the repo to contributors only.
In Dutch (both in .nl and .be), the English term 'master bedroom' was fashionable for a few years, until the stigma of that term carried over from the Anglosphere and it's now being replaced (in the woke areas of the country) with 'ouderslaapkamer', which is literally translated 'parent bedroom'. Although now that term itself is 'controversial' (not mainstream controversial, more in small hardcore circles, so I'm not sure if this will actually become an issue) because (to the best of my understanding of this objection) 'parent bedroom' implies that the 2-parents-with-children family form is normative (you can't make this up if you tried to), which it shouldn't be.
Not sure what my point is, maybe that using 'master' for 'main' is no longer outright commonly accepted usage?
But the objections I read about last summer (tried looking but I can't find it any more) were moral, that the term is also 'oppressive' (not sure if that's the actual term they used, that was the gist of it), basically the same arguments that are made for removing 'master' from Git, language frames our thinking etc.
Probably descended from the Latin word "magister", which (despite Rome having plenty of slaves) didn't neccersarilly refer to a slaveowner -- indeed many Roman slaves were Ludi Magister -- educated slaves that were teachers at Roman schools
Etymology of "master bedroom" seems to come from "Master's bedroom" in boarding schools, where it was the bedroom that the school master occupied (with Master having descended from Roman times)
Master copy; Remastered (music); Master of Arts/Sciences; Mastery
Etc. None of that implies a master-slave relationship.
Edit: No! You see Ivan, it should be master and margarita!
I'd never subconsciously linked the term with human slaves, only ever really thinking of it as an abstract concept, until people started complaining about it... Part of it may be coming from a different cultural context, not being from the US though...
Can you clarify this? If one machine/repo/system acts only on the orders of another, wouldn't "master" and "slave" be clear, descriptive choices of words?
Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln't be used as a description.
There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)#Etymology
We also kill child processes. No-one's had a problem with that till now. Sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor.
Which is a worse analogy, because "following" is a choice and doesn't have to be strict, unlike slave (execute commands or get killed).
On my computer I can open a folder twice without closing it. I can't open a physical folder twice without closing.
With a race condition, no one cares if both processes started at the same time. That's not an important part of the analogy.
Even your point about killing doesn't really fit with the metaphor. Historically, whipping would be the most common punishment.
I do agree with your idea that the metaphor has to be clear. Modbus replace master/slave with client/server, which tends to confuse people used to the old analogy. It's not ideal, but neither is referring back to that time we could trade people.
Really I'm not the best person to judge though. I'm happy to be guided by people who experience racism and groups tackling the legacy of slavery. Because those things seem important whereas my terminology preferences for asymmetric nodes in a distributed system, when there are plenty of sensible alternatives, seem less so.
What made me think more about slavery was the materials that go into computers like cobalt and sulfur. Someone has to go down into the sulfur mine and get that for us. That's an actual master/slave relationship that is going on right now to power all our fantastic infrastructure.
But so much industry has depended on sulfur for so many years that this debate is much deeper and more complex. The ugly truth is that someone far away has to be enslaved for us to live comfortably.
Bring that debate to the front instead and we might find a technical solution to it.
But it's always cheaper to find a desperate person than to maintain a robot that is being attacked by gas and sulfur daily.
And...it still wouldn't matter to those people at all because it wouldn't change their specific situation!
This is a pretty insipid argument.
But the parent argument is valid, you just somehow missed it despite it being descibed and illustrated.
github's action isn't absurd because it doesn't change any random person's situation. It's absurd because of the specific people whose specific situations are not improved.
A Marxist would chuckle at the notion that Microsoft would be removing the word "owner" for being offensive.
I disagree, however I'm not a native English speaker. It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working. We can't ban master/slave as a word or we will loose understanding of what it means. Another poster already mentioned that there are actual human slaves in existence today. I once heard in our time there are more human slaves than ever (mostly due to there being more people overall). It is sad that large companies like Microsoft(Github) choose to waste energy on such pointless activities instead of actually doing something about modern slavery.
Microsoft is still in unique position of being able to pressure hardware makers. Why don't they pressure them into at least trying to improve conditions of actual slaves that mine cobalt and other rare materials at the bottom of their supply chain?
It often isn't. It's not uncommon that "replica" or "secondary" actually make more sense.
Secondary means backup or parity module.
Slave means neither of those things. A slave, in technical terms, means a "dumb" worker (meaning it doesn't make its own decisions about how it operates within the greater system) that is controlled by another module in the system (often called a "master").
And no, "worker" isn't descriptive because it doesn't specify the nature of autonomy within the system - oftentimes, a worker might autonomously pick tasks off a queue and perform work offline or something. A slave is directly, actively and imperatively given commands by another entity in the system.
Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait.
"Slave" is the only word that accurately infers the technical operating aspects of such an actor within system's design.
Stop messing with our vocabulary please. We need it to do real work. Bring on the downvotes, because I know the performative woke crowd loves to ignore these facts.
I'm also very tired of being a labelled a Nazi, hence the tone.
Yes, and a slave database is probably better called a replica. Because that's more descriptive of what it is.
> Secondary means backup or parity module.
Or it could mean the second device on a bus, IDE master/slave for example seems to me to be better as primary/secondary (or even, first/second.)
> Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait.
I dunno, that sounds to me like overloading a word unnecessarily.
> Stop messing with our vocabulary please.
No. Choosing more descriptive words is only a better thing. Stop trying to weirdly limit vocabulary, please.
BTW I remember Russians translating master/slave (in the IT context, e.g. primary/secondary master/slave for IDE PATA drives) as the the leading and the led.
By going down the road of agreeing to some words to be removed you're then imposing a presumption of guilt on anyone who refuses to remove said words. If I maintain some software that uses the word slave or blacklist and I don't accede to making the changes to remove it, or agree to approve a PR that does the same, then it's presumed I am stubborn or worse still, racist. Despite the usage of the word being completely innocent.
Of course, context is everything, which only proves the point. You cannot systematically ban certain words.
I’m playing devil’s advocate. I don’t have strong feelings on this specific change, but I can see my line of thinking surprisingly absent in this entire thread.
Same thing with plastic recycling, in and of itself it is better than landfill, but as it allows us to feel good and look away from the real problem (plastic is cheap because most impacts are externalized) the recycling of plastic contributes more to the problem than to the solution. I know people who traveled around the world about once a year, own a big house and altogether have a pretty big impact that could easily be reduced, but they do recycle plastic and think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.
For the record, I do recycle plastic.
https://text.npr.org/897692090
> Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.
So no, it's not revealing existing hate. It's actively generating new hate.
Voicing a disagreement does not require or beget hate.
I really don't think so. Most obviously because those two groups did not even exist as entities most people were conscious of until recently.
> Hate doesn't spring parthenogenically from the void
Of course not. But it sure can be seeded and nurtured, as you note, by actions people take. And far too many people have been taking various actions that look to me as if they are designed, intentionally or not, to seed and nurture hate. And fear, for that matter. Which are not unrelated things: hate and fear are deeply intertwined and beget each other.
> Voicing a disagreement does not require or beget hate.
That is most certainly true. At the same time, a disagreement _can_ be voiced in a way that begets hate, and all too often is (e.g. via attacking the person, not the idea). And suppressing disagreement can absolutely beget hate. I feel like both are on the rise, unfortunately.
This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they're only capable of doing one thing full stop. I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
> think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.
Well, I guess they're more environmentally responsible than if they weren't recycling plastic. It's better to do something, however small, than nothing, surely? (And I doubt their environmental footprint even registers in the grand scheme of things - it's industry we need to shame, not individuals for the moment.)
[1] Who wasn't already heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery, etc., I suppose.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/perhaps-we-cannot-do-bo...
No, but it certainly makes you care less. Human attention is not linear.
Surprisingly, human minds do seem to work that way. After doing a "good" deed, we're liable to believe that we've done our part, and owe society no further action. Even if our good deed didn't actually change anything.
This effect is often called "moral licensing".
Yet people keep on recycling and switching their lightbulbs after they do the first one (a "good" deed.) People keep protesting even after they've succeeded in one protest. etc.
A lazy and overused argument. No one said only one thing can be done. Fact is time and attention are resources and by doing some thing you allocate less of them to other things.
For example, in California, due to long term drought, urban water usage legislation was enacted. Urban water usage in California accounts for less than 10% of the state’s total usage, so a 20% reduction, at significant personal impact to urban residents, has a sub 2% impact on total use. However, it also gives the appearance that the legislature is actively engaged in addressing the problem of water conservation to under-informed voters without compelling those legislators to address agricultural and manufacturing uses (and their organized lobbying efforts).
The problem with “every little bit helps” mentalities is that they enable perverse outcomes when coupled with limited information decision making, finite resources, and multiple concerns to balance. All of this leads to the politically optimal (and thus career sustaining) option set being deeply suboptimal application of resources.
This is exactly what people do. WAY too many people do "feel-good" charity work. They just pick something that's visible, easily partaken and then decide they're "helping" and go about their lives feeling better.
Like donating clothes to Africa, which actually harms the local economy[1][2]. As does dumping tons and tons of food without proper end to end oversight.
Or having a demonstration in a public location, bothering the end-users or workers of a business. Because it's easy and good publicity. They don't attack the people on top who actually make the decisions, because it's hard and boring work.
[1] http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1987628,00... [2] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mariah-griffinangus/africa-cha...
Our President still lives in a house built by enslaved peoples. Our Congress still legislates in a Capitol built by enslaved peoples.
That fact remains true, and is the prima facie evidence that all Americans have profited from our legacy of slavery, and that we aren't all that concerned with tearing down that legacy and eliminating the harms to folks that those monuments contain... instead a plaque or statue explaining the role of the enslaved peoples is enough.
Meh.
As a practical way to help, I want to call out organizations like DonorsChoose. Find a Title I school or one with high economic need, and chances are high that a) more of the students are people of color; b) they don't have an effective or well-resourced PTA; c) their asks for resources are for basics that you'd assume would already be provided for. For those who want to make an actual difference, I'd highly encourage supporting an organization like this, and I'm pretty sure their communities would appreciate it more than tearing down the White House. https://www.donorschoose.org/donors/search.html?moderateHigh...
The root cause can't be addressed by the same people who reap the benefits of this system, because it's so deep in its core that it would require substantial change, possibly breaking the system itself.
You don't. Nobody does. The plastic you "recycle" gets turned into lower grade plastic and so on until it gets landfilled. For plastic, the only way is down.
Steel, aluminium and glass are examples of materials that are recyclable.
I separate plastic so it can be either burnt together with my other trash, or shipped to Turkey where god knows what environmental crime is committed with it. An extremely small percentage might be melted into some low grade park bench. Absolutely zero plastic will be turned into high quality plastic pellets for industrial as a substitute for new plastic. It does not make me feel good, but not doing it makes me feel worse.
I just voted today for real change. Voting matters, plastic "recycling" doesn't*
* if you live in a place where you have meaningfully different options, not just two flavors of the same
We Turks just produce a lower grade of plastic out of it.
Source: my father works in plastic industry
Came here to express similar opinion and your articulation has succinctly and perfectly captured it so I'll just add to it.
Over the years I've come to realise that effecting real change to address the root cause is hard. It almost certainly won't be done by private corporations; the changes need to be enforced by (and at) institutions that are answerable to communities e.g., right to quality education, a humane law enforcer. Not only is change going to be hard but slow as well. However with more and more institutions getting privatised (private jails, contracted police force etc.,) whose sole motive is to earn more profits I don't see how anything is going to improve in the near future. So what ends up happening is every atrocity against oppressed community gets hijacked by these private mega-corps as they sense PR opportunity.
To take another example; Diversity & Inclusion. We do all the song and dance at the workplace to make it more diverse. But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it's excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person. The reasons are obvious, the entire education system (and society to an extent) is so rigged against oppressed community that it takes a miracle for one of their community to even make it to resume-writing stage. Instead of addressing the problem at the root cause (make it easier for them to get high quality education, lead a decent life) every corporation makes a big PR-noise around D&I while in reality the work place continues to be non-diverse. Net result is we end up having debates like "why should we reduce interview bar", "it's unfair to the deserving candidates" while completely being blind to the root cause of the problem.
/rant
I agree based on my personal experiences.
One of the concrete suggestions by the author of the blog post really strikes me as a step that we could implement, but we don’t: drawing from non-traditional backgrounds. And it’s because it’s an uphill battle. Much easier to do some low hanging fruit.
I’m not a minority in tech, but coming into my current job I had a semi-traditional background. Even getting first rounds was a struggle, only ameliorated by having a professional network of tech people, which is very much not something that you can expect a non-traditional candidate to have.
Seriously, my “get to phone screen” rate without network referrals was around 2-3%. With referrals was about 60%. That’s how bad it gets. So now when it’s in my direct control I go out of my way to look for non-traditional backgrounds in the pipeline and give them the benefit of the doubt during resume screening, paid for in hours I spend interviewing instead of programming
It seems you don't have any bash/zsh/fish scripts which assume that the most important branch is named "master"...
Specifically how would you define non-traditional, and in your opinion why should this non-traditional segment of people get a separate funnel?
I don’t want a separate funnel thank you very much. I know some companies will reject my CV because of my education - that’s fair enough. I know some interviews will be harder for me. I prefer the risk of being filtered out early or having tough interviews over the lingering suspicion that I am a non-traditional hire.
This is the message I get on my machine when running git init:
What version are you using?
> To give ample warning for users wishing to override Git's the fall-back for an unconfigured `init.defaultBranch` (in case we decide to change it in a future Git version), let's introduce some advice that is shown upon `git init` when that value is not set.
https://github.com/git/git/commit/675704c74dd4476f455bfa91e7...
Based on this it does appear to be deprecated, the current favourite is 'main'
There are references in code to `PREPARE_FOR_MAIN_BRANCH`.
You can see some commentary on the mailling lists: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAMP44s3DExJ-F=MKhKyupr5M0RDvr8k...
Similarly, GitHub claims that git is making similar changes, and links to a "Statement" that actually says the opposite, and a code change that also does not include anything like making that change (both are from June 2020). Since GitHub's claim is obviously in error, I wonder if it's malice or incompetence.
Is there some other evidence that git is going to deprecate master?
The 'hint' is nicely worded, but there is sufficient evidence of a pending name change (likely to `main`) for the default.
edit: Downvotes and the wording of some responses make me concerned that some folks may be unaware of the reference. Doubleplusgood is a newspeak word used in the book 1984. Newspeak is a language that is used to eliminate the ability for people to express unapproved thoughts because there are no words with which to express the concepts to others.
Words are not he problem, attitudes are.
Stupid, moron, retard. People start using them as a pejorative and so a new neutral term is required.
Lavatory, toilet, water closet, bathroom. People don't like talking about poo so they keep using euphemisms to describe the room where it happens. This one is a favourite of mine as some people find 'toilet' distasteful despite it being the furtherest from the actual action taking place.
Very, literally. Not sure where this one is headed, but if it's happened at least twice, it'll shift again some time.
Are we doomed to keep shifting language to keep up taboos and keep the meaning of words which naturally will shift?
In response to an article about removing the word master
I agree with this observation. For reasons that the author has articulated far better than I would in this comment, so please read the whole thing.
The map is not the territory, and you may simply be noticing the differences between your map and mine.
Edit: super/sub may be more grammatically correct (e.g. subset, superset)
Read to the end, and the author suggests SWE apprenticeships - I support the idea, but by contrast, it isn’t free, and would require some actual effort by line managers, so...
But as a teacher, the way this makes all the existing guides and tutorials wrong means I have to waste 15 minutes of my semester (about 1%) explaining this.
In short, the main effect of this change is to very slightly raise the barrier to entry for new developers.
Is it an empty gesture? Maybe? Does it cost more than a couple of seconds for making things clearer and making a minority of people people happy? No.
It probably wasted more integrated time across all the people reading this article than just shrugging and changing it does.
In practice, big techs don't care about POC, they care about mobs.
"Inclusive" words is just what make mobs happy and it's cheaper to do than being accused of discrimination for real reason: POC representation in big tech.
Changing a default branch name is cheaper than try to fix the real world.
That's the point, and that, unfortunately, the reason why the situation will never change: Because we act only on the exposed representation; movies, text on web site, etc.
To me it’s kinda like calling people with long noses “people of nose size”.
Basically there's a movement to shift from inheritance to entity component, wanting to implement people with has-a descriptions instead of is-a descriptions. This enables data oriented optimizations so that society executes more efficiently & can be more easily extended as new requirements are submitted by the mob
https://www.acedisability.org.au/information-for-providers/l...
Language doesn’t do multiple inheritance well so has-a descriptions are easier to work recognizing that people are multifaceted.
Diabetes itself is awful. Whether or not it's the leading descriptor makes no difference with that, and I'd rather just use the non awkward terminology ("I'm diabetic" rather than "I'm a person with diabetes".) It would feel almost patronizing if everyone started referring to me that way.
The social justice crowd is unlikely to address it because, with their norms of discussion, mentioning it will likely attract mockery and redirection: "Oh no, we must protect the feelings of the poor white people! How oppressed they are! I'm sure it's just as bad as having ancestors who were enslaved and lynched!" The term "white fragility" might be used; in feminist circles, it might be "what about the menz!?". There's an instance in this thread (flagged) of someone mocking someone who complained about inconveniences. I generally term this "Look at these oppressed people; your complaint is invalid".
These argumentative norms seem to prevent the social justice crowd, as a group, from making decisions of the form "Let's make a minor effort to avoid needlessly offending the people that we're nominally trying to win over".
"Be kind. Don't be snarky."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not English native so that could be the wrong term, not trying to offend anyone. In this context, I mean "discriminated persons/peoples".
IIRC, I saw this on the rules of r/publicfreakout (stating that videos representing "POC" would be moderated). For me "POC" means "Proof Of Concept", so I asked and discover it was about "Person Of Color" and so I use this on English spoken Internet.
But I agree, it's a weird term and I never use this in my native language. Each country have different way to talk about racism and discrimination because each country have it's own racism and discrimination problems.
Lots of languages have a fuzzy formal/casual split where usage is both context-based and a matter of respect, though I think the US is more unique in (1) the degree of energy focused towards coming up with formal names for demographic groups and (2) making them out of words that are also used casually.
The terminology seems to be shifting to BIPOC, to include Indigenous peoples. I haven’t heard an a explanation for why Black is also split out.
In high school, there were kids that called themselves brown, but it was always ironically.
Boom.
So I'm indirectly asking a black software engineer by virtue of reading the blog: What are the things that should be done instead? Not a lot we can do it about stop and search. How do we actively bust bias? He slams the 'meritocracy' meme: I know that is widely backed here. So what can be done instead?
> Personally, I have no attachment to any of these words.
Sadly, I think a large proportion of people absolutely have a very strong attachment to not changing anything. Who will agree with you on this front but be against anything more substantial? I've been told on this board that the only racism is antiwhite.
>Inevitably there will be some of you in the audience asking, “Well what do you want them to do? They’re trying their hardest, help them with some solutions!!”.
>I don’t want this post to be about The Solutions™ but here’s one for your noggin; there is this a significant intersection between career changers/developers coming from non traditional backgrounds (i.e. people with no CS degree) and minorities. Put your money where your fucking mouths are and hire these people. Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants?
> SLAVE: From Middle English, from Old French sclave, from Medieval Latin sclāvus (“slave”), from Late Latin Sclāvus (“Slav”), because Slavs were often forced into slavery in the Middle Ages.[1][2][3][4][5] The Latin word is from Byzantine Greek Σκλάβος (Sklábos), see that entry and Slav for more.
> ROBOT: Borrowed from Czech robot, from robota (“drudgery, servitude”). Coined in the 1921 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek after having been suggested to him by his brother Josef, and taken into English without change.
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slave#Etymology [2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/robot#Etymology
Still I concur with the OP's statement that the percentage of African American in the tech industry is marginal (in the US, not sure elsewhere). I don't know what we can do about this. But we have to change as a society and as individuals.
It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate.
For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, watching people be vicariously offended without asking if context in question is offensive, and the obsession with signaling instead of meaningful action.
Displays of misplaced white guilt like this - while bizarre psychologically - don't really harm or help anything.
Oh wait no I don't, because feeling shame or accomplishment for something your ancestors did hundreds of years ago that you had zero control over is a completely ridiculous concept.
Of course, our media is run by billionaires so they capitalize on the identity politics to divide everyone and avoid having any real debate about economic policy, which is the only thing that really matters.
I would so much rather be debating about the best way to roll out UBI than whether to call something "main" or "master".
Economic incentives don't change people's minds, they motivate them to double-down on their biases.
What I'm saying is that if Fox and CNN (for instance) devoted the same air time to good-faith debate about the causes for, impact of, and solutions to wealth inequality and our changing socioeconomic landscape as they do reading Twitter comments live on air, we might be in a better position than we are today.
They want you constantly thinking about race instead of thinking about wealth inequality.
They want you constantly fighting with your fellow workers instead of forming unions.
Basically all large, multinational corporations now make their company logo rainbow for pride month, and all release the same sounding official statements about racial inequality on a regular basis, etc. etc.
It's almost impossible to find a large corporation that doesn't do this now. And their statements are so bland and generic that they are almost all identical, and completely interchangeable.
See: Rodger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Bill and David Koch
This specific instance seems like an overreaction of some in both corporate and social media culture. One poster already pointed out that this is likely more about corporate fear of getting targetted by a vocal but ultimately small 'woke' crowd (there, another label, but at least a bit more specific than just generally someone who wishes to achieve basic goals like welfare, equality, and regulation of private industry). It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
In debates like this sometimes a small number of loud, well-meaning but naive people get much more influence than they should for fear of the other being painted the bad guy, while a significant number of people who are actually affected by the underlying issues don't get heard at all.
* Colin Kaepernick and kneelgate
* calls to boycott Starbucks for celebrating an inclusive holiday season, rather than Christmas in particular
* republican voters "cancelling" Mitt Romney and other republicans for being vocally anti-Trump, even though their political principles have not changed
I can think of at least one more serious example that goes beyond just a vocal minority: The long, ongoing fight to teach children about LGBTQ issues in public schools. Teachers can be fired for simply revealing to their students that they have a same-sex partner.
Not long ago, too, was it career-ending for a Hollywood actor to come out publicly as LGBTQ. Ellen comes to mind as an example.
Can you say anything to demonstrate to me that it really is more than just a vocal minority of people?
Perhaps we have different definitions of "cancel culture"? I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it. I do think the master vs main issue is silly, though. I'm not sure where you draw draw the line between "cancel culture" and "social consequences for toxic / abusive behavior in public".
[0] Religious-right, anyway
Since I have you here, would you mind elaborating a bit more about your stance on "cancel culture"? I'll also elaborate a bit more on my stance.
I think most people would agree that mobs by definition have no united agenda. It's a bunch of disorganized people with their own goals and motivations who all briefly get fired up about the same topic. Twitter mobs are a tornado of confirmation bias, where people in echo chambers spin up hot takes of current events to confirm their own worldview. The amount of meaningful debate that can be had in 280-character chunks is negligible.
When people talk about "cancel culture", my impression is not that they think there is any sort of coordinated attack on right-leaning figures by prominent left-leaning figures -- only fringe conspiracy theorists believe that George Soros is sending out weekly lists of names that should be "cancelled" this week.
It's that they believe Twitter is a place which has developed a culture of criticizing and ridiculing other users, public figures especially. I think it's undeniable that any time a public figure missteps, a vocal minority of people (e.g. angsty teenagers) on Twitter calls for the person to be fired or otherwise deplatformed, even before they have a chance to respond. Some people also receive death threats.
So, I don't think it's unreasonable to label that sort of behavior as "cancel culture". To me, it clearly exists, but there is room for debate about how prevalent it is, as well as how good vs bad it is.
I think we agree that "cancel culture" is not as prevalent as Fox / MSNBC would have their viewers believe. Twitter magnifies the opinions of their angry users to drive engagement, and then news organizations pick it up to serve one political narrative or the other.
Personally, I have seen many positive examples of public figures being called out for toxic or abusive behavior, and I'm all in favor. Louis CK was "cancelled" for extremely-scummy-but-not-necessarily-illegal behavior. Heck, #metoo is all about cancelling rapists, and that's a good thing! I also think that the JK Rowling controversy was for good cause, and led to both productive [1,2] and unproductive public discussion.
However, to me, the whole master vs main debate is silly. I don't see it as a driver of positive change.
[1] Contrapoints, "JK Rowling" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us) [2] Contrapoints, "Cancelling" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8)
It is interesting you call it the "master vs main" debate. The problem is the combination of the words master and slave. You - maybe unconsciously - left the word slave out.
And there is not really a debate. I do not believe anybody was bullied to change that. It was a decision that was made independently. And now in the aftermath people shout about it as if it is utterly impossible that this could have happened without some mobbing or a big "culture" that made this a unjust decision. Because: "I know not a single adult that like that change." Well, maybe the majority likes it. The majority just does not participate in online discussions, so it's invisible. Hard to tell.
You've not met me, but I'm a left-leaning individual who thinks the drama about "cancel culture" is mostly invented.
There's lots of people doing crappy thing on the internet generally and on twitter in particular.
In a world where you can get anonymous death threats for pretty much any reason, I've not seen any evidence that "the left" or "cancel culture" is an actual problem in this regard beyond the baseline of people being nasty when anonymous.
I have seen people, often on both sides of the same issue, point to unpleasant people on the other side and make some kind of argument that "those people" are all crazy. Some of the individual stories are horrifying but I've never found any of them convincing at the level of settling the argument (whichever argument it is invoke in). It's just used as a way to circle the wagons against the other side.
Your position is the same as the ones he's met. That was his point.
For instance the vast majority of working professionals I know don't get themselves regularly involved in political arguments on Twitter, since they see it as unproductive.
So it is simultaneously true that:
* cancel culture is "a thing" on Twitter, in the sense that it's easy to find examples
* cancel culture "doesn't exist", in the sense that no one you are likely to encounter in real life is ok with cancelling people for tweets they made as a teenager
> I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it.
That is cancel culture.. its just not an example of cancel culture run amuck which is what the problem has always been, not cancel culture itself which is widely accepted by most people for the most egregious behaviors.
If you say it's not cancel culture when a majority of people change their mind about someone, then you're saying that almost by definition cancelling is when a small minority of people have the power to deplatform someone who missteps. So, it's not accurate to say that "the left is ok with cancel culture" (for instance) since only a small group of people are going it who are not representative of the larger population.
Mitt Romney was not attacked for not representing conservative/republican values, but for going against a mob/cult (of personality). That is as "cancelling" as it gets, regardless if it leads to him being voted out in Utah or not.
He is not ostracized in the way I would consider it. As far as I know Republicans still work with him, are willing to let him sponsor bills, etc. My understanding is he is still invited to Republican lunches as well.
I think we are working with two different understandings of cancellation. He will almost certainly lose his next election though.
>he was good enough to be president
Well not good enough since he lost to Obama. Just because you win a primary doesn't mean the majority actually supports you.
>so something else must have changed.
I think people forgot what his views were. People have nostalgia and remembered they thought he was better than Obama which turned him into a more mainstream conservative in their mind. I think there are other things at play like Romney being a Morman and also having name recognition.
My point was specifically that this wasn't the case here. Maybe you misread a negative in my comment.
>Colin Kaepernick and kneelgate
Kaepernick wasn't canceled by the right. He just wasn't the best player out there and didn't get onto another team. He now is making millions from Nike and other deals all without playing the game. If this is what be canceled is like I would gladly sign up.
>calls to boycott Starbucks for celebrating an inclusive holiday season, rather than Christmas in particular
There was an attempt but nothing happened. As far as I know Starbucks' revenue didn't even drop (but I haven't really looked into it). Again a complete failure of a cancellation.
>republican voters "cancelling" Mitt Romney and other republicans for being vocally anti-Trump, even though their political principles have not changed
Romney still has his senate seat and is still on all of the committees he was original on. There is no cancelling here, unless you mean voting out a politician is canceling.
>The long, ongoing fight to teach children about LGBTQ issues in public schools.
This is a bit more complicated. Some people believe it is more than just an objective teaching that LGBTQ people exist and you should treat them as any other person but more of encouraging people to engaging in such behavior. Some people also accuse the schools of focusing on random LGBTQ people or assuming people's sexuality when they weren't married in history class instead of focusing on more important people or just the facts. I don't think I was in school when this was going on so I can't really comment on what it is like.
> Teachers can be fired for simply revealing to their students that they have a same-sex partner.
I have only seen this in private religious schools. In theses cases the teacher agreed to publicly follow the church's teachings and they failed to follow their employment contract. You shouldn't work for a church if you disagree with the church's teachings.
>Ellen comes to mind as an example.
Are you saying Ellen was canceled for being LGBTQ? I am pretty sure she is being attack for being abusive to people who work / worked for her.
Liz Cheney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy have successfully been censured by the GOP, and motions are in progress against the rest that defected from the Trump cult.
The NFL would have almost certainly done it themself since the NFL was losing viewers massively. Just not watching a show is not canceling in my view. If that is the case then almost everybody is canceling almost everything else.
>you might remember someone saying "Get that son of a bitch off the field".
Last I checked Trump can't cancel any NFL player.
>Liz Cheney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy have successfully been censured by the GOP
I agree these are [partial] cancellations, but members of the GOP being censured by the GOP is not really the same as organization you did not choose to be a part of cancelling you.
There's also the part where conservatives are Masters of Canceling since forever, including things like Hays code.
It's easy to make people who are angry at outgroup not notice they are fleeced.
Which right are you talking about?
Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left? I don't.
Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd? I know very few. Almost all of them who speak on the topic, speak in unequivocal support of "woke" ideas and talking points.
If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it. You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd to not be counted as racists.
It's in everyone's power to start extinguishing the extremes. Until then, I'll take silence on your nearest extreme as your tacit approval of it.
Certainly. The majority really. That's in the Netherlands, but compared to the vocal internet crowd most people I know who vote on parties left of the political compass worry about climate, animal and human welfare, and inequality. Rarely will someone go all 'woke' and demand changes like this.
Haha, GP specifically assumed US in the first line of his comment and then got responses from the Netherlands and twice from UK. Yeah, it's largely an American phenomenon so far but I wouldn't be too happy about it because American culture exports these things all over the world and Hollywood is among the most woke.
While you're protesting this notion on HN, plenty of your countrymen are learning English from some of the wokest trash on Netflix.
I don't see how your sweeping generalisation in the last paragraph adds to the considered discussion here either.
Not your fault, though. Our internal borders are meaningful. We lie to ourselves that they aren’t, and the rest of the world goes with that. Minnesota, Michigan, and Mississippi may as well be different countries for all they have in common.
Whereas US' opinions on foreigners are always balanced, well-nuanced and fair?
I'm in the UK so maybe it is different, but lately "woke" is anyone that is seen as an enemy of the far right. Including those who are on the right of the spectrum, but just not as far as those throwing the "woke" label around.
But I was talking about a more agreeable definition of "woke". Many people on the left are very comfortable with this subculture, just like many people on the right are very comfortable with Trump. I very rarely hear people on the left saying anything against the woke culture, so in my mind it's very reasonable to equate or at least strongly affiliate the two.
I am also in the UK and there is lots of hand-wringing about "the extreme far right" but if you gently probe what people mean by "extreme far right" they mean "Brexit" or "not electing Jeremy Corbyn".
I expect in a few months the term "ultra extreme far right" will enter the lexicon, and we'll keep adding superlatives as the term "right-wing" becomes more and more diluted and gradually encloses the entire population except for a few Momentum die-hards.
Bollocks. For starters, Brexit had support on the far-end of the left, who see the EU too liberal, e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/692f2578-fcbd-11e5-b5f5-070dca6d0... (RMT comes to mind since I work in that sector)
I've certainly seen many outside the Momentum bubble being labelled 'Tory' (e.g. Lib Dems as 'yellow Tories', Blair/Starmer as 'red Tories', etc.), but you're speaking pure hyperbole.
"Extreme far right" is reserved for the likes of NationalFront/BNP/UKIP/BritainFirst/BrexitParty/Reform/whatever they're calling themselves these days (plus their goons like EDL, DFLA, People's Front of Judea, Judean People's Front, etc.)
It saddens me to see this sort of word-muddying (especially on HN), since it makes it easier to deflect this sort of crap:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_UK_Conservative_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia_in_the_UK_Conserv...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Conserv...
(Not forgetting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Labour_... to avoid the knee-jerks; although that's probably not dismissed as 'people call everything "extreme far right" these days')
By putting BNP and UKIP in the same list you have just proved my point.
Is Rustie Lee "ultra extreme far right" in your opinion? https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/documentaries/who-is-rustie-le...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/03/new-ukip-membe...
No. In my opinion, Rustie Lee is not "ultra extreme far right". I don't see why you're asking though, since I didn't call UKIP "ultra extreme far right" either; or any one or thing, for that matter. So I don't know what point you're trying to make; that racists will always fall back on the "I have a black friend" defence?
In any case, I deliberately avoided referring to specific individuals, since that often devolves into he-said/she-said accusations, and metaphysical circle-jerking about the 'true intent' of this or that. Tangentially, it's useful to the far right when discussions around them or their tactics devolve into such petty bickering, since it's a useful distraction towards easily denounced anecdata (hence putting their audience more at ease with the bigotry, and hence nudging the overton window a little more). After all, it's no coincidence that white supremacists deny the existence of systemic racism (unless it's against "whites", of course).
Whilst bringing up a person (or, to reduce circle-jerking, the outcomes of their actions), is fair game in a discussion about people's actions; I would recommend against pivoting an existing discussion towards some person or other, as you've done, since that can help to entrench far right memes (e.g. that racism is only about individuals, etc.).
With that in mind, I would point out that I am not the first to put UKIP in the same list as the BNP; UKIPs founder did the same (he cited the party's increasing racism and ties to the BNP as the reasons he left in the late 1990s).
The previous I'mNotRacistBut Party was UKIP (featuring Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as advisor for racially-charged issues, and denounced as racist 24 years ago by its own founder)
Before that the BNP was scoring a few percent in general elections.
And around and around it goes, all the way back to Mosley's blackshirts.
Of course, Farage himself may denounce such things:
> I set the party up, she was the administrator that got it set up.
( https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/12/former-ukip... )
Which is an interesting contrast to his remarks when the party was being formed:
> This was Catherine's idea entirely - but she has done this with my full knowledge and my full support.
( https://www.independent.ie/business/brexit/the-new-ukip-nige... )
Friendly reminder that it's very easy, and very common, for racists to disavow their racism when it's expedient to do so (e.g. an extreme example https://youtu.be/zcoYKuoiUrY?t=1568 )
Yeah, the funny thing about the UK is hearing from a country where the center-left party bombed an election precisely because it couldn't throw away its woke wing on two big "woke" issues (Brexit and antisemitism), and hearing that "anyone who's not far-right is woke". Well no. Keir Starmer won his place as head of Labour precisely by his willingness to reject further coalition with the "wokes", when Corbyn had been unwilling to really oppose them at all.
Aside from that, the 2019 election was really a Brexit election. Labour failed to pick a side, and the Conservatives were promising to get Brexit done and were early enough in the negotiations that they could promise it would be a soft brexit or maximum brexit depending on which crowd they thought would hear their comments.
Yes. The majority of them are performative liberals.
>Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?
Yes. There is infighting to an extent but it's really not hard to find leftist critiques of what you call woke culture.
>If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it.
I highly doubt bad faith actors would care about what people on the left are doing. Sure hasn't stopped you from mischaracterizing them all this while.
>You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding as to who "the left" are. The majority of actual (not what passes for American left) leftists will agree that disowning "Trump and his crowd" is the same kind of performative wokeness that you accuse liberals of. Disowning and denouncing for appearances does nothing because it doesn't tackle the root cause that allowed a movement like Trump's or the larger right to come to power.
The general population publicly expressing their honest moderate views and opposing the extremes is not "for appearances". It's the core of what's missing in today's public debate, dominated by far left/right activists, bot farms, and personalities/celebs.
My point is, the (American) left is justly associated with wokeness because they are its primary visible supporters. Maybe it's because those on the left who don't support it just don't speak up, in which case, my message is: please do. I'm not just going to assume your existence.
As I mentioned, I've seen plenty of this, but with filter bubbles being what they are, it's hard to fault someone for not coming across them enough.
What I'm saying is that it's not that they (we?) don't exist, more like you don't come across us because of xyz reasons that are getting harder and harder to pinpoint as discourse is manipulated each passing day.
I also broadly agree that nuance is missing in the "modern debate", which causes bad faith interpretations like everyone on the left being either "woke police out to cancel everything you love" or "stalinists looking to establish USSRv2" and everyone in the right being "uneducated white people who don't know what's best for them" or outright Nazis. I wanted to push back against this kind of monolithic interpretation, hence my previous comment.
Isn't that really dangerous though?
eg if you're unlucky enough to become targeted by some of the more "out there" people, they can do career-and-effectively-life ending things by blowing it out of proportion, getting it in the media, etc.
It's an easy way to discredit your political opponent.
Also, i am sightly offended when people call the Democrats "left". I've talked to a real "leftist" (and by that i mean, sightly left on european political board), he felt forced to join the democrat to have a shot at a representative position, and some support for his flyers, but he agreed with my broth: the democrat would be barely center in europe.
And honestly, the far right and the conventionnal right have only themselves to blame for the right of the woke/cancel culture. They are the one who started to open up the overton window, they can't start crying when their politicals opponent do the same.
Also, what does "left" in Europe look like? Because I'm surprised to see you say that Democrats in the US "would be barely center in Europe".
The Democrats push for what can at best be termed social democracy, even though real social democracies in Europe would still be to their left after they fulfilled most of their campaign promises. Left right and centre are kind of reductive categorizations but social democracy is left of centre.
I know of quite a few prominient anti-woke left-leaning people in the UK: Helen Pluckrose, Andrew Doyle, Nick Cohen, Kathleen Stock, and so on.
The best I've seen is sentiments along the lines of "yeah that's overkill" which is about equivalent to what fiscal conservatives and libertarians were saying about the moralizing christian right back when those clowns ran the show.
People don't generally speak out against people who make their positions look like a reasonable middle ground. Woke crap makes basically every mainstream left position look reasonable by comparison so of course they don't want it to die. It makes them look good.
(but neither side seems to know the other has even that little bit in common)
Of course we shouldn’t. That’s not how any of us should think about other people.
The way to improve things is to speak "truth to power", and the moral way to do it is to always "punch upwards".
I've been riling against Trump, Bannon & Co for the past 4 years. Before that I've been vocal about Obama's reign of terror, his broken promises of closing gitmo, and his drone wars. No doubt in my next 4 years I'll be hurling insults against Biden.
There is no need to add disclaimers or enumerating all things that a comment doesn't stand for. Doing so not only makes for "boring reading" but also looks like the person feels very insecure.
>" Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?"
Bill Maher is a fairly prominent liberal who has been vehemently anti-woke. This is regular fodder on his Friday night HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher as well in his regular standup comedy.
There's a lot of them. But do you really expect them to do it all the time? Disavow every single misinformed but loud person? (Why don't you actively speak against Ted Bundy - are you supporting serial killers?)
For example I can argue with my mom who says she's a feminist because women are better than men. Or I can spend that time preparing a lesson for the local programming club for kids. Why would I choose the first option? Who would benefit?
Disavowing Trump is massively different - a single, elected person with power. Taking that position and bringing it to their local representatives would be worth the effort.
Amongst the more left leaning people I know there was a hugely negative attitude towards the CNN/MSNBC style coverage of the past 4 years that fixated on Trump and conspiracy theories and gotcha stories.
Every side is gonna be smeared, it's much more important to look at what they're actually trying to offer people. And offering nothing but vague platitudes tends to be worse than offering lies, as Hillary's pretty vapid 2016 campaign showed. This move by github seemed to bring more attention to them working with ICE and the like than anything else that I could see.
$15 min wage was super popular in Florida, Trump won Florida by a significant margin. Had the dems actually offered this obviously popular thing and stood by it that state could've turned out very differently as it'd force Trump to take a side on something that mattered to people.
Yes. The "healthcare pls" meme springs to mind as a trivial, but very widespread, example https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=healthcare%20pls%20...
This article we are commenting on is an example of this.
Yes, some big names here: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
(cue the no-true-scotsman argument how e.g. Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker or Margaret Atwood aren't really "left").
Many of them have gotten flak for signing it, too.
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
Of course, the woke left views somehow views this as infighting, and somehow trying to primary away more conservative Democrats somehow is not.
I don't have the experience of any other group doing this. I agree that it is not inherently a political ideology.
The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal. I think it is important to say that because I know people in other parts of the country that see these as insults and would be surprised to know that people commonly self-identify as these terms.
I find that this group thinks their behavior is better and more helpful than apathy, "silence", and the idea of rampant exclusionary hate from the right. When its really not better, its different, but its not more helpful. There is absolutely a constant threat from people afraid of bird watchers in a park, people that blend into their ranks and are willing to weaponize their understanding of race, two seconds after donating to the Democratic Party.
You are saying 'this group thinks' as if all people who would identify as adhering to leftist ideologies (from the extremes to common social democracy) act like this. You are trying to stuff people into boxes: you are either team A or team B. That is polarization; something we can sorely do without.
There needs to be push-back if they [those left/liberals not in this camp] want to disassociate. But where is it? I don't think there is appetite for this argument.
I know many of left/liberal-types (in the Bay Area) all who either believe, or accept this as silly but somehow think it is meaningful to some people and so should be gone along with...
I'm also convinced that the screamers aren't really interested in stopping black people from being offended (let alone actually harassed/murdered). I think they're much more interested in getting recognition for fighting the fight.
Its just the 99% correlation with my life experience, observations of real impactful polarization, which leave me without another way to describe it.
Be my guest in rewriting it more accurately.
I don't think Microsoft do claim that, nor is that really why they did this.
Microsoft is a profit seeking entity that is trying to maximize its profit and goodwill (an intangible asset) at the same time.
Thus for them the best moves are those which:
* Have minimal cost.
* Distract people away from profitable dirty laundry which doesn't attract goodwill (e.g. concentration camp contracts).
* Buy them some goodwill among some people - especially through the mechanism of "outrage marketing" (people who by dint of attacking "the right" when they attack this will naturally defend Microsoft - a bit like how Nike used colin Kaepernick).
They did this because "change master to main" appeared in a local maxima that maximized these three conditions.
This is being reflected all around the corporate sphere because what applies to Microsoft applies to a lot of other companies.
Just abut the only company to handle one of these situations in a way that seems rational to me is Trader Joe’s. Some people on Twitter decided that having a burrito labeled “Trader Jose” was a horrendous form of cultural appropriation and demanded the company change all products with this kind of word play in branding. TJ’s considered it and just basically said “no, move along” and the whole woke twitterverse moved on to some other target.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/...
The marketing/PR people in any organisation care passionately about what other people think of the organisation - naturally, because it's their job to care about this.
Journalists are insanely influenced by what other people are saying and love nothing better than a nice piece of juicy controversy to get those ads clicked.
Stock markets are notoriously twitchy about rumours and "public perception".
Most corporate CEO's got to that position by climbing a greasy pole where what other people think of you is literally the most important factor in your climb.
So almost everybody involved in making these kinds of decision are exactly the people most vulnerable to being bullied like this.
But if you can resist - there's only a few thousand Twitterati who will bother even trying to enforce any kind of boycott, and they're probably not your customers in the first place. It's completely ineffectual if you can just ignore it.
Telling the geeks in the IT basement to change the name of the "master branch" on that "git" thing that the organisation apparently uses, so that thousands of angry people (some of them journalists at large media organisations) aren't shouting at you on Twitter seems like such an easy choice to make ;)
a) modern corporate culture trying to make employees take on the company they work for as part of their personal identity
b) young, liberal people working in PR departments who would be horrified if anyone personally called them racist / sexist / homophobic etc
These people go to work, see some random account on twitter saying "<your company> is racist" and a) and b) combined makes this feel like a personal attack on them that they have to defend and social signal against.
This is the most likely explanation I have come up with, because as you said, none of this really makes sense from a logical business perspective.
But that's an obervation we make in hindsight, and without knowing it was like for the targets. At the time, their phone is probably ringing off the hook, media are calling, etc., and they have no idea when the attack will end or if people are getting fired, advertisers withdrawing or any of that.
I'll applaud anyone, left, right or other-vectored, who stands up to mobs, though. I'm not a fan of the phrase "cancel culture," but it gets one thing right: it is a cultural development, both the culture of outrage and the culture of appeasing the mob. The injustice of a, outraged mob declaring itself judge, jury and executioner only works if targets try to appease them. So while the culture of outrage is a hard problem because it's diffuse, anyone who refuses to accept that injustice is has an outsized effect in pushing back against the appeasement side of it.
> It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
If you combine both the statements, you are committing a no true Scotsman fallacy.
The idiots are just very loud on social media.
Why? For what purpose are you burdening 90% of True Scotsmen with an obligation of your choosing?
As an example, as a leftist I can say: “A socialist revolution without social justice is not socialist”. Yes, this is a no true Scotsman fallacy, but here I am merely disavowing a subgroup of people that might share my economic believes that workers ought to take over the means of production, but fail to see that the racial injustice in our economic system is part of the problem. In my view, if you don’t see that, you are not a real leftist.
Seeding wrong ideas in what seems to be a neutral context is not nice™.
That's missing polsci 101, left/right exist, that's why they have names, not the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
Oftentimes simply being talking in public gains otherwise obscure or even unhelpful views traction simply by being available.
I, at least, completely support GitHub's actions.
Btw, we're not "walking away from the Left", as is indicated in the recent election results. You might be confusing your own people for Hispanics.
?!?
It basically means a "house slave" that was well-treated and is therefore sympathetic to or on the side of the white man. The anytonym is "field n-word", a slave that worked in the fields, which I probably heard more often as people sometimes identify as that term. E.g., if a guy is talking to his buddy who has a nice ("cadillac") job situation, he might say "I'm just a field n-word."
this person is referring to a dichotomy in the black American slave caste, where people that worked in the fields were considered different than people that worked inside the house. the adjectives being "house negro/n**r".
It is used to invalidate the opinions of someone proclaimed as "black" that doesn't have consensus with a community that is pretending to be amorphous.
There have always been black Americans privileged enough to choose causes like any other American, while being lumped into the identity politics from all factions of the country. Even Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail (1953) references this.
I don't speak for anyone, and I am aware of black American people in my life that did bring up the "master/slave" terminology in computing as problematic and offputting and insensitive. The people in my life are of an older generation than me. The github issue, as this article points out, does not have a "slave" context only a master. To some that doesn't make a difference.
I am speaking for myself and like I said I agree with what the person in London wrote.
What do you mean? It looks like Trump got a higher percentage of black votes in 2020 than 2016. The change is larger than Hispanic votes even:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54972389
"Microsoft stops selling software to American police departments" is a good response to BLM. "Microsoft changes 'master branch' to 'main branch'" is pointless deckchair-reshuffling that signifies nothing.
By applauding the change of a noun that has the most tangential possible relationship with slavery, aren't you letting them off the hook of doing anything substantive?
I like that you quote it there.
I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US. It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
There are. The Democratic Socialists of America has grown a lot over the past few years. They even managed to get four member elected Congress this last election cycle.
It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
I have no evidence, but I suspect McCarthyism and the following hard crackdown on leftists that followed during the cold war greatly slowed down this "natural" growth. It took a generation removed from the cold war for this growth to start up again.
Edit: equality+equity.
With the rise of Bernie Sanders and a new generation of people getting into socialist and left wing politics, it became quite a bit broader and larger and vibrant. And my impression is it became of a centre of gravity for other left tendencies in the US to coalesce.
There's quite a few different groupings in there these days. I don't think you can make a broad generalization like you did here.
They're more concerned about trigger words and identity politics than dismantling capitalism.
Although there’s still the CPUSA, PSL and even the DSA.
In the US, if you are generally more aligned with the democratic party but see some changes you disagree fundamentally with, you either suck it up or give up your ideals and switch to the complete opposite (republican party).
Just look at COINTELPRO for example, that's what happens.
Democratic Socialists, Social Liberals, NeoLibs, and NeoCons(because of the Republican party's shift to the right) are all stuck under one party, so the biggest group controls the entire thing.
However the confinement of the current democratic system in the USA today simply doesn’t allow for third parties to gain national traction. There are mathematical models that proves this fact. For the real left to get socialist parties to the national assembly some democratic reforms needs to happen first.
For context, I am neither black nor American, I have little time for woke virtue-signalling and fake outrage, but I do want to be properly respectful of others whose background and sensitivities aren't necessarily like my own. With that in mind, I often find socially acceptable terminology around race confusing.
For example, take the word "color". I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable, nor why one of the most prominent advocacy groups still uses the former term in its name. There is so much unconstructive commentary about this particular example that it's hard to figure out what the relevant history and genuine sensitivities are here. Can you enlighten me?
Black people in America are from many different cultures and are simply people that noticed that they had a shared experience of being excluded from institutions and even entire states.
The terminology simply comes from individuals taking initiative in the moment and saying "they treat everyone that looks like us all the same and we need umbrella terms to acknowledge our shared circumstance so that its easy to refer to ourselves". Other non-black people already had terms for us and these terms were typically also used in the pejorative. Many people consider "black" to be an affliction even today. So what you have is that some black people reject those older terms, some people try to repurpose and "take back" those older terms, some people create new terms, most terms are still in use.
These aren't scientific terms, but they do permeate into academia to convey a shared concept. So there isn't much to read into it except learning what the consensus is, and the history of why it is. But trying to merge it into the lexicon based on pattern recognition with other words will only confuse you.
but lets look at your example source of cognitive dissonance, NAACP:
The NAACP has done historically monumental things on behalf of a group of very different people that were being excluded as if they were the same. It comes from a different era and different motivated individuals taking initiative. It predates a different individual pushing “African American” much later on. That predates such rampant subsequent immigration and population growth in the US where enough people find African American to be so ambiguous to the point of ridiculous, while there are many slave descendants that take pride in the term and make it their whole identity (or have it forced on them like many black people in other English speaking countries with no American parents, this is particularly comical to me), whereas others who may also be slave descendants adopt black American or other adjectives and identifiers. With the NAACP there is no utility in changing that acronym and no need to or drive to, like a landmark. It wouldn’t surprise me if they arbitrarily did change the name on their own, but there is no talk or consensus amongst its beneficiaries to do so (unlike other landmarks).
Well, yes, this is how the group forms in the first place. It's made up of people who don't have an identity in common other than the one that's forced upon them of "non-white" by the white people discriminating against them.
Note that in countries which aren't white-majority you don't generally get a group of people holistically identifying as "people of colour", even if the same ethnicities would do so in the US. Instead you get different forms of racial discrimination.
Similarly LGBT+ merges a group of people with very different identities and practices, the primary thing they have in common is receiving the same kind of abuse from the same people.
Scott Alexander explains this as a way for upper-class people to maintain their privileges: "The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying "colored people" is horrendously offensive but saying "people of color" is the only way to dismantle white supremacy."[0]
[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-...
“Indeed, what is acceptable for white people to call African Americans and for black people to call themselves has evolved over the last century. The standard term has shifted from “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “African American” as people sought to redefine themselves and their place in America.
Now, in 2020, “people of color” often is used to refer to the collective group of non-white Americans. It is offensive to single blacks out as “colored.” That, in part, is because of the painful segregationist history associated with the term prior to the mid-1960s. “Colored-only” restrooms and water fountains are examples of harmful relics of the Jim Crow South that black people had to fight, and die, to remove from American culture.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/dahleen-glanton/ct-da...
Scott Alexander's hypothesis explains all of that. Constant change is what makes fashion fashion, and fashion is a very effective way to discriminate between the in-group and the out-group.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/30/295931070...
The most important word in the term "African Americans", to me, is, "AMERICANS". You're in this with us. You're our friends, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. We're in this TOGETHER. And this woke-ism bullshit is just that: bullshit.
Changing a primary branch name from "master" to "main" isn't solving the damn problem. Execs want to do this to earn PR points and wash their hands of the issue of a lack of representation and equality in the industry as a result. It's cheaper than actually giving a shit. But the reality is that socioeconomic barriers to entry into high paying STEM roles amongst our African AMERICAN friends/colleagues is a very real problem that needs to be addressed on both a cultural and economic level.
Ya'll are every damn bit as capable as the rest of us and I'm fucking tired of seeing you thrown under the bus in this industry, especially under the guise of "woke"-ism. It's time we start tearing down these PR stunts as the falsehoods that they are and insist on real, monetary, quantifiable and results-driven investments in black communities that are damn well deserved.
And to my colleagues in the industry that are non-black (especially white): it's time we stand up and "get their back" for our black friends, colleagues and family members. We're in this together, and it's well past time we stand up for our fellow Americans. This bullshit charade needs to stop and WE have the power to move things forward into an era of REAL representation and fairness, and as such we have a RESPONSIBILITY to do it. Enough talk - it's time to act.
Unfortunately this export from America is starting to take root in Europe.
It is an American import and it is absurd. It also causes division. e.g Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross. I've seen a lot of guys in working man's pubs get quite angry and this sort of resentment is always hand waived away as "racism" when that isn't the problem at all.
Many developers don't spend time with the lower classes / those that aren't university educated which have to deal with the worse parts of immigration. They only see the positive aspects of it.
BTW the same happens with the British in the South of Spain btw. The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.
This old nonsense. This is the problem people like you will constantly bring up the past and won't let anyone forget about it. None of the people that were involved with that are alive today. Also BTW every country and people have invaded and colonised one another if you go far back enough in time. Are we going to start blaming the Italians for Caesar massacring the Celts and the Gauls? When do you want to stop? 50, 100, 500, 1000 years?
> I suspect your xenophobia is a personal foible, not a British sensibility
When did I claim I had a problem with people having another flag up? I didn't say that. I said the labourers in the pub tend to and it has nothing to do with xenophobia (which is you basically euphemism calling them/me racist btw).
If you re-read my comment I actually said that someone would just claim it was racism and not actually try to understand what the real issue is. You did exactly that and you didn't even direct it at the right person. You can never have a sensible discussion about these issues because mid-wits will scream racism almost as it were some Pavlovian reaction.
BTW I am actually a xeno-phile. I actually have lived all over the globe and have only recently come back to the UK.
> Your insistence that foreigners can't continue to identify with their own culture while also embracing a new one is aptly described as xenophobia.
Nope. I never insisted that at all. I never even mentioned foreigners. You keep on twisting what I am trying to explain and trying to pervert it into something you wish it to be.
I said that this sub dividing people in the *same nationality* by *race* is an American import to the UK (and from what some of my Belgian and French friends have told me) a import into some parts of Europe as well. It isn't typically done in the UK, France, Belgium and I suspect it is the same in many of the other European countries.
Then I said that working class labourers (not all of them white btw) don't like it when 2nd/3rd or 4th generation immigrants aren't patriotic or don't try to assimilate (like their parents did). I then said these concerns / complaints will always get hand-waived away by people as "racism" when the real problem is a feeling of disrespect. Just like you have.
It got nothing to do with xenophobia as the people I am talking about are British.
> If you want to have a sensible discussion, lets start by engaging with what is actually said instead of what we wish was said.
I do. So if you could actually respond to what I said and refrain from this behaviour (which you are now accusing me of) that would be great. Pointing the finger at me, when it is actually you is disingenuous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How HN works is that commenters need to resist provocation and focus on substantive, thoughtful discussion no matter how divisive the topic is. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. This is something we're working on learning to do as a community. Most commenters in this thread are demonstrating that it is possible. Accounts that fuck with that process by casually setting fires or stoking them are particularly harmful, so please don't do that here.
In terms of whether an article is on topic, the criterion is not "might someone take it as flamebait", but "is it intellectually interesting and substantive enough to support thoughtful discussion". More explanation about that if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
Also it is interesting that you've gone after me not the guy that was blatently calling me racist. But there you go.
Go fuck yourself.
> Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross.
That's not anti-foreign culture, but it is insulting to be born in the UK and not see it as your homeland. Or would you be okay with me raising a British flag in India and claiming I was British, if my parents happened to move there before I was born?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No that's absolutely racism.
> The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.
This is also their racism.
A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.
> No that's absolutely racism.
Why? Care to explain? I never mentioned the race many weren't white btw that were making a similar complaint.
> This is also their racism.
So Spanish people who are basically white are being racist against other white people? Is that what you mean? That isn't racism.
Or British (not all British people are white) are people being racist against Spanish people? Or are you using Hitler's definition of what "white" is which means Northern European.
Either way this is non-sensical.
> A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.
What are you on about? Nobody said anything about that. I said there are people in Spain that are English that don't assimilate with the local population which is Spanish.
I'm actually sympathetic to your views, and feel strongly that immigrants should respect and participate in the host culture as much as possible. That requires effort on both sides, of course, and the blame doesn't always lie with the host Western culture as is often unfairly characterised.
My only point was that I don't see that maintaining a link to your heritage and cultural/ethnic distinctiveness as _necessarily_ incompatible with assimilating and participating fully into the host nation and enriching it in the process. This isn't an argument for neoliberal multiculturalism by the way, which I view as mostly a policy disaster, that hurts the working classes and immigrants the most.
The faction of people that don't believe you are British if you aren't white has to be minority of people. Most of the people that may have brought up the subject are in their Winter years now. Pretending that Enoch Powell is still popular is a nonsense and tbh is nothing more than virtue signalling IME.
She's the perfect example. If a full on British person like Nigel Farage does a heinous crime (or make it apples to apples, he joins ISIS) would they take his citizenship away?
If she was born in the US, it would be unthinkable.
The case went through all the legal proceeding and she is not allowed back in the UK. Good!
> If she was born in the US, it would be unthinkable.
If they were born in the US, they would have just been assassinated by drone strike instead like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki.
The citizenship concept is a requirement for modern life. If a person has their citizenship revoked, what are they to do?
They are illegal where they are, and they are illegal where they go. To my knowledge, there's no processes in any country for becoming a citizen without a preexisting citizenship from another country.
Back to this specific example, if she had wanted to come back and denounce ISIS; what should the UK offer her?
What about if she wanted to come back and face trial; what should the UK offer her?
In the end, just to point out the obvious, revoking citizenship is completely unneeded. If she comes back, charge her with her crimes. If she travels, extradite her. If she stays, let the leopards eat her face.
A lot of ISIS members came back, they faced persecution, some even death sentence but none had their citizenship stripped.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-k-strips-citizenship-is...
> If they were born in the US, they would have just been assassinated by drone strike instead like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki.
Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.
Well they shouldn't have been let back in anyway. I also have no sympathy for a woman that said she felt nothing when she saw severed heads (of people executed by ISIS). Also there are claims that she enforced some of the Sharia laws and wasn't a passive member of the Caliphate.
She revoked her citizenship when she left.
> Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.
No there is a different legal treatment for people that join a rogue state which literally wants to destroy yours. I don't care about these people. Her supporters can cry racism all they want, It isn't racism. We don't want terrorists back in the country.
While I do see your point (not British myself, but in Switzerland we had a few ISIS cases as well), I'd like to offer a different viewpoint as well: Our countries messed up at some point in their life - education, mental healthcare support, whatever; something went wrong when one of our citizens feels obliged to join something as heinous as ISIS. After all, we also feel like that with every other terrible criminal - murderers, rapists, etc.; our societies believe in their right to find the right path again, why not someone who joins ISIS?
Anyone born in New York is American, not everyone born in London is British.
The empire caused all sorts of citizenships to appear; citizens of the Empire were "British" right up until the point where they actually started moving to Britain, causing that right to be taken away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Ugand...
Some of it is imported, but the UK is quite capable of its own characteristically British racism, most recently directed against Poles and Romanians.
Tell that to the Balkans.
In our secular societies you are what your nationality is and your race is irrelevant (or should be considered to be) in the eyes of the state and in the UK it is considered rude to bring up someone's race (other than identifying them).
I will accept that we aren't perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good. Bringing up areas of Europe which I obviously wasn't referring to and have been politically unstable for decades now is disingenuous and simply missing the overall point to be a smartass.
Europe has the same problems the US does just spread across fewer skin tones.
Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.
I never claimed there were Romanians Europeans living in France. I claimed that if you were happened to be Black and British you were still seen as simply British (until relatively recently). The same is generally true in other parts of Northern Europe as well, I have discussed this with Belgians, Germans and Frenchmen online and they all tell me similar things.
I am complaining that this nonsense of saying you are a White <Nationality> or a Chinese <Nationality> or Black <Nationality> idea has been imported from America. It doesn't make sense here.
> "African American" isn't solely about skin color, but also about a shared history, migration path, acculturation, and regional population concentration. It's as much a valid "sub-nationality" of American as "Midwestern" or "Californian".
I don't care what they do in the USA. That is their business. It isn't a thing here and it shouldn't be. Just because we speak English in the UK, doesn't mean we are like Americans.
> Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.
I understand this and never claimed the opposite.
Thanks to EU freedom of movement, that is absolutely what you do have.
Why is race necessary or useful in the same way?
Yes, but
> You are your nationality.
Only if you're a nationalist. Many believe in cross-national or non-national collective identities, e.g. the identity of being a wage worker.
In other cases - it's groups oppressed by the state. The Catalan and Basque come to mind; and there are the Roma ("gypsies"), who are not territorially-defined.
etc.
Nope. That is how the law and the state sees it.
Are we at the point where we need to announce our skin colour so that can be the basis of judgment of our comments now?
And you chose to only call out the white person? Do I even need to point out the irony of this?
You equate the few radicals that see some issue there with all 'on the left' which is presumably 50% of any population.
Similar to veganism: the joke is that vegans are all very vocal about being vegan. But reality is that you simply don't notice all the ones that aren't vocal about it and silently love their lives or focus on other issues. Its just an issue of availability bias [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal_burner
2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
As in, it isn’t an inaccurate criticism. It would be nice if the various camps just acknowledged their criticisms based on accuracy.
Yes, a few predictably present radicals does make it an accurate criticism. It would be more difficult to predict this kind of behavior from people identifying as “the right”. They do other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the latter, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the former that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform.
> Traditionally, Zwarte Piet is black because he is a Moor from Spain. However, since the late twentieth century the common explanation of Zwarte Piet's blackness has been that it is due to the soot on his body acquired during his many trips down the chimneys of the homes he visits. Those portraying Zwarte Piet usually put on blackface and colourful Renaissance attire in addition to curly wigs and bright red lipstick. In recent years, the character has become the subject of controversy.
Oh this is a good short summary of the era
but really the web amplified the tendency to look and speak in shallow settings
it's like morals on the map versus the territory
Does the "right" even care about racism?
Granted I don't know much about American politics; in Europe though, I don't really see right wing parties having an issue with racism, or sexism or even poverty.
Maybe Trump & the Republicans really see black people, women, minorities as equals. Oh wait...
The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your own snarky comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.
If you define "left" as anything "not far right" then, yeah, ok, of course it's going to include a bunch of liberals who are not interested in any real structural change in the political-economic system and so are obsessed instead with changing how people speak.
So I just don't use the word anymore if I can. I'm not "left wing", I'm a socialist... Unfortunately "socialist" also seems to mean something weird to many Americans, too. (That anybody could with a straight face call Obama or Biden socialist just boggles my mind...)
I don't agree with their philosophy as I believe it to be unrealistic but their criticisms and descriptions of what the state is and isn't is valid and why some call it socialist may make more sense to you. Hans Herman Hoppe (I am sure someone will quote mine him to smear him after I've mentioned him and haven't read any of this books) even called Democracy a soft form of communism.
Yes there is. There is a tonne of stuff that is explicitly socialist. In the UK my boss (who is from the UK) has recently said that the Biden Administration is more socialist than the previous administration. The news here has said it.
It got nothing to do with the cold-war. It is to do with their policies.
If there are quite a lot of people outside of the US that consider him to be much more socialist (and there are quite a few) than Trump, then it cannot just be "American conservatives" that are claiming this.
> Conservatives have just learned that they can score easy points by calling anyone left of Ronald Reagan a marxist
I don't know how anyone can make this statement with a straight face. What about ObamaCare?
If it is redistributing wealth, it's socialist. Taking taxpayer money from person A and paying it out as a subsidy (even if laundered through a private company) to benefit person B is socialism.
Anytime you are redistributing wealth under the threat of the government's right to licit first use of force, you're engaging in socialism.
What you're describing is socialism as defined by its libertarian intellectual opponents, and that's a pretty broad definition (any taxation followed by spending is socialism? That's pretty odd... so all military and police forces are socialist?)
So, fine, if that's what you choose to believe, but it's certainly not a policy proposal that is advocated by actual socialists. Even the soft left wing of the Democratic party found/finds the ACA objectionable.
In fact it's explicitly the kind of policy that liberals advocate in order to avoid socialist policy measures and to avoid being called socialists.
That's communism, a specific flavor of socialism.
There are many variations discussed in the article. What you should look for are the market varieties of socialism, especially the ones where the objective is to achieve socialism by following peaceful mechanisms of achieving socialistic goals instead of achieving socialism via revolution.
The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.
"quick somebody ban any word with master and black"
"whew that was a close one"
Just a thought.
Seems another good reason to “walk away from the left” if even their apparently sincere projects keep backfiring like that.
> It's not pervasive corruption that's to blame, it's the evil culture of people not like you and their corrupt representatives!
We have this where I live, but thankfully we also enjoy a fair amount of mobility; it's less common to be entirely surrounded by those who vote the same as you, and most ridings have flipped between two or three parties over the coarse of most constituent's lifetimes. While the ethnic diversity of the ridings has generally increased over the same time.
Americans could use more political diversity; you're choosing between neocons and neoliberals, and fighting visciously against each other to do so.
To switch things around for perspective:
"There's nothing wrong with being white and you should be proud of your race."
Yep, if a black person told me this it would be patronizing, and if a white person told me this I'd assume they're racist. Swap white for black in my quote, and it's what the white community in the US is effectively telling the black community, if not in such obvious terms.
It's precisely because of systematic racism that we white people get to share our "sage advice" on how to combat racism, while being almost totally ignorant on the subject. It's proof of privilege and hideously condescending.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...
Do you think that there's a difference with using "master" for the main branch vs using "blacklist" for stuff you don't want in your system? Or are they equally non-offensive to you?
"allowlist", "blocklist", "denylist", whatever. They all mean something. I know that "blacklist" is used in a number of areas (blacklisted authors etc.), and I don't have much trouble understanding it there, but those uses also come with a whole set of connotations that don't necessarily apply to lists of URLs or whatever. It's a stretch too far for my brain to be able to hop over without thinking it through.
(For the record, I'm also all in for "false alarm" in place of false positive, and "missed bug"/"undetected flaw" for false negative in the context of static analysis where it makes sense.)
it is part of an effort of acknowledging that things white are seen as good or less bad, and things black are seen as bad and worse, and this is consistent across the language
this particular approach of extrapolating that towards skin color and ethnicity is just as misguided
but I could have seen it coming: when I’ve used the words in context before, it becomes clear people have had race on their mind the entire conversation that they try to make a poor joke about the irony of me using those words. Seemingly for their own comfort.
Not exactly what I would call privilege, in America.
I read about the GitHub name change, then completely forgot about it until I saw this HN thread. At the time I think I asked our internal Git guru if this was going to change anything, and he said don't worry about it.
My concern is that a few gaffes from here and there are combined into some unifying characteristic of my "wing," when most people simply take little or no notice of them.
The best thing a company can do the way I see it is to _dedicate_ a cut of regular profit to a black charity. Like, on a regular basis.
Money can affect serious change in the right “hands”.
JUST MOVE MONEY TO BLACK CHARITIES OR ASSOCIATIONS. ITS CALLED DIVISION OF LABOR. Then, do your best to be inclusive intentionally. That’s the answer IMO.
Take a minute to reflect back on what happened.
People that werent going to do anything meaningful, but still wont. Except now they wear black and blue versions of the American flag in a specific counter protest.
While the actual person of color has to listen to your ilk proclaim rewriting the language is so progressive and for that person no matter what their life experience has been, and also wonder about how much the “silent” people resent them because they think it’s we’re going to cancel them.
Hope that people can further refine how the energy and sentiment is directed. I feel like we’re close, but people are still so out of touch.
Malcolm X was a communist---pretty sure that's about as far leftist as you can get.
Malcolm X disparaged "White Liberals", but not "White Leftists" (who he was loosely aligned with). The other poster is conflating the two.
A "leftist" believes in abolishing capitalism, either through enormous reform, an inherent collapse, or radical action. Leftism is broadly in the tradition of either Karl Marx or Pyotr Kropotkin. There is no significant leftist party in the US, although the SWP and CPUSA still nominally exist.
X believed that true racial justice is unachievable under capitalism. He was distrustful of liberals because he believed their attempts at gentle reform would hold back the "true" path to racial justice, placating his Black compatriots to the realities of capitalism and the necessity for revolution.
He did a substantial amount of advocacy with the Socialist Workers Party, so he was obviously fine alongside white people as long as they shared his economic beliefs. MLK also shared many of these beliefs ("Letter From Birmingham Jail", "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?").
It should never be forgotten what Nazis did to jews or white to black. Naming a main branch is just... A joke?