I agree this (and related religious-political thought policing) are a dark side of what amounts to UBI which it where much of society is at. Do and say the right things, give up freedom of choice, and you're taken care of for life. Think for yourself and you're left in the cold.
It reminds me of the movie 300, where all Xerxes demands is that you kneel.
The people around you should try to get into political positions where all they'll need to do is to have the right political opinions and enforce that then. Which opinions those are depends on the organization.
The problem of course is that many people couldn't stand to work in such an organization, and there's definitely suffering involved unless you are a certain type that loves that kind of work.
Absolutely, but "all sorts of politics" is not "any sort of politics". Also, I'm pretty sure none of the teams who made these word lists are struggling to make ends meet. For example, what does the guy who's out there in the middle of a cold night making soup for homeless people think about these lists?
Do and say the right things, give up freedom of choice, enter into a social contract where in exchange for refraining from exercising some of one's natural rights to others' detriment, they agree to refrain from...
I don't follow the UBI thing at all. If anything, this illustrates that we should have UBI or try and reduce the amount of folks working in bullshit jobs somehow.
I dunno, I think it's good that a racial slur is not thrown at me in my workplace. I know at least some people who would love to do it as a """"joke""""
Racial slurs have been banned for a long time in the average workplace and that’s a good thing. These lists are talking about banning words like “crazy” (offensive to the mentally ill) and “felon” (offensive to … felons, I guess)
So some banned word lists are fine, obviously you can't call your students racist slurs. But these ones are bad (presumably because I personally don't understand why some of the words on the list might be offensive.)
No, it’s because I read the list and they don’t give convincing justification for their choices. Most of the banned words are banned because “someone somewhere maybe might interpret this as offensive in the worst possible case.” Everyone agrees that certain words are slurs. Stanford and their ilk have just started designating things slurs that aren’t used that way.
Banned word lists are always a bad idea. I feel like it probably only makes things worse - people wanting to offend will come up with new euphemisms and slurs but will be in the clear because those words aren't on the banned list yet.
At the end of the day, we really want to be holding people accountable on the meaning of what they write or say, not making lists of words that probably don't actually offend anybody but that someone thinks could possibly offend someone else somewhere at some point in time, maybe.
I am not who you asked but I can see an argument being made that, yes, a banned word list consisting of racial slurs is still bad, albeit significantly less so.
The argument would go something like this: you can ban use of racial slurs without specifically making a list of them that are banned, as such a list both opens the door to further banned words and also comes with a maintenance cost, where it has to be changed. As an example "person of colour" is currently an acceptable term but when I was a kid I think people would have associated that term with "coloured" and find it insulting, so if you have a specific list you have to manage cases like this.
Secondly banning racial slurs altogether ignores that there are legitimate contexts in which they should be used (directly quoting something someone has said, discussing old media in which that sort of language is used, etc.), and these contexts are very different from referring to an individual or a group using those slurs. A list of banned words means those words can't be used even in those contexts, as opposed to just not using them as a pejorative or insult.
Yes, it's unnecessary at best but potentially causes other problems. Really, if somebody uses a racial slur, does somebody above them really need a banned word list to caution or discipline them? Of course not!
You don’t see how using the word “crazy” to describe someone with a mental illness creates a negative connotation that harms them? If you label someone “crazy” do you think you’re more or less likely to recognize them for their work, regardless of their performance? Do you think you’re more or less likely to listen to them with an open mind?
The word “mental illness” already has a negative connotation that harms them. Calling someone mentally ill would be way more hurtful than someone saying “Wow, that’s crazy!” offhand in a conversation, which is what these lists are really targeting.
Reality is that life kind of sucks for people who take care of or interact with the mentally ill, and it definitely sucks more for the mentally ill themselves… No amount of progressive hand-wringing or administrative Band-aids is going to change that.
Banning the word crazy is silly, ineffective, patronizing nonsense that does nothing to help the mentally ill whatsoever, not even changing the perception around them nor making them feel better.
So you recognize that giving someone a negative label harms them, but you think people should do it anyway? The problem is that the label itself creates additional bias. It dehumanizes the person. Suddenly you’re not a person suffering from depression or bipolar disorder; you’re “crazy” or “mentally ill” and should be shunned or diminished.
Plenty of people who suffer from a mental illness do well in life, but you’re right that they often have a harder time. So then why should we actively make their life even harder by attaching a stigma and dehumanizing them? I don’t think that’s progressive as much as just humanitarian.
We’re conflating two abstract issues here and you’re accusing me of doing things that I’m not doing.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario: two of your coworkers are in an office and one tells the other something shocking. The second says, “Wow, that’s crazy!” Do you think that’s a micro aggression, or worse, a slur?
Second scenario: you’re talking to a coworker and they say “Bob has been off recently. Some of the stuff he says is so insane. Yesterday he completely embarrassed us in that meeting!” Do you think this is any less hurtful to Bob because your coworker said “insane” instead of “crazy”?
My answers are “no” and “no”, and it seems pretty obvious why. In the first scenario there’s no intention to harm someone and even if harm is done, it’s extremely small. In the second scenario, your coworker is going to say something bad about Bob and it doesn’t matter how tightly you control the corporate Newspeak, he is going to express his opinion.
Grow a spine and realize the world isn’t for or against you, it just is.
These are the kinds of words people are talking about, not historical slurs.
I work for a very large company. These words are in a list of words we're "not allowed" to use. There are even more ridiculous ones (e.g. can't use "normal" to describe things)
I just briefly checked 'muskateer' on Wikipedia, of all the old pictures listed on the page, I couldn't find one that depicted a non male-presenting one, does that make 'muskateer' gender-charged as in the "three muskateers'
Violent language?! How do they suggest you write about actual wars?
[edit] I won't even dignify the stupidity of conflating the Spanish language with a race - then its use with racism - with a response, except to say that such a view could only arise among the privileged children of racists in a very small part of the United States.
I'm lucky in that for most of my career I worked in an organization where if you alienated any of your colleagues you increased the odds of not having future work.
That's not what this is about. This is more things like 'you're never allowed to use words like "idiot" or "dumb" because any use of those words ever is ableist against people with learning difficulties' or "using the word 'disabled' is always insensitive, even if somebody uses that word to talk about their own disability and says it's fine for you to use"
not that. Anything done above the lowest common denominator is ableist, according to one frame. And according to the other frame (expressed constantly here), everyone earns everything by their own merit alone, and it's always been so.
The flaw in both of these frames is their focus on language, as if language alone can make things what they are. It's a mistake that older people can always see in young people, that I couldn't see in myself but I can see in my younger self now; the idea that you will remake the world by changing the definitions.
You're absolutely right, but your rightful demand is being abused and taken to unrealistic extremes by people who want to (a) build a career on top of that and (b) be seen as social messiahs. Abuse comes from all sides.
This is just "People don't complain about social justice when they have real problems" couched in an academic setting, and that argument is quite tired.
Is it, though? And is the ritual proscription of harmful words (where the definition of "harmful" keeps expanding, into frankly ludicrous territory,) truly doing anything at all for "social justice"?
it's... demonstrably true though? Inflation up, layoffs, ukraine... no more social justice news, google searches down, mentions in NYT down, voters stop responding to it on both sides in elections.
> Inflation up, layoffs, ukraine... no more social justice news, google searches down, mentions in NYT down, voters stop responding to it on both sides in elections.
"transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely" was like three days ago
or as a black friend of mine is fond of saying about such signaling acts, “the powers that be will go to great lengths to be seen to be doing something while maintaining the status quo”
Exactly that most places actually do ban ‘moron’ in official communications and have done so for ages. It’s an extremely ableist term, it’s does not simply mean “stupid”.
I think the point is that if someone does not comply with their advice they might have their life impacted in a negative way, can't get job, grants, ostracized, etc. Which de facto becomes a ban.
I may have worded it better. Provocation is not the best tool.
My point is that there is already a "forbidden-word" list that everyone can easily agree with - which include things such as racial/discriminatory slurs. Then why is it such a stretch to understand that some words actually do hurt people? (I mean I know why - it involves conscious mental work, and human brain is optimised for shortcuts.)
One might be dissatisfied with some words in "the list", but what I see here is the rejection of the very idea that such lists have value. People who are affected by those words should ultimately be the deciders on the usage of those words, not people who have privilege.
While it may feel like it's "only something", it's still better than what was before - namely, nothing.
his point is that such signaling is annoying on its face (it’s smarmy and patronizing) and also annoying because it doesn’t benefit him: especially compared to, say, competitive job offers, recruitment efforts at HBCs, etc. Actions that aren’t primarily focused on “showing”, but are concerned more with “doing”.
If it meant breaking the status quo on more meaningful quality of life metrics, like being able to get better jobs or better mortgages, I'm not sure the answer is so obvious.
Regular punching I suppose. Regardless all punching is bad. It's just that there is some nuance in how it's dealt with. Much like big kids punching much smaller kids (and vice versa) on the playground.
The "status quo" is racial discrimination, which the person who said that is presumably subject to. The idea is that the word lists make people feel like they're helping, when those people aren't actually doing anything to fix actual problems and actually keep the system going.
The problem is that many of the same people who rail against guidelines that encourage more neutral language also dislike things like affirmative action, scholarships for minorities, investment/stimulus in poorer areas or other governmental support for poorer people.
So I guess you just have to hope problems like inequality resolve themselves. Fingers crossed eh!
The problems like "inequality" did not happen because we had equality. They arose because we had discrimination. Many of the same people who rail against guidelines that encourage more neutral language also don't agree that "the only cure to the past discrimination is present discrimination".
Yes it doesn't sound crazy because you're not describing reality - you're describing the fictional world where you are being victimised because you're not a minority. This line of reasoning is a favourite with white supremacists and "actually it's racist to try to address racism" is the first step on that road.
>also dislike things like affirmative action, scholarships for minorities, investment/stimulus in poorer areas or other governmental support for poorer people.
In my experience, the "Don't help poor people" and "Don't be racist when supporting people" are not the same group.
Visibility = Number of people impacted * level of impact
Getting a high level of impact is hard. A company word list stacks the other side of the equation. That visibility gives people a feeling of impact and something to point out, to convince themselves they're doing good in the world, while at the same time they're funding the politician that is gerrymandering to reduce the voting impact of black people, for example.
When you can afford to have political commissars it's because you have bloat and corruption. When you can't afford to not have political commissars it's because society is corrupt.
You can't call it a forbidden word list if no words are actually forbidden. This is a purposeful choice by the author to make these harmful word lists as bigger deals than they actually are.
If you work at these institutions and frequently use these words it will likely affect your career. So if you want to keep getting paid, these words are for most purposes, forbidden.
Is it unfair, though? If I work at an academic institution and I'm sending out a bunch of emails to other professors using the n-word, is it wrong that I could get investigated based on that?
Nobody here talks about the n-word, but things like "master branch" or "sanity check". And the main problem is that organizations trying to ban those terms never even ask people with disabilities, different cultural origins etc for their opinion or permission. What gives them the right to decide what is hurtful for other people than themselves?
Also it doesn't prevent problems like racism, it just hides them behind fake politeness.
> And the main problem is that organizations trying to ban those terms never even ask people with disabilities, different cultural origins etc for their opinion or permission.
Citation needed. Also untrue, i've witnessed these people consulted first-hand.
I stand corrected then, though I cannot believe those lists are completely based on that - one of the lists linked in the article recommends using "sex worker" instead of "child prostitute", which is objectively just terrible and hides child abuse behind a harmless generic term. Then there are pointless plays on words like "unhoused person" instead of "homeless person" and "enslaved person" instead of "slave".
I agree offensive language should be avoided, and I couldn't care less what a git branch is called. But I think it is more offensive to affected people to play these linguistic games instead of taking measures that actually make a difference. Universities investing billions into real estate funds shouldn't lecture others about what wording is offensive to homeless people.
Both 'homeless person' and 'slave' make the negative sound like a permanent unchangable state of affairs... as if that is that persons identity.
But 'unhoused person' and 'enslaved person' make the negative sound like a very changeable state of affairs you have power over.
> But I think it is more offensive to affected people to play these linguistic games instead of taking measures that actually make a difference.
They aren't linguistic games. It's the same reason you tell your kid "you'll get them next time" instead of "you are a loser" if you value their mental health.
The second one is technically true, but you know there is danger they'll feel like being a loser is their identity if they hear that too much.
"Both 'homeless person' and 'slave' make the negative sound like a permanent unchangable state of affairs... as if that is that persons identity."
No they don't. There was an entire civil war that established that regarding slavery. People go from homeless to not homeless all the time.
These are very much linguistic games being played and the stakes are the careers of people that make the grevious mistake of not adhering to the made up rules.
> Both 'homeless person' and 'slave' make the negative sound like a permanent unchangable state of affairs... as if that is that persons identity.
... How so?
Imagine these two sentences:
"The slave poured wine from an amphora"
and
"The waiter poured wine from an amphora"
... These are the same sentence aside from the word used to describe the one doing the pouring. The word, in this context, describes a current mode of existing for the person doing the pouring but I cannot see at all why "slave" as a word implies an inherent/permanent state of affairs in a way that "waiter" doesn't.
"John was a slave in 113BC" vs. "John was a metalwoker in 113BC"...
Seriously please explain to me where on earth you are getting an implication it's permanent, I am so confused
EDIT: I do kinda get the "is their identity part", but no more than referring to someone by their occupation or by their hobby (i.e "David is a bird watcher") does
Your superficial understanding of the subject (i.e. mentioning the N-word, when that is not in any of these lists) is the fuel that these people need to keep rising in their careers and social circles. Way to give them a shoulder to step on.
Come on, the n word is not what we are talking about. The references terms like "low income and poor". If you think they are equivalent then I'm at a loss. Or did you just not read the article?
From the title, I was expecting a list of racial slurs or the like. It actually lists things like gendered and stigmatized words with alternatives, which does smell like administrative bloat.
> —administrators have increasingly become enforcers of workplace discipline. Even if forbidden-word lists are presented as “advisory,” they exist as weapons in administrators’ arsenal for penalizing faculty.
The risk of abuse is significant as is the chilling effect on speech.
Interesting that you seem to imply that you would be just fine with canceling people or with the chilling effects of speaking if the "kind of speech" fit some criteria that you personally have.
Ok, I see. No I would not cancel or end the careers of those people that did that. My true hope is that people can come to the understanding that ignoring people that try to do that is the proper approach. Just like I don't want to hurt people that believe in flat Earth. I just ignore them as kooks. People that make forbidden word lists and people that call the employers of people because they disagree with them should be ignored and this should become socially acceptable.
Also, I will note that in both of your examples it wasn't free speech but specific actions taken by a person.
Oh, there's several ways. Simply driving down the SNR by out-speaking someone is the easiest, which is why so many forums have rules of etiquette or time-boxing. Inducing a speaker's audience to leave by making the environment so odious that they voluntarily stop associating there.
As, well, a human being, yes: I am just fine with refraining from volunteering my time or attention to people who fit or do not fit some criteria. It's called "freedom of association."
If normal, everyday words are blacklisted and put one at risk of discipline or censure, that has a chilling effect on speech in general. People consider it safer not to speak at all, even if they have an important idea or viewpoint which should be communicated.
(I'm someone who has lived through at least two cycles of "Stuff we all used to say we don't say anymore." Language moves. Things "everyone" accepts are fine until they aren't. Do you still use bare pointers in C++ or do you use options and smart pointers?).
Oh, by all means, continue with your attempts at gaslighting by dismissing this as a normal evolution of language.
Language does move alright, but apparently, we have a bunch of self-appointed activists who think they can dictate the direction it moves for everyone else. And how do we know they're clueless? Well, for one, they keep pushing things like "Latinx" nonsense, even though actual Latino Americans have made it clear they don't want it.
By what process do you think we got to the place where the words that are on most text chat channels' banned or auto-flag-for-moderation lists got to be on those lists? It was by a group of people (which started small) explaining why those words weren't okay, over and over again, until people agreed.
My personal opinion is that 2/3 of the words in your list could probably stand to be jettisoned from regular usage (I haven't heard a compelling explanation for the remaining third but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise).
The abnormal part is these activists bring up ancient negative definitions (that no one else has ever heard of) for words like "brown bag", when no one uses the 'bad' definition in daily practice, and try to ban it.
If a word/phrase has evolved toward a positive definition, then its abnormal and regressive and wrong to try to bring back the negative definition and force people to stop using it. Why do they do it? For just the twitter points?
>Many are written not by faculty but by ambitious university administrators.
I think it's a pretty poor form of argument to immediately impugn the motivations of the people you disagree with. It's also quite frankly a little comical to suppose that ambitious university administrators would decide this was how to direct their ambition.
One thing that really struck me about this article is that it points to policies, and language lists, but there's one thing that's missing. Any actual details about anything at all that's bad. Like, ok, this policy exists where you can report a book for being offensive and they'll consider your complaint. That sounds... fine? If you want to follow that up and say "Hey look! Here are the books they banned!" I'm interested, but that policy just sounds... fine. What's the actual problem here?
I think the problem here is the right wing intellectual sees a harmful word list and thinks "Oh my god they're stifling academic inquisition"- but as the author points out, these word lists don't operate actually within the academic setting. What is actually happening is school administrators don't want you referring to another student in the university cafe as "sugar tits".
So a harmful word list like this is acceptable to you? I don’t see any mention of “sugar tits”. What I do see is people trying to use their authority to tell you how to speak.
Almost no one is offended by words on the Stanford list, yet it exists and can be used against you when you don’t speak the way they want.
Yeah, I think it's absolutely fine to have a harmful word list. I don't think you're really engaging with the issue of why this type of list exists either. There is a genuine balance to be made between the chilling effect of this list vs the chilling effect of a work/university environment where routine use of racist/sexist/other"ist" language creates an unwelcome environment for minorities.
I think a core disagreement here is people on the right say "These academic institutions are being politicized" but that's not true, the institutions were always political, it's just that previously they were political in a way that favoured rich straight white men and now an effort is being made to counteract that.
Oh yes, because obviously these lists reflect the way that people from minority groups without a degree talk to each other in everyday speech. I’m sure these lists were all written by people from those groups.
If they actually engage in a productive argument against banning specific words it might just reveal that really it's about them wanting to say whatever they want and not care about people whom these lists intend to help (by not reminding them how they are different or that their parents were enslaved etc) or about furthering some political agenda of whoever they are affiliated with. So they are stuck with abstract handwavy arguments about word banning in general.
Just an observation. I can't say if this or these lists is good or bad at the moment. Anyone can still offend or exclude anyone and cause a great burn, including hinting at ethnicity and ancestry and whatever, with perfectly allowed words...
I like your example of sugar tits, because it shows exactly how you have been coaxed into buying a product that is not what you think it is. "Sugar tits" is so obviously wrong that it is not in any list. It's the same as someone else earlier in this thread who said that not allowing racial slurs is a good thing. Of course it's a good thing; that's so obvious that most common racial slurs are not in any of these lists. Instead they put things like "three amigos" or "war games", because what they are trying to show you is that you need them. It becomes so hard to decide exactly what is ok and what is not that they convince you that you need them to tell you what to do. It is a way to justify their existence. However, the jump from "sugar tits" or racial slurs to "three amigos" and "war games" is simply too large. To be honest, I think that anyone who is actually worried about this problem should be the first to criticize these people, because they are using your perfectly fine motivations in order to fuel their own career and social advancement. By pushing everything to meaningless extremes, they are making your perfectly fine motivations disappear amidst chaotic noise.
speaking of which, my git client on my computer makes master branches, while github wants to use main branch. its a little annoying, I would be open to switching my git client to do main by default, how do I do that? I'll look it up now that I've typed it out
Out of curiosity, how did this affect you? This is only an issue the very first time you set up a repo, no? As soon as you push 'master' to an empty GitHub project, that becomes the default branch. And if you clone a repo there is no expectation from the local git that a branch with any particular name exists. What am I missing?
You're missing nothing, it's a non-issue. You can use master or main and neither git nor GitHub care, employers might have some guidelines but they generally have a bunch of things like coding conventions, codes of conduct or other office policies designed to make workplaces somewhere you can actually work without, for example, worrying about colleagues saying or doing hateful, racist or sexist shit
I often use the push instructions that a new empty github project prompts, and do it frequently enough that I want my system defaults to match those instructions.
Its not important to me to know that my system could overwrite those instructions successfully because "master" or whatever my local branch is called can be written into the command line. Its not important to me that "main" is a contrived replacement for "master".
Ironically, stuff like this only makes tech less inclusive to marginalized newcomers. Some impoverished kid trying to teach themself git won’t be able to follow as easily any git tutorial out there that refers to the “master” branch.
I’ve actually worked with a couple tech newcomers who encountered this very issue, one of whom happened to be black.
They took no offense at the term “master,” but were extremely frustrated by how copying and pasting commands from git tutorials would often not work. As a simple example,
$ git clone git@github.com:username/test.git
Cloning into 'test'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (3/3), done.
$ cd test
$ touch foo
$ git add foo
$ git commit -m "my commit"
[main f00f00d] my commit
1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 foo
$ git push origin master # as a tutorial might advise
error: src refspec master does not match any
error: failed to push some refs to 'github.com:username/test.git'
That person absolutely despised using git because of its complexity. Git is indeed extremely complicated, and microannoyances like this do not make things any easier.
In 10 years, it’s likely that there will still be some repos with the principal branch called “master” and some with it called “main,” so confusion will still exist. But even if all repos and tutorials were magically switched over to “main” in 10 years’ time, the net result would be several years’ worth of newbie developers experiencing a slew of microannoyances, with zero upside. There is no evidence that a branch called “master” caused widespread harm, but there is plenty of evidence that further complicating an already complex system was harmful to some degree.
The problem with that argument is that it would prevent _any_ improvements to git that don't correspond to outdated documentation.
You could just as well argue that the changed name of the default branch is one of very many things that make git difficult for beginners to learn and having bumped into it early taught a valuable lesson that branch names in git are arbitrary.
Something that took me a longer than I care to admit to figure out.
It's arbitrary save that a default value (i.e. "master") exists that is used if none is provided to 'git init' when the repo is first created. That default name is configurable, e.g. to 'trunk' if you like things confusing: `$ git config --global init.defaultBranch trunk`
The name 'origin' for the remote repository that you originally cloned from is likewise arbitrary. There is nothing magical about `git push origin master`. You could name your remote "my_github_account" and do `git push my_github_account trunk`.
This knowledge becomes essential if you're synch'ing with several remote repos. OTOH, knowing that these are arbitrary names and not part of the command make it more obvious that it's _possible_ to have multiple remotes in the first place.
But it comes at the cost of making life more difficult for authors of tutorials designed to get people to memorize difficult git commands without understand what they do.
Part of the argument identifies a harm to making changes to git, which is true for any changes to git that break existing documentation. I would hope that git maintainers are considering that when deciding about making any changes. But the other part of the argument is that the benefit is too small (or nonexistant) to outweigh the harm, which is not true in all cases.
I'd sure hope the tutorial gets updated, if that's what the git team decide to change the default to. The people running the main git documentation site seem to do a pretty good job of keeping up to date, though, so I'm optimistic.
This would sort itself out pretty quickly, though. Different aspects of git's usage are constantly changing and any tutorial that doesn't keep up to date would be irrelevant sooner or later.
Example of what? Is this being mandated by your organization's administration? Count yourself lucky working with an administration that gives a shit about version control.
Most organizations have some document describing acceptable coding standards that cover things like whitespace/indentation, brackets, idioms and naming conventions.
It is so bizarre how many people draw the line at master/slave - it's just another convention, why on earth are they desperate to write these two specific words above all else? Why is "don't use verbs in your REST routes" ok but "don't use master/slave" a cause to get on your soapbox and cry about human rights being impeded?
For me personally it's offensive because master and slave don't, never did, and never will, specifically refer to a single culture's experience - and that the idiocy of identifying the technical use of those terms with racism could itself only come from a racist mind.
[edit] while you downvote this, consider that my grandparents family were literal slave workers prior to being shot, and no, I don't think we should BAN THE TERM. Only insufferable racist snobs think that calling a computer a "master" or a "slave" makes normal people think of HUMAN SLAVES AND MASTERS. And even if they do think of human slaves and masters, then hopefully no normal person would think of some racist thing after that. And if they did, then that is a racist problem, not the words. Do you understand? Do you understand that my grandparents didn't survive to live in a world where words are banned because some idiot draws a connotation from them and assumes that other people will as well, or just to exercise power over other individuals? Like, fuck you!
It it bizarre? If I told you that your use of the word "most" is racists, would you agree and stop using it? What if I told you that your use of the word "things" is racist? Obviously my overreaction to those words is my problem not yours and you should not stop using them.
The reason people draw the line here is because to many people these words CLEARLY have nothing to do with race and "oppression". They never have. And yet now somehow YOU made them "dirty".
It is a common occurrence where a group of activists deem something as forbidden, create a commotion around it that intimidates those who comply solely out of fear, ultimately leading to that something being considered "bad" because only those who don't mind disregarding social norms continue to use it. This is not a natural process but a hostile takeover.
I think the best summary of this thread is you addressing me using another "problematic" word "dude" that made it into multiple of the "forbidden words" lists.
There is an enormous difference in standards and expectations for language in professional or academic settings and random internet message boards. The fact that I am using the word "dude" or that I just ran "git checkout master" a couple of minutes ago should show you that on my "side" of this argument is pragmatic, flexible and reasonable and not at all against "banning" words, no matter how many of you are here throwing little tantrums.
But I agree - you stumbling around in clown shoes, failing to understand the issue you're hopping mad about is a great summary.
Words do have power, but this sort of thing misunderstands the type of power they have. Words have power when used for persuasion. Banning the words does nothing to change the persuasive power of people who would use language to convince other people to do evil things. It only takes away the power of ordinary people to transmit the truths they see and hear. Stripping language is, in itself, evil; and juxtaposing words like "inferior blacklist" - a phrase that never existed - as if it were a brilliant example proving the racism of the second word in the phrase, shows only a misunderstanding of both the nature of racism and the nature of language.
Words used for persuasion on a large enough scale become imbued with a default associated meaning.
> Banning the words does nothing to change the persuasive power of people who would use language to convince other people to do evil things.
Do you really believe there is no power in words being repeated? Do you not believe that the real racists are bothered by not being able to espouse their usual rhetoric freely?
Much more annoyed than the free- speech advocates in this thread whose group definitely has no overlap with the real racists.
> real racists are bothered by not being able to espouse their usual rhetoric freely
I don't think they're particularly bothered; they espouse their rhetoric either way. And if you take away some words, they quickly find others. I haven't seen the changing of the language in the past 40 years to be particularly effective at stemming their racism or their ability to persuade. If anything, the US has become more racist in my lifetime, despite the many many iterations of politically correct revisionist speech. Again, it's a form of hubris and foolishness to believe that you can change thoughts by changing words.
> Words used for persuasion on a large enough scale become imbued with a default associated meaning.
This is the definition of a racist way of thinking. If you watched Hitler's speeches and heard him say that Jews are dirty enough times, would you believe it? Would you associate "Jew" with "dirt"? Because many people heard those words thousands of times and didn't believe it. If you're afraid you would believe it, then you are the problem, not the word "Jew" or the word "dirt".
> The real problem isn't I called my coworker the N-word, it's that '"Forbidden-Word” Lists Are a Symptom of Administrative Bloat.
Without the list to point to, they may not be fired. Less repercussions to bad actions, mean they feel more free to spew their racist rhetoric.
> I haven't seen the changing of the language in the past 40 years to be particularly effective at stemming their racism or their ability to persuade.
See the usage of "boy" when referring to Black men diminishing over the years because it became less acceptable.
> If you watched Hitler's speeches and heard him say that Jews are dirty enough times
If you are a 12 year old in school learning about the holocaust, the anti-wokeness educators are neutrally presenting hitler, and you don't personally know any Jews... you don't have effective tools in your environment to hedge against making that association.
The way to more fully employ elites in an environment of oversupply is to employ more of them at levels appropriate for their qualifications - but for reduced hours (like, maybe about 25 a week?). Problem solved!
Perhaps they aren't qualified to do anything that needs to be done whatsoever. Maybe they and their degrees are completely superfluous and unnecessary. Historically, the way to employ such educated sons was to either make them priests or send them to die in wars or to the colonies to get drunk and slaughter indigenous people; when all three of those strategies failed, societies with too many of them usually collapsed under stupid and poorly planned revolutions run by young rich idiots.
This is a conservative think-tank article about how the people who are actively passing laws against teaching black history and sex education shouldn't have their hate speech infringed.
Conservatives have been attacking institutions of higher education for decades. There is nothing new here. Why is it on the front page of HN?
There are plenty of US conservatives and their sympathizers here...
But to anyone else: just check out some other articles on the linked site to understand who is writing this. Ask yourself why them, and why you don't see others have the same opinion.
What I said was accurate about their intentions. If they said the same thing I did, they'd be saying the quiet part out loud.
They're accusing everyone left of them as teaching "a doctrine", and they're accusing administration of unilaterally making mandates, but then clarifying that affinity groups were consulted.
This is the type of article where they pretend to care about free speech. They tend to keep those separate from when they try to influence legislation on what can and can't be taught.
If Republicans would take a harder, pro-legal immigrant stance they’d find many immigrants and children of immigrants would be hard set against this nonsense.
> What does embracing immigrants have to do with this ?
> There are slurs for immigrants too
> The last Republican president had a word he liked to use to describe the countries these immigrants come from
I mean treat them on equal terms. You just demonsrated that they’re viewed as second-class .
Things like renaming master to main unfortunately fall into the same category: make it appear you’re trying to do something without actually doing anything useful.
Which is evidently not true. You think about it, therefore the topic is thought about, so a goal is achieved. The goal is to not mindlessly employ a brutal term that stands for horrible abuse in a completely unrelated area, just so, and as a result trivializing it. There are other things you can complain about, "master" is not one of them.
If your contention is that when I listen to a remastered Beatles album and think that they were masterful musicians, I'm also somehow convincing myself that slavery was not a big deal, you'll have to provide some kind of evidence for that.
When you say 'a goal is achieved', are you trivializing the accomplishment by using a word from sports? When I think someone who leads is doing a good job, am I trivializing lead poisoning?
I think they mean the very fact that people have to be conscious of their words and view them critically through the lens of hundreds of years of oppression is meaningful all by itself.
They said that "mindlessly employ[ing] a brutal term that stands for horrible abuse in a completely unrelated area, just so" trivializes it, and that's what I took issue with. If they only intended to say that thinking about slavery is meaningful, I am happy to agree.
The rhetoric technique I am using is called good faith discussion. I am asking you for evidence that the casual use of the word 'master' trivializes slavery in the minds of the speaker or listener. The questions you're calling slippery slope are genuinely intended to help me make sense of your position, because I don't see how they wouldn't follow from it- presumably from your response they do not. There is no intent to ridicule.
Just asking for proof would have sufficed to prompt a response on the subject matter, it's the examples that make me question your good faith. Alas, I'll take your last sentence at face value.
I must admit I'm not strong on that trivialization position. The "thinking about" part is more what I'm aiming at when I say it actually had an effect (maybe even the intended one).
As for trivialization: not a linguist, so I can't cite sources here. The mechanism I think is called semantic satiation. It's employed for nefarious reasons too, in the form of "buzzword fatigue" or "buzzword burnout" and I'd argue if this wouldn't be effective, it wouldn't be part of political parties' playbooks. Other examples: Apart from holocaust trivialization (which is actually a felony in my country), another attempt to avoid a similar effect that I find interesting is the protection of the symbols of the Red Cross.
I feel like a comment that just asked for a source would be less substantive and more dismissive. Adding examples of how it goes against my intuitions serves to justify the request. But we can agree to disagree there.
I could be convinced to restrict freedom to prevent harm, but doing so just to have a positive impact goes against me on principle. I get the sense that this is a common principle because all of these lists specifically discuss harms, but it may just be an American thing. So I'm going to talk about trivialization, but it's fine with me if you'd rather argue against this paragraph (or ignore me entirely).
The closest I can find to semantic satiation having significant effects beyond the short term is in helping stutterers, where the meaning of the words would be irrelevant. I may not be using the right search terms though.
An important distinction re: political parties is that they are using the relevant meanings. A master git branch, as far as I'm aware, does not refer to someone controlling someone else but is used in the sense of a master recording. In any event, US Republicans talk about CRT and US Democrats talk about fascism, both ad infinitum. Neither side is trying to normalize or trivialize their attack words, so that's a point against 'if it didn't work, it wouldn't be in their playbook'.
The slavery connotation of "master" is highly USA-centric.
The rest of the world, especially us who speak english as a second, third or fourth language, has no such cultural weight behind the word. It's just a word among others we had to learn, we didn't learn the culture behind it.
Comparable to the impacts in academics and other area, the renaming as annoying as it was, is an action without impact on any functional aspects (but surely on social aspects)
irony: The groupthink in this thread is that words like master/slave don't matter, but everyone expressing that opinion feels like a victimized free thinker.
Of all of the corporate departments I perceive qualified to write “lists,” IT is perhaps rock bottom.
It seems to consistently result in visible productions of over reactions that are disconnected from reality.
For example deaf and blind people that I know of prefer to be called deaf or blind.
Brown bagging in my life time has always referred to making one’s own lunch and taking it to work or school in a paper brown bag.
Black box refers to an electrical literal black box which one is unable to see its implementation details without opening it.
The thinking of individuals who produce these works seems to seep into everything they perceive, and so ironically they shouldn’t be producing these lists.
Red, in my experience in most people’s minds, does not refer to Indians predominantly.
BIPOC seems to elevate “capital B” black people and “indigenous” people over others. This seems to be the current initialism in-vogue but I find it inappropriate.
I would err on creating too short of a list over an ever expanding one.
But I digress. That’s not the point of the article. Ideally we don’t have these at all. Not because of administrative bloat being something to avoid but because hopefully you learn how to speak to people with nuance as a result of living life and talking to people with different backgrounds and working continually on your own simple ethical decisions.
As a final comment, much of the social discussions we have in the states are really limited to US centric social perspectives.
People don’t talk like this in many other countries. There’s some irony in being so concerned about how one communicates with other communities that one doesn’t see how myopic this is on an international scale. It’s so American.
>There’s some irony in being so concerned about how one communicates with other communities
That "concern" in modern United States is literally the end of your professional life! So these self-appointed thought and speech police have, and will employ without a second-thought just for twitter points, through social media, a way to amplify their power to the extent that they can do something previously impossible and end your career over a (possibly imagined) thought "crime" or speech "crime". So from that perspective, all the walking on eggshells and concern about this is absolutely real not just a socially imagined construct or idea.
Generally speaking, this is only enforced upon political dissidents however. Black face is forgivable if you are Justin Trudeau, but not Billy Bob Conservative.
I agree there seems to be some people that are immune to this, but it is capricious in application. if someone wants more reddit/tiktok/twitter points that day then even the most ardent ally to your specific leaning will be sacrificed to the internet point gods.
The thing about having rules that everybody is constantly breaking is that they let you selectively enforce them on your enemies. Drug laws have been historically like this and used more against minorities e.g.
So when pictures surface of someone that the in crowd doesn't like is an old Halloween costume, they all play it up as if the person's a monster. Realistically, few if anyone actually care deep down, and so when the same thing happens to someone currently in favor, it's easy to let it slide.
The problem isn't that justin Trudeau (who I despise incidentally) got a pass for dressing up in a costume (which obviously wasn't remotely offensive in the context it was in), it's that other people's careers have been destroyed for the same thing.
Just like e.g. Bill Clinton "not inhaling" - nobody gives a shit if he smoked pot. But simultaneously thousands of people, mostly who are "undesirables" in the eyes of law enforcement for one reason or another get incarcerated for it.
Very well put! Selective enforcement is the key here. When everyone doesn't get to play by the same rule or even know the rules in some cases, how do you have a functioning society?
"Trudeau said he wore blackface “makeup” in high school to sing “Day-O,” a Jamaican folk song famously performed by African-American singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte. TIME has confirmed that a photo shows Trudeau at a school talent show wearing blackface and an afro wig." - TIME
Nah man that's just straight up blackface minstrel, extremely racist and bad. Sorry, you're confusing it with the other time he wore blackface.
Honestly though, why is this important? He meant no offense and no one was hurt. Should we advocate for ending his career because of something he did in highschool?
Politically me and Trudeau are very far apart, he is very much further left than I am. I just don't think youthful indiscretions that harm no one and are not criminal in nature should haunt someone for the rest of their lives.
The realpolitik of the thing is that when bad stuff comes out, the value people perceive the perpetrator brings is weighed against the bad stuff. In essence, cost of keeping them vs. cost of marginalizing them.
Some folks were just too valuable to marginalize. Some aren't. But that's pretty true of any space humans operate in, whether the bad stuff is Halloween costume choices or bad hygiene.
If there are a hundred Justin Trudeaus to choose from, the one that was racist gets left by the wayside (I think this is what scares people about this sort of thing... They realize they aren't special enough to step out of line).
Problem is that with so much free money floating around, a large chunk of IT and especially startups was never about running a profitable business but about perpetuating a ponzi scheme running on investor money doubling as a daycare center for employees, since there was never any actual market pressure to operate profitably.
You don't see as much of this in other industries where most companies are busy making actual money (or they will get out-competed by companies who care about their bottom-line more than virtue-signalling).
The irony of the whole thing is that these language power games are, in part, pushed on IT/development exactly because IT/devs typically have relatively low social status/institutional power, when compared with, for example, sales.
The central point of the article seems dubious to me. I think it's more likely that administrators are simply in charge of implementing forbidden word lists. This is of course their job. However the central political impetus for doing so is likely elsewhere. (E.G. faculty leadership or something).
I also personally struggle to see the harm caused by such lists.
The central point of the article seems dubious to me. It seems more likely that administrators are simply in charge of implementing these lists. This is of course their job. However it seems likely that the central political impetus for their doing so lies elsewhere. E.g. faculty heads or university leadership.
I also struggle to see the harm of such lists personally.
It contributes to polarize the opinion.
Never a good thing.
It accuses People of things that have never crossed their minds.
When I do a BlackBox testing never have I or those that I know Associated the "Black" of the Box with the skin of people (for good or bad).
When we talk about Blacklist/WhiteList there is no Connection with skin colour.
Black and white have those connotations not because they are associated with Skin color but because Black/white is more often culturally associated with dark/light(unknown/known).
You are saying to me that My human Instinct to not like the Darkness are because I have associated them with Dark Skin People? When I cried as a baby because I was afraid of the Dark, I was afraid of the Dark Skin People although I Didn't know yet what color was or what people are?
You are saying to me that all my Cultural background has no value because someone somewhere might read it wrong? That I am incapable of having a judgment or instinct without it being just that without further sinister meanings?
Is that what these movements are saying? these movements are doing more to imprint this racial divide on the minds of this generation that anything they are are trying to protect from.
Saying "Poor" is offensive and non inclusive?
Saying "my self-reported income was in the lowest income bracket" is way more offensive.
What does it really say? What does self-reported have to do with the my financial status? Is It my fault that I am Poor? If I self-Report more Am I not poor anymore?
Where are the scientific studies, not humanities politically loaded essays, showing that behavioral design through compelled language (a self-evident opposite of freedom of expression a a blatant social breach to state-totalitarianism) leads to reduction of interpersonal violence—notably sexual assault and domestic abuse?
If I was into conspiracies and my country had an adversary that created 100 year plans I would think that this is a pretty good way to sow discord and weaken both economic and social bonds. If I was into conspiracies.
201 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadIt reminds me of the movie 300, where all Xerxes demands is that you kneel.
I find your comment fairly tone deaf and reeking of unwarranted victimism.
The problem of course is that many people couldn't stand to work in such an organization, and there's definitely suffering involved unless you are a certain type that loves that kind of work.
... wait.
Straight out of 1984.
Could be just me though
Did you read the lists in question?
At the end of the day, we really want to be holding people accountable on the meaning of what they write or say, not making lists of words that probably don't actually offend anybody but that someone thinks could possibly offend someone else somewhere at some point in time, maybe.
To be clear, this neans you also think banned word lists consisting only of racial slurs are bad?
The argument would go something like this: you can ban use of racial slurs without specifically making a list of them that are banned, as such a list both opens the door to further banned words and also comes with a maintenance cost, where it has to be changed. As an example "person of colour" is currently an acceptable term but when I was a kid I think people would have associated that term with "coloured" and find it insulting, so if you have a specific list you have to manage cases like this.
Secondly banning racial slurs altogether ignores that there are legitimate contexts in which they should be used (directly quoting something someone has said, discussing old media in which that sort of language is used, etc.), and these contexts are very different from referring to an individual or a group using those slurs. A list of banned words means those words can't be used even in those contexts, as opposed to just not using them as a pejorative or insult.
Reality is that life kind of sucks for people who take care of or interact with the mentally ill, and it definitely sucks more for the mentally ill themselves… No amount of progressive hand-wringing or administrative Band-aids is going to change that.
Banning the word crazy is silly, ineffective, patronizing nonsense that does nothing to help the mentally ill whatsoever, not even changing the perception around them nor making them feel better.
Plenty of people who suffer from a mental illness do well in life, but you’re right that they often have a harder time. So then why should we actively make their life even harder by attaching a stigma and dehumanizing them? I don’t think that’s progressive as much as just humanitarian.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario: two of your coworkers are in an office and one tells the other something shocking. The second says, “Wow, that’s crazy!” Do you think that’s a micro aggression, or worse, a slur?
Second scenario: you’re talking to a coworker and they say “Bob has been off recently. Some of the stuff he says is so insane. Yesterday he completely embarrassed us in that meeting!” Do you think this is any less hurtful to Bob because your coworker said “insane” instead of “crazy”?
My answers are “no” and “no”, and it seems pretty obvious why. In the first scenario there’s no intention to harm someone and even if harm is done, it’s extremely small. In the second scenario, your coworker is going to say something bad about Bob and it doesn’t matter how tightly you control the corporate Newspeak, he is going to express his opinion.
Grow a spine and realize the world isn’t for or against you, it just is.
master
blacklist/whitelist
crazy/idiotic/stupid
"skin a cat"
"black market"
"black box testing" / "white box testing"
"three amigos"
"war games"
?
These are the kinds of words people are talking about, not historical slurs.
I work for a very large company. These words are in a list of words we're "not allowed" to use. There are even more ridiculous ones (e.g. can't use "normal" to describe things)
What's the problem with "war games"?
the reasoning for "three amigos" is that it is "racially loaded language"
[edit] I won't even dignify the stupidity of conflating the Spanish language with a race - then its use with racism - with a response, except to say that such a view could only arise among the privileged children of racists in a very small part of the United States.
not that. Anything done above the lowest common denominator is ableist, according to one frame. And according to the other frame (expressed constantly here), everyone earns everything by their own merit alone, and it's always been so.
The flaw in both of these frames is their focus on language, as if language alone can make things what they are. It's a mistake that older people can always see in young people, that I couldn't see in myself but I can see in my younger self now; the idea that you will remake the world by changing the definitions.
"transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely" was like three days ago
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.
or as a black friend of mine is fond of saying about such signaling acts, “the powers that be will go to great lengths to be seen to be doing something while maintaining the status quo”
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My point is that there is already a "forbidden-word" list that everyone can easily agree with - which include things such as racial/discriminatory slurs. Then why is it such a stretch to understand that some words actually do hurt people? (I mean I know why - it involves conscious mental work, and human brain is optimised for shortcuts.)
One might be dissatisfied with some words in "the list", but what I see here is the rejection of the very idea that such lists have value. People who are affected by those words should ultimately be the deciders on the usage of those words, not people who have privilege.
While it may feel like it's "only something", it's still better than what was before - namely, nothing.
I don't have any opinion on whether it made it meaningful to add race there, that way
yes, agreed
The NY Times put a moratorium on anti-Asian aggression by Black Americans during the early days of COVID.
Yet they made an exception for a White on Asian, but all that did was mask the actual problem in society.
Growing up as an immigrant, the racism in non-White American circles is also very real but never spoken of.
Immigrants are typically a minority, so if they were discriminating or being aggressive towards the majority then it'd be considered "punching up".
A better analogy would be the smaller kid finding yet another, even smaller kid to beat down.
Then avoiding any mention of the smaller bully, because they were being bullied by someone larger. Nothing positive or nuanced about this position.
Tarball? “abusive relationship”? “war room”?
This is way beyond the obvious racial discrimination and micro agressions.
What are my kids going to deal with when they get into Uni?
So I guess you just have to hope problems like inequality resolve themselves. Fingers crossed eh!
It does not sound crazy to me.
In my experience, the "Don't help poor people" and "Don't be racist when supporting people" are not the same group.
Visibility = Number of people impacted * level of impact
Getting a high level of impact is hard. A company word list stacks the other side of the equation. That visibility gives people a feeling of impact and something to point out, to convince themselves they're doing good in the world, while at the same time they're funding the politician that is gerrymandering to reduce the voting impact of black people, for example.
Also it doesn't prevent problems like racism, it just hides them behind fake politeness.
Citation needed. Also untrue, i've witnessed these people consulted first-hand.
I agree offensive language should be avoided, and I couldn't care less what a git branch is called. But I think it is more offensive to affected people to play these linguistic games instead of taking measures that actually make a difference. Universities investing billions into real estate funds shouldn't lecture others about what wording is offensive to homeless people.
> "enslaved person" instead of "slave".
Both 'homeless person' and 'slave' make the negative sound like a permanent unchangable state of affairs... as if that is that persons identity.
But 'unhoused person' and 'enslaved person' make the negative sound like a very changeable state of affairs you have power over.
> But I think it is more offensive to affected people to play these linguistic games instead of taking measures that actually make a difference.
They aren't linguistic games. It's the same reason you tell your kid "you'll get them next time" instead of "you are a loser" if you value their mental health.
The second one is technically true, but you know there is danger they'll feel like being a loser is their identity if they hear that too much.
No they don't. There was an entire civil war that established that regarding slavery. People go from homeless to not homeless all the time.
These are very much linguistic games being played and the stakes are the careers of people that make the grevious mistake of not adhering to the made up rules.
... How so?
Imagine these two sentences:
"The slave poured wine from an amphora"
and
"The waiter poured wine from an amphora"
... These are the same sentence aside from the word used to describe the one doing the pouring. The word, in this context, describes a current mode of existing for the person doing the pouring but I cannot see at all why "slave" as a word implies an inherent/permanent state of affairs in a way that "waiter" doesn't.
"John was a slave in 113BC" vs. "John was a metalwoker in 113BC"...
Seriously please explain to me where on earth you are getting an implication it's permanent, I am so confused
EDIT: I do kinda get the "is their identity part", but no more than referring to someone by their occupation or by their hobby (i.e "David is a bird watcher") does
Normal Person: I think we should be able to say poor and homelessness.
Leftist: oh you think it's ok to say the n word! You probably think the Nazis were right too.
Normal Person: I don't want schools lying to me about my kids gender and don't think kids should be at sexually suggestive drag shows.
Leftist: oh you don't think trans people have the right to exist. You probably think the Nazis were right too.
Just the mental gymnastics required are astounding and no matter what you do there is always a gotcha. It's exhausting.
https://studentaffairs.unc.edu/student-affairs-staff-portal/...
The risk of abuse is significant as is the chilling effect on speech.
Making forbidden word lists and convincing your company to adopt them.
Also, I will note that in both of your examples it wasn't free speech but specific actions taken by a person.
(I'm someone who has lived through at least two cycles of "Stuff we all used to say we don't say anymore." Language moves. Things "everyone" accepts are fine until they aren't. Do you still use bare pointers in C++ or do you use options and smart pointers?).
Oh, by all means, continue with your attempts at gaslighting by dismissing this as a normal evolution of language.
Language does move alright, but apparently, we have a bunch of self-appointed activists who think they can dictate the direction it moves for everyone else. And how do we know they're clueless? Well, for one, they keep pushing things like "Latinx" nonsense, even though actual Latino Americans have made it clear they don't want it.
By what process do you think we got to the place where the words that are on most text chat channels' banned or auto-flag-for-moderation lists got to be on those lists? It was by a group of people (which started small) explaining why those words weren't okay, over and over again, until people agreed.
My personal opinion is that 2/3 of the words in your list could probably stand to be jettisoned from regular usage (I haven't heard a compelling explanation for the remaining third but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise).
If a word/phrase has evolved toward a positive definition, then its abnormal and regressive and wrong to try to bring back the negative definition and force people to stop using it. Why do they do it? For just the twitter points?
I think it's a pretty poor form of argument to immediately impugn the motivations of the people you disagree with. It's also quite frankly a little comical to suppose that ambitious university administrators would decide this was how to direct their ambition.
One thing that really struck me about this article is that it points to policies, and language lists, but there's one thing that's missing. Any actual details about anything at all that's bad. Like, ok, this policy exists where you can report a book for being offensive and they'll consider your complaint. That sounds... fine? If you want to follow that up and say "Hey look! Here are the books they banned!" I'm interested, but that policy just sounds... fine. What's the actual problem here?
I think the problem here is the right wing intellectual sees a harmful word list and thinks "Oh my god they're stifling academic inquisition"- but as the author points out, these word lists don't operate actually within the academic setting. What is actually happening is school administrators don't want you referring to another student in the university cafe as "sugar tits".
Almost no one is offended by words on the Stanford list, yet it exists and can be used against you when you don’t speak the way they want.
I think a core disagreement here is people on the right say "These academic institutions are being politicized" but that's not true, the institutions were always political, it's just that previously they were political in a way that favoured rich straight white men and now an effort is being made to counteract that.
Just an observation. I can't say if this or these lists is good or bad at the moment. Anyone can still offend or exclude anyone and cause a great burn, including hinting at ethnicity and ancestry and whatever, with perfectly allowed words...
edit: the answer https://superuser.com/a/1572156
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
I often use the push instructions that a new empty github project prompts, and do it frequently enough that I want my system defaults to match those instructions.
Its not important to me to know that my system could overwrite those instructions successfully because "master" or whatever my local branch is called can be written into the command line. Its not important to me that "main" is a contrived replacement for "master".
They took no offense at the term “master,” but were extremely frustrated by how copying and pasting commands from git tutorials would often not work. As a simple example,
That person absolutely despised using git because of its complexity. Git is indeed extremely complicated, and microannoyances like this do not make things any easier.In 10 years, it’s likely that there will still be some repos with the principal branch called “master” and some with it called “main,” so confusion will still exist. But even if all repos and tutorials were magically switched over to “main” in 10 years’ time, the net result would be several years’ worth of newbie developers experiencing a slew of microannoyances, with zero upside. There is no evidence that a branch called “master” caused widespread harm, but there is plenty of evidence that further complicating an already complex system was harmful to some degree.
You could just as well argue that the changed name of the default branch is one of very many things that make git difficult for beginners to learn and having bumped into it early taught a valuable lesson that branch names in git are arbitrary.
Something that took me a longer than I care to admit to figure out.
Agreed. Seeing this in the tutorial (if it hasn't already been updated as such) would be great:
> Branch names are arbitrary, but for convenience a default of 'main' is provided. There's nothing special about 'main'.
Of course I'd double check they really are arbitrary for all contexts before adding the above since I'm not 100% confident it's true.
The name 'origin' for the remote repository that you originally cloned from is likewise arbitrary. There is nothing magical about `git push origin master`. You could name your remote "my_github_account" and do `git push my_github_account trunk`.
This knowledge becomes essential if you're synch'ing with several remote repos. OTOH, knowing that these are arbitrary names and not part of the command make it more obvious that it's _possible_ to have multiple remotes in the first place.
But it comes at the cost of making life more difficult for authors of tutorials designed to get people to memorize difficult git commands without understand what they do.
This would sort itself out pretty quickly, though. Different aspects of git's usage are constantly changing and any tutorial that doesn't keep up to date would be irrelevant sooner or later.
It is so bizarre how many people draw the line at master/slave - it's just another convention, why on earth are they desperate to write these two specific words above all else? Why is "don't use verbs in your REST routes" ok but "don't use master/slave" a cause to get on your soapbox and cry about human rights being impeded?
[edit] while you downvote this, consider that my grandparents family were literal slave workers prior to being shot, and no, I don't think we should BAN THE TERM. Only insufferable racist snobs think that calling a computer a "master" or a "slave" makes normal people think of HUMAN SLAVES AND MASTERS. And even if they do think of human slaves and masters, then hopefully no normal person would think of some racist thing after that. And if they did, then that is a racist problem, not the words. Do you understand? Do you understand that my grandparents didn't survive to live in a world where words are banned because some idiot draws a connotation from them and assumes that other people will as well, or just to exercise power over other individuals? Like, fuck you!
The reason people draw the line here is because to many people these words CLEARLY have nothing to do with race and "oppression". They never have. And yet now somehow YOU made them "dirty".
It is a common occurrence where a group of activists deem something as forbidden, create a commotion around it that intimidates those who comply solely out of fear, ultimately leading to that something being considered "bad" because only those who don't mind disregarding social norms continue to use it. This is not a natural process but a hostile takeover.
But I agree - you stumbling around in clown shoes, failing to understand the issue you're hopping mad about is a great summary.
This used to be called a "slave mentality". It's a pretty useful expression these days.
Words do have power, but this sort of thing misunderstands the type of power they have. Words have power when used for persuasion. Banning the words does nothing to change the persuasive power of people who would use language to convince other people to do evil things. It only takes away the power of ordinary people to transmit the truths they see and hear. Stripping language is, in itself, evil; and juxtaposing words like "inferior blacklist" - a phrase that never existed - as if it were a brilliant example proving the racism of the second word in the phrase, shows only a misunderstanding of both the nature of racism and the nature of language.
Words used for persuasion on a large enough scale become imbued with a default associated meaning.
> Banning the words does nothing to change the persuasive power of people who would use language to convince other people to do evil things.
Do you really believe there is no power in words being repeated? Do you not believe that the real racists are bothered by not being able to espouse their usual rhetoric freely?
Much more annoyed than the free- speech advocates in this thread whose group definitely has no overlap with the real racists.
I don't think they're particularly bothered; they espouse their rhetoric either way. And if you take away some words, they quickly find others. I haven't seen the changing of the language in the past 40 years to be particularly effective at stemming their racism or their ability to persuade. If anything, the US has become more racist in my lifetime, despite the many many iterations of politically correct revisionist speech. Again, it's a form of hubris and foolishness to believe that you can change thoughts by changing words.
> Words used for persuasion on a large enough scale become imbued with a default associated meaning.
This is the definition of a racist way of thinking. If you watched Hitler's speeches and heard him say that Jews are dirty enough times, would you believe it? Would you associate "Jew" with "dirt"? Because many people heard those words thousands of times and didn't believe it. If you're afraid you would believe it, then you are the problem, not the word "Jew" or the word "dirt".
No, they are. They complain about censorship all the time.
They made an entire strategy because of their annoyance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
> they espouse their rhetoric either way.
Yes, but then they get fired and complain
> The real problem isn't I called my coworker the N-word, it's that '"Forbidden-Word” Lists Are a Symptom of Administrative Bloat.
Without the list to point to, they may not be fired. Less repercussions to bad actions, mean they feel more free to spew their racist rhetoric.
> I haven't seen the changing of the language in the past 40 years to be particularly effective at stemming their racism or their ability to persuade.
See the usage of "boy" when referring to Black men diminishing over the years because it became less acceptable.
> If you watched Hitler's speeches and heard him say that Jews are dirty enough times
If you are a 12 year old in school learning about the holocaust, the anti-wokeness educators are neutrally presenting hitler, and you don't personally know any Jews... you don't have effective tools in your environment to hedge against making that association.
There's nothing inferior about a blacklist. Often, it's way more useful than a whitelist.
The overproduction of elites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
A fairly clear threat to any society is masses of un(der)employed young males. People with capability+ambition but no outlet.
So what about all those surplus advanced degrees ? What if they start an evil organisation along the lines of SPECTRE ?
Conservatives have been attacking institutions of higher education for decades. There is nothing new here. Why is it on the front page of HN?
But to anyone else: just check out some other articles on the linked site to understand who is writing this. Ask yourself why them, and why you don't see others have the same opinion.
Ad-hominem!
This site can be perfectly neutral and balanced while containing titles like:
- Wokeness Is Creeping into Continuing Legal Education
- Buckle Up, All Ye Unvaccinated!
That words don’t have meanings to be used to engage ideas, but are simply signifiers of which political tribe you belong to.
Your claims about me and my language are also not correct. I am not engaging in tribalism. I am pointing it out.
That’s the very essence of tribalism.
They're accusing everyone left of them as teaching "a doctrine", and they're accusing administration of unilaterally making mandates, but then clarifying that affinity groups were consulted.
This is the type of article where they pretend to care about free speech. They tend to keep those separate from when they try to influence legislation on what can and can't be taught.
It’s indeed quite tiresome.
There are slurs for immigrants too
The last Republican president had a word he liked to use to describe the countries these immigrants come from
I mean treat them on equal terms. You just demonsrated that they’re viewed as second-class .
> The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Which in this example if even more true, as many of the HR/administration staff are openly revolutionaries and activists.
When you say 'a goal is achieved', are you trivializing the accomplishment by using a word from sports? When I think someone who leads is doing a good job, am I trivializing lead poisoning?
Just asking for proof would have sufficed to prompt a response on the subject matter, it's the examples that make me question your good faith. Alas, I'll take your last sentence at face value.
I must admit I'm not strong on that trivialization position. The "thinking about" part is more what I'm aiming at when I say it actually had an effect (maybe even the intended one).
As for trivialization: not a linguist, so I can't cite sources here. The mechanism I think is called semantic satiation. It's employed for nefarious reasons too, in the form of "buzzword fatigue" or "buzzword burnout" and I'd argue if this wouldn't be effective, it wouldn't be part of political parties' playbooks. Other examples: Apart from holocaust trivialization (which is actually a felony in my country), another attempt to avoid a similar effect that I find interesting is the protection of the symbols of the Red Cross.
I could be convinced to restrict freedom to prevent harm, but doing so just to have a positive impact goes against me on principle. I get the sense that this is a common principle because all of these lists specifically discuss harms, but it may just be an American thing. So I'm going to talk about trivialization, but it's fine with me if you'd rather argue against this paragraph (or ignore me entirely).
The closest I can find to semantic satiation having significant effects beyond the short term is in helping stutterers, where the meaning of the words would be irrelevant. I may not be using the right search terms though.
An important distinction re: political parties is that they are using the relevant meanings. A master git branch, as far as I'm aware, does not refer to someone controlling someone else but is used in the sense of a master recording. In any event, US Republicans talk about CRT and US Democrats talk about fascism, both ad infinitum. Neither side is trying to normalize or trivialize their attack words, so that's a point against 'if it didn't work, it wouldn't be in their playbook'.
The rest of the world, especially us who speak english as a second, third or fourth language, has no such cultural weight behind the word. It's just a word among others we had to learn, we didn't learn the culture behind it.
It seems to consistently result in visible productions of over reactions that are disconnected from reality.
For example deaf and blind people that I know of prefer to be called deaf or blind.
Brown bagging in my life time has always referred to making one’s own lunch and taking it to work or school in a paper brown bag.
Black box refers to an electrical literal black box which one is unable to see its implementation details without opening it.
The thinking of individuals who produce these works seems to seep into everything they perceive, and so ironically they shouldn’t be producing these lists.
Red, in my experience in most people’s minds, does not refer to Indians predominantly.
BIPOC seems to elevate “capital B” black people and “indigenous” people over others. This seems to be the current initialism in-vogue but I find it inappropriate.
I would err on creating too short of a list over an ever expanding one.
But I digress. That’s not the point of the article. Ideally we don’t have these at all. Not because of administrative bloat being something to avoid but because hopefully you learn how to speak to people with nuance as a result of living life and talking to people with different backgrounds and working continually on your own simple ethical decisions.
As a final comment, much of the social discussions we have in the states are really limited to US centric social perspectives.
People don’t talk like this in many other countries. There’s some irony in being so concerned about how one communicates with other communities that one doesn’t see how myopic this is on an international scale. It’s so American.
That "concern" in modern United States is literally the end of your professional life! So these self-appointed thought and speech police have, and will employ without a second-thought just for twitter points, through social media, a way to amplify their power to the extent that they can do something previously impossible and end your career over a (possibly imagined) thought "crime" or speech "crime". So from that perspective, all the walking on eggshells and concern about this is absolutely real not just a socially imagined construct or idea.
So when pictures surface of someone that the in crowd doesn't like is an old Halloween costume, they all play it up as if the person's a monster. Realistically, few if anyone actually care deep down, and so when the same thing happens to someone currently in favor, it's easy to let it slide.
The problem isn't that justin Trudeau (who I despise incidentally) got a pass for dressing up in a costume (which obviously wasn't remotely offensive in the context it was in), it's that other people's careers have been destroyed for the same thing.
Just like e.g. Bill Clinton "not inhaling" - nobody gives a shit if he smoked pot. But simultaneously thousands of people, mostly who are "undesirables" in the eyes of law enforcement for one reason or another get incarcerated for it.
Nah man that's just straight up blackface minstrel, extremely racist and bad. Sorry, you're confusing it with the other time he wore blackface.
Some folks were just too valuable to marginalize. Some aren't. But that's pretty true of any space humans operate in, whether the bad stuff is Halloween costume choices or bad hygiene.
If there are a hundred Justin Trudeaus to choose from, the one that was racist gets left by the wayside (I think this is what scares people about this sort of thing... They realize they aren't special enough to step out of line).
You don't see as much of this in other industries where most companies are busy making actual money (or they will get out-competed by companies who care about their bottom-line more than virtue-signalling).
Those who can't teach, teach Gym.
Those who can't teach Gym, make lists of forbidden words.
Actually as I'm writing this I still draw a blank what it's actually meant to be. But Americans love their acronyms.
I also personally struggle to see the harm caused by such lists.
I also struggle to see the harm of such lists personally.
It accuses People of things that have never crossed their minds.
When I do a BlackBox testing never have I or those that I know Associated the "Black" of the Box with the skin of people (for good or bad). When we talk about Blacklist/WhiteList there is no Connection with skin colour. Black and white have those connotations not because they are associated with Skin color but because Black/white is more often culturally associated with dark/light(unknown/known).
You are saying to me that My human Instinct to not like the Darkness are because I have associated them with Dark Skin People? When I cried as a baby because I was afraid of the Dark, I was afraid of the Dark Skin People although I Didn't know yet what color was or what people are?
You are saying to me that all my Cultural background has no value because someone somewhere might read it wrong? That I am incapable of having a judgment or instinct without it being just that without further sinister meanings?
Is that what these movements are saying? these movements are doing more to imprint this racial divide on the minds of this generation that anything they are are trying to protect from.
Saying "Poor" is offensive and non inclusive? Saying "my self-reported income was in the lowest income bracket" is way more offensive. What does it really say? What does self-reported have to do with the my financial status? Is It my fault that I am Poor? If I self-Report more Am I not poor anymore?
And countless other examples....