Does wanting to keep master/slave and white/blacklist while also keeping information and resources for people historically (and to some extent currently) disadvantaged by systematic oppression mean that basically everyone will be mad at me? What do you call this position?
Edit: The Google admin panel won't even populate the "allowlist" when you search whitelist which is frustrating. I'd at least like it to show up, even if it's believed to be important enough to change.
I'm from a group of people that was historically oppressed in slavery, can I keep using master/slave or do you decide that it's offensive for me? Of all the things that are a problem in the world, this is by far one of the weirdest and silliest hills to die on.
If you're a person you're likely from a group of people that was historically oppressed in slavery. The list of peoples who were not oppressed, historically, is very short. Humans have treated each other horribly for many, many generations.
Germans are a bit touchy on this. There are a bunch of two-letter or two-digit combinations you can’t have on your license plate, for example. Somemore far-fetched than others. At some place I recently heard about they use two-letter initials (extremely collision prone, but whatever), except for people like Nadja Schmidt.
It’s definitely silly, but otoh I guess all culture is silly…
Changing “master” to “main” is exactly the kind of empty symbolic gesture corporate America loves.
If you want to talk about real power dynamics, walk down the street in San Francisco. Visible poverty everywhere, in one of the richest cities on Earth. If you want healthcare, food, shelter, or political representation, you need to pay.
That’s the relevant power dynamic, and because it is so intractable these activists have conceded it and instead resort to virtue signaling (“we can’t change the system but at least we want to!”). Who the hell cares. George Floyd’s problem wasn’t that not enough software engineers were aware of American chattel slavery, his problem was that being poor is effectively illegal.
It's pretty obviously sarcastic, but it's interesting because ChatGPT thinks it's sincere. It appears that sarcasm detection is still outside the capabilities of large language models, which is surprising because people have been manually annotating sarcastic remarks on internet forums for the past 30 years. How could it get simpler than that to create a training set?
My interpretation of the GP (my personal views on the debate have no bearing) is that the whole master/slave debate meant a whole lot to a few thousand people in one specific country, and absolutely nothing to the rest of the world.
They then go on to mention a term that they find offensive, that seems like it shouldn't be offensive, and imply that under the same rules that master/slave was abandoned, we should abandon the term "equity" as well.
What do you think communism was ideologically about if not a system of "imposed equity"? In the name of what were people persecuted and killed if not "equality"?
For him, the celebration of these is offensive and excluding.
I'm a descendent of a grandmother who, as a child fled the brand new Soviet regime when my great grandpa was being shuffled off to the Gulag on the train in the cold North. I'm sorry that your family died by those same people who shuffled off my great grandpa. Hello.
Is there a problem / disadvantage / critical misleading with using my context as a lens to understand what's the right way to appropriately address unfair power dynamics?
What I struggle with is this: the rules that govern which words are "problematic" are often arbitrary and based on the US political landscape. These decisions have little to do with how many people were affected globally, yet these rules are broadly applied to (at least) all English-speaking countries.
The linked article wants me to be outraged (or at least upset) that references to equity are being removed from government software. Why should I be? As I mentioned in another comment, some of these tactics are broadly similar to what left-leaning movements did or wanted to do. The positions being taken are often presented as objective and empathic (for example based on historic power imbalances), but power imbalances are dynamic and regional.
>The power dynamics you're talking about are always in the context of North America, specifically the USA
Well that’s where the people are that are having these discussions for the most part. People from other parts of the world would be wise to have their own discussions and ignore the American cultural context of our discussions.
People from the left who think they are smart have names for the people who represent this new cultural shift. It's natural to blame things you don't like on the other "stupid" group.
I think there is plenty of room to critique what this person is calling “woke” terminology but the “warblgarbl woke cult” from the right is just absurd. Hacker News is apparently a place we are supposed to be able to have more technical and higher minded discussions than say Reddit but every time a cultural issue comes up we revert to cave man.
Actually thats not fair to cave men, we revert to reactionary nonsense.
well look if people wanted to be able to use the words master and slave all over the place they should have thought about it earlier and not had masters and slaves to start with. i dont know what to tell you.
