10 ms·

A lot of language-fixing slacktivism easily becomes a trend because it's highly visible and requires no genuine effort. It's complete bullshit, though. This pa

by ben509 6y ago

A lot of language-fixing slacktivism easily becomes a trend because it's highly visible and requires no genuine effort. It's complete bullshit, though. This particular bullshit is awful since it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association. There's no point arguing, though, just drag your heels until they get bored and go off on some other crusade.

god_hates_fags 6y ago
I had 3 of these people show up in repos I maintain which is surprising since none of those is much popual;r, it would be strange for 1 to appear and is very much not in ordinary for 3. I just vlosed the issues and didn't reply like i would do for any other troll. Because it is basically just low effort troll. There only 1 return more time with more repeat issue but i am simple her block.
nemo44x 6y ago
It’s tokenism and if anything it is detrimental to actual, concrete, transformative improvement. Malcolm X spoke at length about this going back to the early 1960’s. And it hasn’t changed. Condescending tokenizing is a way to avoid anything that would take effort or energy while comforting the narcissist in a warm blanket of moral righteousness. If you look around you’ll see endless tokenism but not much in terms of effective improvements. I don’t doubt these hall monitors think they’re doing the “right thing” or being a “good person”. But really they’re only exploiting people for their own benefit.
tp3 6y ago
I think you're right, there are far too many people trying to do good and being led astray by the self-righteousness of a few. Not in the sense of being brainwashed or being influenced by some external force - like the religious right - but simply by the fact that they can't see through the nonsense the rest of us are talking about.
- aksss 6y ago
  > Not in the sense of being brainwashed or being influenced by some external force - like the religious right Oh I don’t know about that. The “religious left” of today looks, acts, and smells a lot like the religious right of the ‘80’s to me. It’s the same instinct that’s being leveraged in people, just righteousness wrapped in a polka-dot cloth rather than a plaid one. Institutions clearly promote “right-thinking” whether it’s banning the use of words, doing mandatory internal critical race theory sessions, coordinated deplatforming, and let’s not even get started on the soft sciences in schooling and the state of what’s called “news”. The other day I skimmed a headline about a librarian burning their copies of books by Trump and Rush Limbaugh. In some ways the sheer weight of secular institutional support for today’s self-righteousness makes the American church of the eighties look like amateur hour.
sago 6y ago
I'm disagreeing with this thread. So I guess prepping for the down votes. > it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association I think addressing one issue does not 'trivialise' everything else. It can be horribly overstated but changing small fry can help provide momentum to change something more significant. > It's complete bullshit, It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Given changing a metaphor 'black' into a meaning 'block' doesn't seem to me a generally bad idea. I understand the logic of 'that's just what languages is.' But language changes when people use it differently. It seems to me very reasonable to say let's use this language a little bit less unfortunately. I'm not suggesting this is 100% the same but re: language change. I remember that time not too many years ago when people would argue that referring to a 'man' or 'him' at work was non-gendered. And those women complaining that we only talked about business men were just being unreasonable. I'm sure there are still places like that but I'm very glad that my co's & clients changed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Fogest 6y ago
  > It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Honestly, lately I feel like the opposite is the case. Everywhere I go anywhere online all I see is white people being shit on. I see incredibly racist things being said about white people everywhere online and there are zero consequences for it. In fact they often get praised for it. So no, I think what you're saying is far from being true. The people who are looking at a word like "blacklist" and thinking it in a negative racial way are the ones that are the problem. They are the ones grasping at straws trying to find things to be offended by. It's a choice people make and it's only offensive because someone chooses to be offended by the word. You have to remember when being offended by words like this it means ignoring the context. It's just silly is what it is. Language policing is absolutely insane.
vvanders 6y ago
I'm always surprised when someone goes through more effort to oppose something than to accept the PR and build a little trust. We did this in a codebase of ours recently, it really wasn't a big deal to make the change and I don't understand why everyone throws up a big stink about it. If I'm going to spend my energy on something it seems like there's bigger things to tackle than pushing back against branch renames.
- qlk1123 6y ago
  A blacklist-to-blocklist PR may be OK for you, but a master-to-main PR is not OK at all for many others. Slavery is definite evil, but these PRs for branch renaming just went too far. As someone not a U.S. citizen, the impact of PC is ridiculously huge. I know slavery and how bad it is. It appeared in my culture, and it is still there in some form too. However, the ENGLISH word "master" means not much to me. It is just a multi-purpose symbol, like many other words. As the meaning being a main branch, why bothering the renaming? You claim that you are just spending your energy on something else, but in reality you are giving up the right to use your own language and to maintain the definition the meaning of a well-understood and frequently-used word.
- goostavos 6y ago
  You presuppose everyone views this group of people's "trust" as something worth having. It's just as easy to close the PR and move on.
- johnisgood 6y ago
  > I'm always surprised when someone goes through more effort to oppose something than to accept the PR and build a little trust. That is why I just ignore or reject such PRs. I do not believe that enabling it is a good idea. It is not my job to improve their context-awareness either.
- exporectomy 6y ago
  You may feel it doesn't matter now if you're already familiar with the culture but what happens in the future if they come after the word "git" which is a slur for low intelligence people or people with what is probably a mental illness? Mental-health-ism and the intelligence-ism may well appear since they're logically consistent with racism and sexism. Yes, you'll be able to just change that too but it'll be more total manhours for everyone to do that just as blacklist is probably more work than nigger.
Fogest 6y ago
In the last couple years especially I feel like I am walking on eggshells when talking to people. Especially when talking to people I don't know as well. It feels so easy to offend someone these days and I'm getting sick of it. I've been having to unfollow a ton of podcasts recently because no matter how far from being related to politics some podcasts are, they just love to make sure a chunk of the episode is devoted to calling white people privileged and talking about different groups burdens. I was listening to a podcast episode talking about Skyways in a city and somehow half the podcast ended up being about how the skyways affected certain racial groups. It's a podcast that is supposed to be focused on the cool architectural features and infrastructure of cities. Somehow it ends up being a political podcast about racial inequality. Sometimes I just want to be able to relax, but I feel like wherever I go whether it be TV, Movies, Podcasts, or even the news, I feel like I am being attacked wherever I go and that I have to be afraid of offending someone with what I say. Even just making this comment I'm afraid it's going to be downvoted because of mentioning races in a somewhat negative sounding way.
- _carbyau_ 6y ago
  I don't mind thinking about nebulous things and fully considering their consequences, including societal ones. But that feeling of walking on eggshells is more related to a surveillance state coming from social media. More explanatory than I could be: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-07/social-cooling-are-you-self-conscious-about-what-you-click-on/8878948 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-07/social-cooling-are-yo...
  - Fogest 6y ago
    Because of how policed the online world feels with what you say it often feels like it applies in public. However I have yet to work/interact with anyone who seems as far gone as the permanently offended Twitter users seem to be. I swear not a day goes by anymore where I don't here about Twitter going after another person trying to cancel them. We see people losing their jobs simply for sharing a more conservative view on Twitter. I've seen cases of actors losing jobs for sharing an edgy conservative meme, but than someone sharing almost the identical meme but liberal sided being completely fine. Nowadays it seems like even things like jobs can simply be determined by how outraged a group of random people feel. Actors lose jobs because people who probably don't even watch the show get upset by a single tweet they made. The world is starting to not make sense to me and just seems so illogical lately. No matter how factual and objective something is that you say, if it doesn't align with the current politically correct fad people will try to cancel you. People who make perfectly valid and factual claims get shut down by people who just simply call them a "racist" and say "you just don't get it". Instead of trying to help them understand and trying to use facts to logically debate someone they react with emotion and outrage. And then they get dogpilled into submission. I see why it's hard to find people opposing the current PC culture. As soon as anyone does they get called some "ism" and get cancelled.
mancerayder 6y ago
Foucault and the Postmodern philosophers of the 70s started this, with a new epistemology that ties language use to our perceptions of reality, and also the idea of how marginalized people remain marginalized. You see, the power matrix operates daily and we are all involved. We perpetuate real world problems with problematic language, we are told. Change the language, change the outcome, came the activists of the 90s and 2000's. This stuff somehow spilled out of literary theory in academia and started becoming a political force for understanding power dynamics. You can get a taste below, where the commenter is comparing black and white concepts, and how we view one as good and another as bad. Do these folks (like the commenter below) have a point? Yes, sure. But submit your point to the marketplace of ideas instead of trying to force people's hands through censorship. Not everyone has to buy social constructivism. We're allowed to believe that racism has material and economic causes, and changing it has minimally to do with language. So no, don't make me change my git default branch or the way I talk.
- skissane 6y ago
  > Foucault and the Postmodern philosophers of the 70s started this Nobody can know for sure, but I suspect if Foucault were still alive, he'd likely be rather critical of a lot of contemporary social justice activism.
  - mancerayder 6y ago
    I don't claim to be a Foucault scholar but I've heard that claim. The postmodernists were, and to some extent I can sympathize, hostile to grand narratives. Especially given the end of religion and in the middle of the Cold War, who can blame them. Even the attack on Western Enlightenment ideals is at least interesting to discuss But as you say the whole thing is a giant metanarrative times ten, and these language police types are running over everyone who gets in their way. It's making so many people nervous, I think it has a shelf life. What scares me more is the open embrace of postmodern social theory by corporate America. That will lead to a backlash that makes me even more nervous.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deanCommie 6y ago
> There's no point arguing, though, just drag your heels until they get bored and go off on some other crusade. Language and culture generally moves in one direction. Hoping to put the genie back in the bottle on "blacklist" and "master" is like wishing you could go back to the 90's when guys in high school would casually toss out "fag" in relation to each other. You can disagree, and dig your heels in, and pitch a hissy fit, but the world and society is moving on and leaving you behind.
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
"Presentism" is the technical term for this
koheripbal 6y ago
It's a great way to highlight which accounts to blacklist from contributing. Maybe we should develop a central spamlist.

by ben509 6y ago

god_hates_fags 6y ago

I had 3 of these people show up in repos I maintain which is surprising since none of those is much popual;r, it would be strange for 1 to appear and is very much not in ordinary for 3. I just vlosed the issues and didn't reply like i would do for any other troll. Because it is basically just low effort troll. There only 1 return more time with more repeat issue but i am simple her block.

nemo44x 6y ago

It’s tokenism and if anything it is detrimental to actual, concrete, transformative improvement. Malcolm X spoke at length about this going back to the early 1960’s. And it hasn’t changed. Condescending tokenizing is a way to avoid anything that would take effort or energy while comforting the narcissist in a warm blanket of moral righteousness. If you look around you’ll see endless tokenism but not much in terms of effective improvements. I don’t doubt these hall monitors think they’re doing the “right thing” or being a “good person”. But really they’re only exploiting people for their own benefit.

tp3 6y ago

I think you're right, there are far too many people trying to do good and being led astray by the self-righteousness of a few. Not in the sense of being brainwashed or being influenced by some external force - like the religious right - but simply by the fact that they can't see through the nonsense the rest of us are talking about.

aksss 6y ago
> Not in the sense of being brainwashed or being influenced by some external force - like the religious right Oh I don’t know about that. The “religious left” of today looks, acts, and smells a lot like the religious right of the ‘80’s to me. It’s the same instinct that’s being leveraged in people, just righteousness wrapped in a polka-dot cloth rather than a plaid one. Institutions clearly promote “right-thinking” whether it’s banning the use of words, doing mandatory internal critical race theory sessions, coordinated deplatforming, and let’s not even get started on the soft sciences in schooling and the state of what’s called “news”. The other day I skimmed a headline about a librarian burning their copies of books by Trump and Rush Limbaugh. In some ways the sheer weight of secular institutional support for today’s self-righteousness makes the American church of the eighties look like amateur hour.

sago 6y ago

I'm disagreeing with this thread. So I guess prepping for the down votes. > it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association I think addressing one issue does not 'trivialise' everything else. It can be horribly overstated but changing small fry can help provide momentum to change something more significant. > It's complete bullshit, It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Given changing a metaphor 'black' into a meaning 'block' doesn't seem to me a generally bad idea. I understand the logic of 'that's just what languages is.' But language changes when people use it differently. It seems to me very reasonable to say let's use this language a little bit less unfortunately. I'm not suggesting this is 100% the same but re: language change. I remember that time not too many years ago when people would argue that referring to a 'man' or 'him' at work was non-gendered. And those women complaining that we only talked about business men were just being unreasonable. I'm sure there are still places like that but I'm very glad that my co's & clients changed.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Fogest 6y ago
> It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Honestly, lately I feel like the opposite is the case. Everywhere I go anywhere online all I see is white people being shit on. I see incredibly racist things being said about white people everywhere online and there are zero consequences for it. In fact they often get praised for it. So no, I think what you're saying is far from being true. The people who are looking at a word like "blacklist" and thinking it in a negative racial way are the ones that are the problem. They are the ones grasping at straws trying to find things to be offended by. It's a choice people make and it's only offensive because someone chooses to be offended by the word. You have to remember when being offended by words like this it means ignoring the context. It's just silly is what it is. Language policing is absolutely insane.

vvanders 6y ago

I'm always surprised when someone goes through more effort to oppose something than to accept the PR and build a little trust. We did this in a codebase of ours recently, it really wasn't a big deal to make the change and I don't understand why everyone throws up a big stink about it. If I'm going to spend my energy on something it seems like there's bigger things to tackle than pushing back against branch renames.

qlk1123 6y ago
A blacklist-to-blocklist PR may be OK for you, but a master-to-main PR is not OK at all for many others. Slavery is definite evil, but these PRs for branch renaming just went too far. As someone not a U.S. citizen, the impact of PC is ridiculously huge. I know slavery and how bad it is. It appeared in my culture, and it is still there in some form too. However, the ENGLISH word "master" means not much to me. It is just a multi-purpose symbol, like many other words. As the meaning being a main branch, why bothering the renaming? You claim that you are just spending your energy on something else, but in reality you are giving up the right to use your own language and to maintain the definition the meaning of a well-understood and frequently-used word.
goostavos 6y ago
You presuppose everyone views this group of people's "trust" as something worth having. It's just as easy to close the PR and move on.
johnisgood 6y ago
> I'm always surprised when someone goes through more effort to oppose something than to accept the PR and build a little trust. That is why I just ignore or reject such PRs. I do not believe that enabling it is a good idea. It is not my job to improve their context-awareness either.
exporectomy 6y ago
You may feel it doesn't matter now if you're already familiar with the culture but what happens in the future if they come after the word "git" which is a slur for low intelligence people or people with what is probably a mental illness? Mental-health-ism and the intelligence-ism may well appear since they're logically consistent with racism and sexism. Yes, you'll be able to just change that too but it'll be more total manhours for everyone to do that just as blacklist is probably more work than nigger.

Fogest 6y ago

In the last couple years especially I feel like I am walking on eggshells when talking to people. Especially when talking to people I don't know as well. It feels so easy to offend someone these days and I'm getting sick of it. I've been having to unfollow a ton of podcasts recently because no matter how far from being related to politics some podcasts are, they just love to make sure a chunk of the episode is devoted to calling white people privileged and talking about different groups burdens. I was listening to a podcast episode talking about Skyways in a city and somehow half the podcast ended up being about how the skyways affected certain racial groups. It's a podcast that is supposed to be focused on the cool architectural features and infrastructure of cities. Somehow it ends up being a political podcast about racial inequality. Sometimes I just want to be able to relax, but I feel like wherever I go whether it be TV, Movies, Podcasts, or even the news, I feel like I am being attacked wherever I go and that I have to be afraid of offending someone with what I say. Even just making this comment I'm afraid it's going to be downvoted because of mentioning races in a somewhat negative sounding way.

_carbyau_ 6y ago
I don't mind thinking about nebulous things and fully considering their consequences, including societal ones. But that feeling of walking on eggshells is more related to a surveillance state coming from social media. More explanatory than I could be: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-07/social-cooling-are-you-self-conscious-about-what-you-click-on/8878948 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-07/social-cooling-are-yo...
- Fogest 6y ago
  Because of how policed the online world feels with what you say it often feels like it applies in public. However I have yet to work/interact with anyone who seems as far gone as the permanently offended Twitter users seem to be. I swear not a day goes by anymore where I don't here about Twitter going after another person trying to cancel them. We see people losing their jobs simply for sharing a more conservative view on Twitter. I've seen cases of actors losing jobs for sharing an edgy conservative meme, but than someone sharing almost the identical meme but liberal sided being completely fine. Nowadays it seems like even things like jobs can simply be determined by how outraged a group of random people feel. Actors lose jobs because people who probably don't even watch the show get upset by a single tweet they made. The world is starting to not make sense to me and just seems so illogical lately. No matter how factual and objective something is that you say, if it doesn't align with the current politically correct fad people will try to cancel you. People who make perfectly valid and factual claims get shut down by people who just simply call them a "racist" and say "you just don't get it". Instead of trying to help them understand and trying to use facts to logically debate someone they react with emotion and outrage. And then they get dogpilled into submission. I see why it's hard to find people opposing the current PC culture. As soon as anyone does they get called some "ism" and get cancelled.

mancerayder 6y ago

Foucault and the Postmodern philosophers of the 70s started this, with a new epistemology that ties language use to our perceptions of reality, and also the idea of how marginalized people remain marginalized. You see, the power matrix operates daily and we are all involved. We perpetuate real world problems with problematic language, we are told. Change the language, change the outcome, came the activists of the 90s and 2000's. This stuff somehow spilled out of literary theory in academia and started becoming a political force for understanding power dynamics. You can get a taste below, where the commenter is comparing black and white concepts, and how we view one as good and another as bad. Do these folks (like the commenter below) have a point? Yes, sure. But submit your point to the marketplace of ideas instead of trying to force people's hands through censorship. Not everyone has to buy social constructivism. We're allowed to believe that racism has material and economic causes, and changing it has minimally to do with language. So no, don't make me change my git default branch or the way I talk.

skissane 6y ago
> Foucault and the Postmodern philosophers of the 70s started this Nobody can know for sure, but I suspect if Foucault were still alive, he'd likely be rather critical of a lot of contemporary social justice activism.
- mancerayder 6y ago
  I don't claim to be a Foucault scholar but I've heard that claim. The postmodernists were, and to some extent I can sympathize, hostile to grand narratives. Especially given the end of religion and in the middle of the Cold War, who can blame them. Even the attack on Western Enlightenment ideals is at least interesting to discuss But as you say the whole thing is a giant metanarrative times ten, and these language police types are running over everyone who gets in their way. It's making so many people nervous, I think it has a shelf life. What scares me more is the open embrace of postmodern social theory by corporate America. That will lead to a backlash that makes me even more nervous.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deanCommie 6y ago

> There's no point arguing, though, just drag your heels until they get bored and go off on some other crusade. Language and culture generally moves in one direction. Hoping to put the genie back in the bottle on "blacklist" and "master" is like wishing you could go back to the 90's when guys in high school would casually toss out "fag" in relation to each other. You can disagree, and dig your heels in, and pitch a hissy fit, but the world and society is moving on and leaving you behind.

Mauricebranagh 6y ago

"Presentism" is the technical term for this

koheripbal 6y ago

It's a great way to highlight which accounts to blacklist from contributing. Maybe we should develop a central spamlist.