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Agreed. These articles are becoming a formulaic bad trope. 1. Grab some classic American media. 2. Look at it through a perverted lens it wasn't meant to addr

Agreed. These articles are becoming a formulaic bad trope. 1. Grab some classic American media. 2. Look at it through a perverted lens it wasn't meant to address. 3. Decry this lack of coverage as some evil ploy to suppress an outgroup. Seven habits is a great book that anyone would be better for having read.

civilized 5y ago
I'd love a poll of black businessmen to see how many of them think Seven Habits is worthless because it lacks explicit criticism of racism. I bet Covey has given them more of a leg up than a thousand woke hacks.
- buu700 5y ago
  I haven't read the article or the book in question, but this reminds me of the hullabaloo about git master branches. Never in my life have I associated git or its default branch name with American slavery. I would be shocked if a single black programmer in the world had considered before last year that it might be offensive. I haven't discussed the issue with any black friends or family, but it's just such an odd leap to make even if the claim about its etymology is potentially correct. Of course, if even a minority of black programmers were or are offended, it's not my place as a non-black person to tell them they're wrong. I'll happily rename all my branches, update all my code that references master, rename all "master" test environments/hostnames, and update the gitconfig on all my machines, if credible surveys come out showing that a statistically significant number of black programmers genuinely consider master branches offensive. Until then, I'm not going to do free labor to back up what so far appears to be an ill-conceived PR stunt on GitHub/Microsoft's part. The only arguments I've seen in favor of renaming master have been from white people appealing to technicalities/etymology, as if solving a puzzle to prove whether it should be offensive according to some logic, rather than any kind of appeal to the feelings of actual humans. "Robotic wokeness" is a nice term to describe this phenomenon. I'm all for Black Lives Matter and correcting genuine injustices, but it's harmful to everyone when private interests artificially manufacture outrage and social justice causes solely for their own benefits.
  - samatman 5y ago
    I took the opportunity to rename all my master branches to `trunk`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_(software) Because y'know, branches? Trunk and branches? It's the older term. I ran into it using Fossil and liked it, now all my git repos have trunks as well. Of course there's nothing wrong with master, that was just histrionic bullying. At best it was people doing something they can do (change variable names) as a substitute for something they can't (meaningfully affect racial injustice). But like I said. I took the opportunity. Way better name than main... or master for that matter.
    - buu700 5y ago
      Makes sense. I'm not familiar with Fossil, but I know trunk was also the standard when I used SVN back in the day. I think the trunk-branch metaphor makes more sense in the centralized VCS model where there is actually something special about the trunk that makes it distinct from branches, whereas in a DVCS like git master is just another branch except that it happens to be the default one checked out. Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me in and of itself. Even before last year, it wasn't that unusual to see git/GitHub repos with default branch names other than master (dev is probably the next most common one I've seen), and presumably not because of anything to do with racial justice. "Master" seems most practical to me for the moment, since it's the most standard/common term and is relatively non-overloaded, whereas "main" may be more ambiguous unless expanded to "the main branch" (depending on context). It almost feels silly to bikeshed about something so minor, but it's not fair for anyone to demand that millions of people change their behavior and/or spend money without meeting some reasonable burden of proof. It's a slippery slope to allowing such unfalsifiable Pascal's-wager-type propositions ("foo may or may not be harmful, so better do bar instead just in case") to be used for more malicious manipulation of markets and geopolitics.
    - superflit 5y ago
      Then you should stop using Fossil. It gives a bad example for climate change. /s
    - ludocode 5y ago

civilized 5y ago

I'd love a poll of black businessmen to see how many of them think Seven Habits is worthless because it lacks explicit criticism of racism. I bet Covey has given them more of a leg up than a thousand woke hacks.

buu700 5y ago
I haven't read the article or the book in question, but this reminds me of the hullabaloo about git master branches. Never in my life have I associated git or its default branch name with American slavery. I would be shocked if a single black programmer in the world had considered before last year that it might be offensive. I haven't discussed the issue with any black friends or family, but it's just such an odd leap to make even if the claim about its etymology is potentially correct. Of course, if even a minority of black programmers were or are offended, it's not my place as a non-black person to tell them they're wrong. I'll happily rename all my branches, update all my code that references master, rename all "master" test environments/hostnames, and update the gitconfig on all my machines, if credible surveys come out showing that a statistically significant number of black programmers genuinely consider master branches offensive. Until then, I'm not going to do free labor to back up what so far appears to be an ill-conceived PR stunt on GitHub/Microsoft's part. The only arguments I've seen in favor of renaming master have been from white people appealing to technicalities/etymology, as if solving a puzzle to prove whether it should be offensive according to some logic, rather than any kind of appeal to the feelings of actual humans. "Robotic wokeness" is a nice term to describe this phenomenon. I'm all for Black Lives Matter and correcting genuine injustices, but it's harmful to everyone when private interests artificially manufacture outrage and social justice causes solely for their own benefits.
- samatman 5y ago
  I took the opportunity to rename all my master branches to `trunk`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_(software) Because y'know, branches? Trunk and branches? It's the older term. I ran into it using Fossil and liked it, now all my git repos have trunks as well. Of course there's nothing wrong with master, that was just histrionic bullying. At best it was people doing something they can do (change variable names) as a substitute for something they can't (meaningfully affect racial injustice). But like I said. I took the opportunity. Way better name than main... or master for that matter.
  - buu700 5y ago
    Makes sense. I'm not familiar with Fossil, but I know trunk was also the standard when I used SVN back in the day. I think the trunk-branch metaphor makes more sense in the centralized VCS model where there is actually something special about the trunk that makes it distinct from branches, whereas in a DVCS like git master is just another branch except that it happens to be the default one checked out. Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me in and of itself. Even before last year, it wasn't that unusual to see git/GitHub repos with default branch names other than master (dev is probably the next most common one I've seen), and presumably not because of anything to do with racial justice. "Master" seems most practical to me for the moment, since it's the most standard/common term and is relatively non-overloaded, whereas "main" may be more ambiguous unless expanded to "the main branch" (depending on context). It almost feels silly to bikeshed about something so minor, but it's not fair for anyone to demand that millions of people change their behavior and/or spend money without meeting some reasonable burden of proof. It's a slippery slope to allowing such unfalsifiable Pascal's-wager-type propositions ("foo may or may not be harmful, so better do bar instead just in case") to be used for more malicious manipulation of markets and geopolitics.
  - superflit 5y ago
    Then you should stop using Fossil. It gives a bad example for climate change. /s
  - ludocode 5y ago