4 ms·

This has got to be one of the most over-anxiated, one side arguing with itself sociological phenomena since the white slaver panic that afflicted upper-class la

This has got to be one of the most over-anxiated, one side arguing with itself sociological phenomena since the white slaver panic that afflicted upper-class ladies in the late 19th century. There is some magazine wash lib, crucifying themselves on this hill on the HN front page every other day. Yet there is practically no one arguing back. Except of course on Twitter. Which apparently some large set of journalists believe reflects some significant portion of public opinion and influence.

gnicholas 4y ago
I can't tell if you're referring to the phenomenon of banning words, or the phenomenon of criticizing banning words. The first sentence makes it seem like you're referring to the word-banning, but the second sentence is about magazines, which makes it seem like you're referring to The Atlantic (which is criticizing the word-banning).
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  The free speech panic. I'm all for free speech but we are like defcon 100 from anything resembling an actual clampdown on speech and it's extremely tiresome to watch people with editorial boards and national readerships act as if they are being brave for saying what pretty much everyone already believes.
  - Svip 4y ago
    > defcon 100 So everything is fine? DEFCON 5 is the _lowest_ threat level, it's DEFCON 1 people should worry about.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON
    - DubiousPusher 4y ago
      Yes everything is fine. Norms around language change. 50 years ago you could lose your job for impugning most major religious, governmental or other "respectable" institutions in writing. You probably weren't going to jail for it but you just didn't talk that way about the Catholic church. At the turn of the century, the same kind of uber-libs who are so jealous of their speech today were getting anyone who even tangentially endorsed labor organization kicked out of college econ departments and black-balled. One econ professor had some good things to say of The Knights of Labor which was the most ubiquitous and one of the most moderate labor organizations in the country, The Nation called into question his economics chair. Godkin himself tried to have the man fired from Johns Hopkins. Many economists who didn't tow the classically liberal line found themselves dealing with unhappy boards of trustees. Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new. The people claiming it is just have very little familiarity with history. And they take for granted that they have just never been on the wrong side of language norms. Have the woke language grammar police gone too far? Probably. Does it warrant these interminable sanctimonious soap boxes from the Atlantic and their like? No.
      - luckylion 4y ago
        > Norms around language change. That was addressed in the article, I think: Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. You reference slow, natural evolution of norms. Those happen everywhere, not just in language, but they happen organically. People change and then they change what they tolerate, how they speak etc. It's not that someone decides "people now have to speak like this, so that they then change to become like me". That's the "creating a new man" approach that lead to endless suffering under the socialists/communists, though I guess now it would be "creating a new person". > Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new. "Everything is fine, because we've seen bad things happen before, so this isn't new, and only new things can be a problem"?
        DubiousPusher 4y ago
        > You reference slow, natural evolution of norms. Those happen everywhere, not just in language, but they happen organically. People change and then they change what they tolerate, how they speak etc. It's not that someone decides "people now have to speak like this, so that they then change to become like me". That's the "creating a new man" approach that lead to endless suffering under the socialists/communists, though I guess now it would be "creating a new person". That hasn't been true since the printing press and particularly the invention of the nation state. > Everything is fine, because we've seen bad things happen before, so this isn't new, and only new things can be a problem"? That's disingenuous. You know that if these authors were writing these articles in the spirit that these kinds of editorial limitations were a long standing problem that needed to be addressed, they wouldn't be on the front page and commented ad-nauseum. The entire selling point of this kind of article is that it is attacking some novel and dangerous schorge which menaces our very rights. They are broadly in the genre of panic-mongering. What we consider "free speech" has existed since about the 70s. If you considered that paradigm to be free speech, in which there was virtually nothing you could say which would get you arrested but there were things you could say which could get your fired, then you must concede that what is happening now is a roughly equivalent level of free speech. If you find these new limits on your speech onerous but not the old ones, then your gripe is with the flavor of the speech which might get you fired not the fact that speech exists which might get you fired. These articles are generally written by people who just happened to live lives and held values which were highly compatible with the rules of the institutions. So they are by and large, blissfully unaware of the previously extant limitation and how they biased the discourse.
ShredKazoo 4y ago
I'm not entirely sure how to parse your comment. Did you notice this section? >Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington. >.... >Public criticism led Stanford to abolish outright its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative—not for being ridiculous, but, the university announced, for being “broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity.” Even if no one is arguing back, it seems like the language police are winning.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  I would ask you to consider where the mass of everyday people get their information. Consider the edifices from which actual powers spring. Now read that list again and see if it seems important.
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    Fair point, but on the other hand, if language policing leads the American Medical Association to make decisions which decrease the quality of medical care, I'm not enthusiastic about that. The relative importance of the opinions of everyday people vs these associations is not obvious. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35006303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35006303 Re: "the edifices from which actual powers spring" -- if you want a high-paying job as a doctor, maybe you'll be best served by adopting their language guidelines. I could see the trend spreading through the general population because playing the language game becomes the best way to achieve "actual powers".
    - DubiousPusher 4y ago
      I think the thing much more likely to shorten people's lives than their doctor not being able to speak frankly because of woke vocabulary, is not having a house. I'm not even talking about the homeless here. The Atlantic should be running an article every day extolling the virtues of home building and questioning the morals of a country which fails to shelter even working people. Rather than pouring over the editorial policy of wonkish publications, they should be lambasting every state legislature that so far has done nothing to ensure there are enough houses. I think that far worse for democracy than woke grammarians ratioing you on Twitter, is the rise of a surveillance state which previously couldn't exist but is now totally enabled because of AI automation. Obama firmly planted mass surveillance into and "acceptable" "legal" framework. We have learned little of what this apparatus can do operationally since the Snowden leaks which were before the deep learning stuff really exploded. The Atlantic should be questioning every day the moral fiber of a supposedly open and democratic society which has a shadow supreme court and an entire secret apparatus. What I'm willing to bet has a far greater impact on people's ability to control their employment future and therefore their own autonomy far more than the possibility of getting fired for accidentally saying "gimp" during the next inclusivity training? The breakdown of organized labor and growing inequality. The Atlantic should be railing every day about the fact that sub-living wages and make workers desperately dependant upon their employer and less able to exercise their democratic rights. But if you write for the Atlantic, you have friends in CIA. Your kids go to daycare with the kids of several corporate VPs. You don't know anyone that cleans rooms 10 hours a day and lives in a Super 8 for lack of permanent affordable housing. Writing about those things is actually controversial. It's actually risky. So instead, you turn inward. This country's elite media appear to me to have totally lost any grip on reality. There is some fantastical disconnect from what actually impacts people. Instead they only see and obsess about what impacts them. They have gazed so far into their own naval that they are instead playing this Alternate Reality Game, chasing phantoms and navigating mind mazes.

gnicholas 4y ago

I can't tell if you're referring to the phenomenon of banning words, or the phenomenon of criticizing banning words. The first sentence makes it seem like you're referring to the word-banning, but the second sentence is about magazines, which makes it seem like you're referring to The Atlantic (which is criticizing the word-banning).

DubiousPusher 4y ago
The free speech panic. I'm all for free speech but we are like defcon 100 from anything resembling an actual clampdown on speech and it's extremely tiresome to watch people with editorial boards and national readerships act as if they are being brave for saying what pretty much everyone already believes.
- Svip 4y ago
  > defcon 100 So everything is fine? DEFCON 5 is the _lowest_ threat level, it's DEFCON 1 people should worry about.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
    Yes everything is fine. Norms around language change. 50 years ago you could lose your job for impugning most major religious, governmental or other "respectable" institutions in writing. You probably weren't going to jail for it but you just didn't talk that way about the Catholic church. At the turn of the century, the same kind of uber-libs who are so jealous of their speech today were getting anyone who even tangentially endorsed labor organization kicked out of college econ departments and black-balled. One econ professor had some good things to say of The Knights of Labor which was the most ubiquitous and one of the most moderate labor organizations in the country, The Nation called into question his economics chair. Godkin himself tried to have the man fired from Johns Hopkins. Many economists who didn't tow the classically liberal line found themselves dealing with unhappy boards of trustees. Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new. The people claiming it is just have very little familiarity with history. And they take for granted that they have just never been on the wrong side of language norms. Have the woke language grammar police gone too far? Probably. Does it warrant these interminable sanctimonious soap boxes from the Atlantic and their like? No.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      > Norms around language change. That was addressed in the article, I think: Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. You reference slow, natural evolution of norms. Those happen everywhere, not just in language, but they happen organically. People change and then they change what they tolerate, how they speak etc. It's not that someone decides "people now have to speak like this, so that they then change to become like me". That's the "creating a new man" approach that lead to endless suffering under the socialists/communists, though I guess now it would be "creating a new person". > Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new. "Everything is fine, because we've seen bad things happen before, so this isn't new, and only new things can be a problem"?
      - DubiousPusher 4y ago
        > You reference slow, natural evolution of norms. Those happen everywhere, not just in language, but they happen organically. People change and then they change what they tolerate, how they speak etc. It's not that someone decides "people now have to speak like this, so that they then change to become like me". That's the "creating a new man" approach that lead to endless suffering under the socialists/communists, though I guess now it would be "creating a new person". That hasn't been true since the printing press and particularly the invention of the nation state. > Everything is fine, because we've seen bad things happen before, so this isn't new, and only new things can be a problem"? That's disingenuous. You know that if these authors were writing these articles in the spirit that these kinds of editorial limitations were a long standing problem that needed to be addressed, they wouldn't be on the front page and commented ad-nauseum. The entire selling point of this kind of article is that it is attacking some novel and dangerous schorge which menaces our very rights. They are broadly in the genre of panic-mongering. What we consider "free speech" has existed since about the 70s. If you considered that paradigm to be free speech, in which there was virtually nothing you could say which would get you arrested but there were things you could say which could get your fired, then you must concede that what is happening now is a roughly equivalent level of free speech. If you find these new limits on your speech onerous but not the old ones, then your gripe is with the flavor of the speech which might get you fired not the fact that speech exists which might get you fired. These articles are generally written by people who just happened to live lives and held values which were highly compatible with the rules of the institutions. So they are by and large, blissfully unaware of the previously extant limitation and how they biased the discourse.

ShredKazoo 4y ago

I'm not entirely sure how to parse your comment. Did you notice this section? >Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington. >.... >Public criticism led Stanford to abolish outright its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative—not for being ridiculous, but, the university announced, for being “broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity.” Even if no one is arguing back, it seems like the language police are winning.

DubiousPusher 4y ago
I would ask you to consider where the mass of everyday people get their information. Consider the edifices from which actual powers spring. Now read that list again and see if it seems important.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Fair point, but on the other hand, if language policing leads the American Medical Association to make decisions which decrease the quality of medical care, I'm not enthusiastic about that. The relative importance of the opinions of everyday people vs these associations is not obvious. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35006303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35006303 Re: "the edifices from which actual powers spring" -- if you want a high-paying job as a doctor, maybe you'll be best served by adopting their language guidelines. I could see the trend spreading through the general population because playing the language game becomes the best way to achieve "actual powers".
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
    I think the thing much more likely to shorten people's lives than their doctor not being able to speak frankly because of woke vocabulary, is not having a house. I'm not even talking about the homeless here. The Atlantic should be running an article every day extolling the virtues of home building and questioning the morals of a country which fails to shelter even working people. Rather than pouring over the editorial policy of wonkish publications, they should be lambasting every state legislature that so far has done nothing to ensure there are enough houses. I think that far worse for democracy than woke grammarians ratioing you on Twitter, is the rise of a surveillance state which previously couldn't exist but is now totally enabled because of AI automation. Obama firmly planted mass surveillance into and "acceptable" "legal" framework. We have learned little of what this apparatus can do operationally since the Snowden leaks which were before the deep learning stuff really exploded. The Atlantic should be questioning every day the moral fiber of a supposedly open and democratic society which has a shadow supreme court and an entire secret apparatus. What I'm willing to bet has a far greater impact on people's ability to control their employment future and therefore their own autonomy far more than the possibility of getting fired for accidentally saying "gimp" during the next inclusivity training? The breakdown of organized labor and growing inequality. The Atlantic should be railing every day about the fact that sub-living wages and make workers desperately dependant upon their employer and less able to exercise their democratic rights. But if you write for the Atlantic, you have friends in CIA. Your kids go to daycare with the kids of several corporate VPs. You don't know anyone that cleans rooms 10 hours a day and lives in a Super 8 for lack of permanent affordable housing. Writing about those things is actually controversial. It's actually risky. So instead, you turn inward. This country's elite media appear to me to have totally lost any grip on reality. There is some fantastical disconnect from what actually impacts people. Instead they only see and obsess about what impacts them. They have gazed so far into their own naval that they are instead playing this Alternate Reality Game, chasing phantoms and navigating mind mazes.