General > General Technical Chat
'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: Fred Basset on July 07, 2020, 05:27:11 am ---A lot of this is not really real you know?
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Many of the free/open source software projects I've contributed to, are deadly serious about this.
Right now, they're just changing both sources and documentation to replace "offensive" terms with whatever else they can come up with, but there are movements underway to include requirements in the contributor agreements to avoid those terms or face banning.
I may sound coherent occasionally, but me fail English often, since it's not my native language, and I read and write a lot but speak very little (which means I miss a lot of cues, and phrase stuff awkwardly). The idea of having a Language Commissar vetting whether my output is Ideologically Acceptable freaks the fuck out of me.
Kjelt:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on July 07, 2020, 12:28:26 am ---Kjelt, I know that sounds a good idea, but there are serious repercussions that are not immediately obvious. You see, Finnish police and Finnish media decided a few years ago to do just that. (The police even stopped gathering and publishing statistics on ethnicities of criminals for exactly this reason.)
.........................
No, I believe openness and educating kids about other people and cultures works, but this avoid-mentioning-details-that-might-be-misused does not. At all.
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That sounds like it way overshot its original intention.
Ofcourse statistics should be maintained otherwise you can never have a debate.
Still in many cases I think we Europeans are too kind and taken a piss at.
We open our countries for refugees which I fully support, then a part of the group are found to be no refugees at all but economic welfare seekers, but there is no way that the original country will take them back. Worse the part that are severe criminals, we can jail them but we can not sent them back. Luckily these are only small fraction, still they are the ones dominating the news media thereby biasing the countries opinion and occupying the places that real refugees need.
So your country has then shown that not mentioning etniticity etc is also not working, I wish there was a good answer.
Fred Basset:
I agree with you. Lots of people are taking this seriously now. I know they mean well - They want to be kind people who do not offend others. I respect them for that, but this seems to be out of all proportion now.
I think a lot of it is companies being afraid of seeming insensitive and losing money. So nothing is too much trouble to be careful to leave nothing that could cause offense. My non-white friends are not complaining about such things, it is seemingly white people who are complaining about them. Some are well-meaning I suppose, but I wonder about the motives of the others?
Incidentally, your English is superb. Like most languages is is harder to write than speak. Yet I would not have known you are not a native speaker unless you told me. You must have to concentrate and work very hard on subjects such as this, where the nuances are incredibly subtle at times.
I can however see why this must all be so scary for you. It would be for me also as there are so many words and phrases that are in everyday use and yet you have to be cafeful over. It was only a few weeks ago I made a really bad mistake. A (black) friend asked if I was busy? I was thinking about what I was doing and so said without thinking - "I am working like a slave on this". There was an awkward silence BUT ONLY FROM ME. My friend had not even noticed what I had said.
The worst I ever came across was a TV repair man in the early 80s I knew. He had a very bad experience in a bar. In Britain "a foreigner" is also another term for working for cash in hand, no tax and it does not go through the company's books. He said a man came up to him on Satuday night who he knew a bit, because he had fixed his rented TV. He said the TV was faulty and the family would have no TV over the weekend, and could he just come and have a look at it please? He said he did not "do foreigners" and noticed with horror that the guy had brown skin. The man went bezerk, thinking he had just been terribly insulted. He pointed out he was NOT a foreigner, but born in Britain. He treatened to call the head office and report him and so on. He had never heard the term "foreigner" for doing a job off the books, so of course he thought it was a racist insult. The TV repair guy said it took longer to calm him down than going to fix the blasted TV would have done. Not only that, but to prove he was not a racist, he had to buy him a drink as well...
The English language can be one massive trap, sometimes more so if you are a native speaker as so much "throw-away" sayings seem full of problematic words. So don't worry, even native speakers make mistakes all the time.
daqq:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on July 07, 2020, 05:57:10 am ---The idea of having a Language Commissar vetting whether my output is Ideologically Acceptable freaks the fuck out of me.
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I am from a post communist country, Slovakia (Czechoslovakia at the time, it's complicated). I have not been alive during the previous regime, aside from a few years as a baby, but from the recollections of colleagues, family and historical accounts, I can tell you that you do not want that and you are justifiably freaked out by the possibility.
Just a little taste:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media_in_Communist_Czechoslovakia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Czech_Republic#Censorship_during_the_Cold_War
There is extensive literature, but mostly in Slovak or Czech, I never looked at the availability of English sources on the topic.
edit: There are probably more English sources on the same topic in the USSR if you are interested.
You could easily lose a job or worse (much worse) if you had something ideologically unsound to say, or, say, voiced opinions on sensitive topics, like, say, the 1968 Soviet occupation brotherly intervention. Or someone else said that you had said something naughty, regardless of whether you actually said it... People I know told me stories that even I find hard to believe, but I would not discount them.
And from what I'm looking at, a lot of the west is heading in that direction. Not full "You said that there are two genders, go to Gulag", but... it's getting out of hand and I see no good outcome down the road where engineers have to, in addition to adhering to technological standards, doing complicated tasks, analyzing loads of data, have to check their language against an ever expanding list of phrases that got blacklisted. We are here to develop the technology of the future, provide solutions for humanity, not analyze whether the wheel could be of a shape that's offensive to someone.
EEVblog:
--- Quote from: Fred Basset on July 07, 2020, 06:31:20 am ---I agree with you. Lots of people are taking this seriously now. I know they mean well - They want to be kind people who do not offend others. I respect them for that, but this seems to be out of all proportion now.
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Yes, I know people caught up in this and say "I just want to be a good person" etc, and that's fine. The problem is that you can't explain the bigger picture to them and the threat to society all this SJW identity politics and cancel culture poses. They will only learn when it finally impacts them. When eventually they won't be able to speak up about something for fear of being canceled. They don't realise that no matter how good an "ally" they have been, they will get eaten alive like everyone else should they take one false step. They just don't understand the precarious society they are creating for themselves.
And to many all this fuss and resistance to this may seem hyperbolic, but there is never ending evidence of where this is leading, and has already led.
You're next, eventually, just wait....
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