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'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts
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vodka:
Slavery Made In Africa

One pearl:


--- Quote ---" When the British abolished the slave trading in 1807 , the king from Bonny, today Nigeria, he argued that the trade  should must continue and oracules from his people
affirmed that the slave trading was an activity ordered by god. The Ghezo king from Dahomey said that he was willing to make anything for the British requested him ,except give up to sell slaves"

 Carlos Arturo Calderón Muñoz

--- End quote ---

Complete article

http://www.alertadigital.com/2020/06/08/cartas-desde-colombia-esclavitud-made-in-africa/

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: coppice on June 13, 2020, 05:06:11 pm ---
--- Quote from: Cerebus on June 13, 2020, 04:13:13 pm ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on June 13, 2020, 03:55:11 pm ---The black lives matter campaigners are upset about how African history and the atrocities committed by the British Empire are not taught in UK schools, which I agree with: African history and the gross human rights violations of the colonial era do need to be taught in school.

--- End quote ---

Bloody hell, British education has gone downhill if that's true. We were certainly taught about the history of slavery in my school, and that's in a highly conservative boy's grammar school in the 70s (which had precisely *one* non-white pupil out of 600 odd).

--- End quote ---
I only did history up to the 3rd form in the 1960s, and we didn't even learn there was a 19th or 20th century.  ;)

--- End quote ---

If your schoolmasters were anything like mine the suspicion was that most of them came from, and still were in, the 18th Century - apart from the physics master with the alembic muttering to himself in Enochian, him we placed in the 17th century at the very latest.
magic:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on June 13, 2020, 03:55:11 pm ---The one thing I don't understand is how the terms "master" and "slave" can ever be deemed to be racist. Anyone who believes they are, is ignorant about history, especially African history.

--- End quote ---
This drama has been going on for several years; the typical argument goes along the lines that simply mentioning anything remotely connected to slavery "retraumatizes" the descendants of its victims, distracts them from the work, whatever.

It may possibly be derived from authentic experiences of some oversensitive borderline mental cases. I never followed the "people of color" scene much, but when you dig into similar posting from feminists you will invariably find broken paranoid women scared of every stupid thing some man does that she doesn't understand. In America it isn't popular to tell such people to retract to some calm place and sort their shit. On the contrary, their "speaking up" is revered by the mob as act of bravery for social justice and progress.

Those theories also explain the racial breakdown of American software sector without resorting to the unpopular "we are still racist" or "average IQ" arguments, which is a value of its own for many. You can rest assured that whenever somebody mentions "slavery" or "colonialism", within a few paragraphs back or forth "underrepresentation" will be found. The seemingly popular "it's just status quo which will resolve itself thanks to rights and liberty" theory also is becoming unpopular because Americans have been hearing it for 50 years so something new is desperately needed.

Go lurk news.ycombinator.com if you are in mood for some :popcorn: I suppose they still are having threads about it every other week.
bd139:
Ah fuck HN. Worst technical echo chamber in the universe.

Programming in Rust cures cancer. Preventing gentrification in SF using ML. Someone shitting on database fad of the hour. Something something China. I switched from a desktop to an open source iPad clone and designed an orbital space programme. Procedurally generated monads in Haskell rewritten in Lisp on top of a Brainfuck VM. GitHub offends man with three arms. Monthly dose of Amiga Denial Syndrome. HN hiring Terraform and COBOL expert for global hegemony.
0culus:
On the bright side, discussions on HN do stay civil compared to most of the rest of the internet.  :-DD It is a massive echo chamber though. Anything that goes against the collective gets downvoted to oblivion.
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