| General > General Technical Chat |
| 'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts |
| << < (67/352) > >> |
| Cerebus:
--- Quote from: tooki on June 15, 2020, 11:51:04 am --- --- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 15, 2020, 11:48:23 am --- --- Quote from: tooki on June 15, 2020, 11:46:12 am ---As for the other stuff, it’s not as though it’s being banned or censured. --- End quote --- That's patently false. If that were true, then any individual treating others differently because of their race would not be racist, eitherg (because they're just an individual, not the society in general, and "not suitable as a proxy for the society in general"). But doing so, demonstrably is. --- End quote --- Banning and censure mean when the government outlaws things because of their content. That hasn’t happened. --- End quote --- That's an unrealistically narrow definition. Facebook and Twitter censor posts based on their own whims or societal pressure with no government intervention. People self-censor for fear of reprisals either from government or other groups or individual people all the time. People and institutions other than government censure people all the time. |
| madires:
--- Quote from: fcb on June 15, 2020, 01:56:22 pm ---Could black and white lists be changed to RED and GREEN, or do they have other meanings in computing? --- End quote --- whitelist -> allowlist blacklist -> blocklist I've just seen that in the slides of a NANOG-79 talk about RPKI two weeks ago. Seems to be an early adopter. |
| nuclearcat:
I got much more interesting observation. As far as i see these "renames" are mainly pushed by those who are descendants of "enslavers nations". Genius idea, if there is no word, then memory of this events will fade, everyone forgets their ancestors crimes and precise definition, so their dark and unpleasant pages of history are forgotten. It seems mainly not those who suffered from slavery feel pain, but descendants of those, who commit this crime want to bleach their history. Who initiated changes master/slave: Python - Stinner Victor, French. https://bugs.python.org/issue34605 Django - Flavio Curella, Italian https://github.com/django/django/pull/2694 Drupal - Bart Feenstra, Dutch(?) https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2275877 CouchDB, Redis - Naomi Slater, German https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-2248 Golang - Filipo Vasolrda, Italian https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/236857/ |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: Cerebus on June 15, 2020, 01:47:25 pm ---English, used properly, is a very expressive language. Unfortunately it gains a lot of its expressive power from context sensitivity. That has led to English overloading words with multiple meanings that have to be divined from context. --- End quote --- Fully agreed. Finnish, on one hand, has a smaller core vocabulary, but on the other hand, new words can (and often are) created as variants from the core words. Onomatopoeic words are also quite common. To exaggerate a bit, any Finn can be a Shakespeare in creating new words that others immediately understand. Unfortunately, young people, probably because of the prevalence of English media (we don't e.g. dub movies, we subtitle them – the only exception is media for kids), insist on using Finglish, or English-derived words, and not their Finnish equivalents, socially. You see this especially in nicknames and pseudonyms; they're extremely often in English, even in otherwise purely Finnish text (like "messages from readers" sections in newspapers, and Finnish websites). Only us older folks and non-city-dwelling folks like to use Finnish everywhere. It is an open question as to how much terms affect thinking. Research has shown that forced speech – i.e., using specific terms when speaking about things – is actually the one form of brainwashing that works: if you are forced to say only positive things about a subject, you'll feel more positive about that subject in relatively short timespans (weeks to months), even without excessive repetition. (Apologies, I cannot find references right now; the paper I read was published in the last fifteen years.) (One could argue that this means that banning certain terms, and forcing people to use only "positive" terms about things or they won't have access to the internet or work in general – even if provided by private organizations –, sounds like a good way to combat racism. I find it tyrannical: an attempt to impose a pattern of thinking on my brain, denouncing my individuality and freedom to think how I wish, reducing myself to an eusocial interchangeable unit. I'm willing to go to war, to kill, to avoid or topple such a system.) It is well known that "native" and "foreign" languages tend to be processed in slightly different parts of the brain, though. My fear is that the only-superficial-understanding – a topic I keep ranting about, sorry! – is stifling critical thought, and pushing humans away from contemplation and analysis into simple emoting. --- Quote from: Cerebus on June 15, 2020, 01:47:25 pm ---Six meanings for one word, not strictly including the sense of master/slave as in flip-flops. That leads me to wonder aloud: "Does this mean that the people complaining about the use of 'master' in the technical sense are just not very good at English comprehension?". --- End quote --- A very good point. I suspect these people refuse to think rationally, and instead emote; certain posts in this thread have enforced that suspicion even further. |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: GlennSprigg on June 15, 2020, 02:00:30 pm ---If 'VIRTUALLY' no-one has/uses guns on the street, then the 'Police' would not have to be so pro-active in 'using' (warranted or not) equal deadly force in the majority of confrontations! ::) --- End quote --- I suspect it is less about guns per se, and more about the sort of anonymity that urban environments provide. In Finland, there is a very, very stark difference in police behaviour between Helsinki (Helsinki-Espoo-Vantaa region, comprising about a fifth to a quarter of the entire population of the country, in a relatively small area) and the rest of the country. This was ridiculously obvious even in the Finnish "Cops" TV series, "Poliisit", and in similar TV programs. Yet, the gun issue is completely reversed. Most people living in the city area do not have guns, whereas hunting weapons are ubiquitous in the rural areas. (And the policing regions are so large and the cops so few – only about 1.3 per 1000 – that it is definitely not a case of "but everyone knows the cops in the rural areas", because they definitely do not.) In Helsinki, the cops are typically brusque and issue commands, whereas elsewhere in Finland, they start by talking. A typical case is a drunk person causing trouble or fighting, and elsewhere in Finland the cops often wrestle with these, whereas those in Helsinki rapidly resort to hard takedowns or a tazer. I don't know why this is so, but as I said, it is self-evident even in the "Poliisit" clips shown on Youtube: you can immediately tell if the police are from Helsinki/Uusimaa region, or elsewhere, based on how they deal with an encounter. I have no idea how to fix the issues with police in the USA, and obviously that part of their system needs reform (having a full percent of your population in jail at any given time is a pretty good indication that your justice system has issues). I just wanted to point out that guns or gun violence is likely not any kind of a root cause, even with criminals; it is much more likely about dissociation from society or some such. As to myself, I've found that talking to ones neighbours makes it much easier to deal with disturbances; and that remembering that most offenses stem from ignorance and stupidity and NOT from malice, makes it easier to understand others. Classifying others as "racist" for, well, using a word in their technical sense, doesn't. We need better conflict resolution, not labels. (And by that I mean we need to talk about the root causes and find real-world actions we could do to fix things without making things worse, and not just placating others emotions and egos because they feel slighted somehow.) |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |