Loaded terms in free software

People used to assume bleeding had a healing effect.

Sick? Let’s bleed you some. Still sick? Let’s bleed you some more. Dead? The medicine worked, you’re not sick anymore!

Sometimes you need to address the root causes not pile layer over layer of feel-good posturing that is never as side-effect-free as the feel-good proponents assume.

Keep some perspective on this please. None of these terms have been 'appropriated for abhorrent behavio[u]r [or] sentiments'. And words do not have negative connotations *in and of themselves* but connotations as a function of context.

To take a really extreme example, in American culture the N word has massively negative connotations in most circumstances, but is also used very casually with no negative connotations by some black people. Context matters.

'Master' and 'blacklist' do not have negative connotations in and of themselves, and certainly not in the contexts of `git push origin master` or 'device blacklist'.

> This is analogous to saying "we're not going to remove your tumor because it may come back elsewhere tomorrow".

It's analogous to saying "we're not going to remove this benign lump because it's pointless and all surgery is dangerous and can have side-effects".

This language is doing no harm. Removing it does harm.

> Tools which assume "master" is "special" are already broken.

No they aren't. The initially created default branch in git is not configurable and so it's not unreasonable to assume that the first branch created in any new git repo will be 'master'. Not every tool is expected to work with every possible git repository.

>As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, tutorials will have to be updated for the "git checkout" replacements anyways as tutorials naturally bitrot just like code too.

git checkout will continue to work and everyone using git today managed to work it out fine without too much confusion, so I doubt that it will cause any real angst if the tutorials aren't updated immediately. The newer commands are more intuitive for newer users but the old ones will still work and still are teachable.

>You know, it's patterns of comments like yours in this thread which tend to give off vibes that there's something…more underlying your reticence to these kinds of things more than "refusal to go along" on its own.

You're making my point for me. You are unable to have a conversation about this issue where there's the possibility that you might not "win". If people go along with what you want, you pat yourself on the back for a job well done. If they don't, you accuse them of having malicious intent. You refuse to allow the possibility that people can disagree with you without having some underlying evil motive. I disagree with you because what you're doing is poisonous, pretentious, and pointless and for no other reason.

The worst thing is that by making these sorts of accusations you're pushing people away from your camp and ironically making it much more likely they'll be pushed away towards the alt-right kind of viewpoint. Imagine someone's first exposure to social justice is this kind of stuff. They're just going to think it's a bunch of loons trying to police people's language instead of doing something useful. Now I know that there's more to social justice than internet language policing. But does everyone?

I'm not speaking for them, merely stating my opinion based on observation past and present. And yes, I think it is okay to say that. I do not think there's any reasonable way to justify a claim that it makes people *happy* to do something like this. It doesn't make sense for it to be something that makes people happy. Temporarily relief from anger and upset? Sure.

>You're right, because there will always be injustice in this world. So does that mean we just give up and don't bother making even small changes to make things slightly better? It's not a zero-sum game; changing terms that bother some people doesn't impair the larger fight against injustice.

This is wrong in two main respects.

Firstly, there's a limited amount of effort available on the part of the people that want to make these changes. Now far be it from me to tell them how to accomplish their goals well, but it seems to me that the people that are pushing for these changes are not actually doing anything truly useful. So to suggest things along the lines of "we can do both, you know" really doesn't seem to have any basis in evidence. Either 1) you really can't do both, doing one consumes enough time and energy that you don't have any left to do the other, or 2) the people involved in this are doing it because they're incapable or unwilling to pursue *real* change and so are left trying to pursue something that looks like change for 'social justice' but is actually ineffective terminological nitpicking.

The second thing is that this sort of effort really does impair the larger fight for injustice. It puts people off that would otherwise be on your side 100%. I totally believe in social justice. I think that the current situation in America, especially w.r.t. the Police, is just appalling. It's unjust. If people were actually focusing on that, on a real issue that all agree is a real issue, there would no argument from me or people that, like me, don't feel this is effective or reasonable.

The problem is that by focusing on things like this (or 'RuboCop' - oh no a Ruby linter with 'Cop' in the name??? how terrible! not joking there was genuinely a big internet fight over that too) you turn off people that would otherwise be fully on your side. You create animosity. I would struggle to sit down and have a productive conversation about an issue I really agreed with someone on (like police violence in American not being in an okay place) if that person had just spent the last week telling me I'm insensitive or a racist for having a git branch called 'master'.

>In that case, we need to balance the net change in happiness, and I strongly suspect that the increase in happiness from changing the terms outweighs the decrease in happiness from people who don't want to change the terms.

The problem with this idea is that it's central planning, basically the economic calculation problem. Maybe Rice's Theorem is a better analogy. Either way, the idea that you can calculate or even estimate the 'net change in happiness' of something like this is naive.

One thing I think you're not taking into account is that the whole issue itself, all the discussion around it, all the arguments, the name-calling, etc. is itself a source of significant unhappiness. The future animosity it will generate when people create 'Please change your default branch name to main' issues on issue trackers and it's declined. All the evidence I can see around me in this thread and in every other forum or group I've seen is that discussing this kind of stuff leaves permanent scars in a community and this kind of issue hovering around forever has a negative impact on communities.

Trying to make this an issue has created far more unhappiness than it is supposedly attempting to get rid ofit, and even if it does get rid of some unhappiness, how much of that unhappiness was created by the issue? *And* there's the issue that framing has a big impact on how people see things. A lot of people just never thought about master and it never had any negative or 'problematic' connotation, and now they have negative associations with the word simply because it's been framed as problematic or negative over and over again.

>I would never call someone who doesn't want to change "master" a racist. That position alone is certainly not racist, but it is IMO stubborn and somewhat insensitive.

Stubbornness is a sin and a virtue. While sometimes one can be stubborn to a fault, I think a bit of stubbornness is valuable because it makes people really justify stuff like this. And when pushed a little, they really admit what they think. Let me quote someone else in the thread:

>By removing non-problematic uses from these terms, you ensure that they're only used in order to be problematic. That, in turn, means that the genuinely problematic uses can't hide behind reasonable uses and say that they don't "mean" to be offensive, they're just using "standard" terms. And then, finally, this means that we can separate out and handle the people who genuinely believe that acting on racism etc is good behaviour, because they're the ones continuing to refer to things like master/slave, or blacklisting.

In other words, they *know* that the usage of [word] is not problematic at all, but are trying to pull back usage of the term so that they can call anyone that's still using [word] can be labelled as [bad thing]. This isn't just racism, it happens all over. It's language policing. 'Master' is not a *slur*. 'Slave' is not a *slur*. Slavery is much wider and broader as an institution in history and today than the racial slavery of the United States. If all slavery in history were racial slavery I could understand someone claiming it's a racist term but it just isn't and that's a fact.

They are the people pushing for this change, obviously. The people that think they care about this terminology, that think it is important that it (this terminology) be changed. Who else would I be referring to? I didn't realise that I had to spell it (the meaning of the phrase) out every time. Pronouns are a linguistic universal, so I--obviously mistakenly--assumed that you'd understand my usage of them (pronouns).

If you'd like me to write out the referent of every pronoun I use (other than first and second person singular pronouns) in future, be sure to let me know. First and second person singular pronouns have such obvious referents even _you_ should be able to understand what they (the pronouns) mean without explanation. :)

>The descendants of slave trafficked Africans are (quite understandably) asking for terminology relating to the slave trade to be reconsidered.

This is incorrect.

Firstly, they're not the ones asking for this, white activists are.

Secondly, the terminology is not 'relating to the [Atlantic] slave trade'. 'Master/slave' is derived from its usage in relation to slavery as an institution in general, not specifically the instance of slavery that Americans are still hung up about because of the terrible inequality in America today. Slavery has existed everywhere, but because America refuses to make amends they're still much more hung up about it than elsewhere. Nobody is going on about Maori slavery or Norse slavery (thralldom) today. 'Master' has wide variety of meanings other than just its usage in the context of slavery, and even then see above. 'Blacklist' has literally nothing to do with race or the slave trade *at all*.

It's also not 'quite understandable' why they'd want terminology relating to the Atlantic slave trade to be reconsidered. I'm not offended or upset about terminology that relates to famines or blights or potatoes despite having Irish citizenship and a lot of Irish ancestry. It was a terrible time in history, but that doesn't mean I'm going to get upset about the term "resource starvation" for example. It's just ridiculous. It's in a totally different context.

>People who are suffering various kinds of discrimination because of their ethnicity are asking for terms like "blacklist" to be reconsidered (amongst many other changes - changing terminology is one of the /least/ of those changes).

'Blacklist' has literally nothing to do with race and never has had anything to do with race or racial discrimination. 'Black' is not a derogatory term or an offensive one.

>Women have asked that the usage of male terms as generics ("that all men are created equal") be reconsidered. Trans people are asking that the default assumption of binary gender is reconsidered.

Blatant derailing...

>Historically the Jews have spent many years asking for the same kind of consideration, and for the most part have been granted those requests. We don't normally refer to the Roma as Gypsies for the same reasons, and in both cases we've (mostly) retired the use of derogatory language tied to those groups because it was clearly harmful (you don't hear the phrase "jew down" any more, nor is "gypped" common usage, and I hope I don't have to explain why that's a good thing).

'Gypsy' isn't universally considered derogatory. There are lots of gypsies that prefer to be known as gypsies, especially common amongst the ones *that aren't Roma*.

'Gypped' is derogatory because it plays on an association between gypsies and stealing, underhandedness, cheating, etc. It comes from the term 'gypsy' as referring to the groups of people known under that term. On the other hand, 'blacklist' has nothing to do with black people. It isn't a racial term or one that has its origin in racial stereotyping or anything like that.

So no, 'gypped' and 'blacklist' are not comparable at all sorry.

>Each of those groups have entirely reasonable justifications for their requests - they're not asking because they're weak spineless creatures who can't handle a bit of wordplay, they're asking because they're suffering actual harm. The fact that the world is apparently being besieged by similar requests doesn't demonstrate that everyone has suddenly become snowflakes, it demonstrates that there's a hell of a lot of this stuff out there, and the more people recognise that these things can be addressed, the more people are actually standing up and asking.

>"They" may never be sated, because it's hard to know if we'll ever reach the kind of utopia that would leave everyone satisfied with everything, and until we reach that state there will always be people who desire change. But by the same token, why should people pretend to be satisfied when they're not? Why should people accept the status quo if it makes them unhappy? Why shouldn't they ask for changes to be made which might make them more satisfied with their lives?

Gypsies are suffering harm when they're associated by proxy with stealing and stereotyped in that way. Black people aren't being harmed by a 'master' branch or 'device blacklist' at all.

The problem is that there is no actual problem here to be solved because it's an ever-expanding pool of things that are now 'offensive' for no reason. Now it's 'master' next it will be 'resource starvation', abort(3), kill(1), orphan processes, or something else. No more 'black pepper' and 'white pepper'.

And the problem, as I have said, with this, is that it doesn't accomplish anything. It's like smoking. It might temporarily relieve stress but really it's *creating* stress by creating these strong negative associations. If you are in the social justice movement for long enough you find yourself automatically negatively reacting to words and ideas that are actually harmless. I realised I was feeling this and that's when I stepped away from that kind of stuff: the social justice language police train themselves to be offended and outraged by stuff and then they're outraged by it. It's psychologically addicting to be outraged. But it doesn't actually do anything or help anyone or make anyone's life any better.

I'm sorry, I thought "man" *was* the gender-NEUTRAL version. Okay, that's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the male version is wer-man, and the female version is wif-man. Which is why we have words like "mankind" - it really IS gender-neutral.

THAT is a big problem with all these demands to change the language - it'll simply drift and bring all the same problems back unless we do something about the underlying ATTITUDES that cause the problem.

Cheers,
Wol