Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Posted Jun 18, 2020 3:09 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)In reply to: Loaded terms in free software by rbranco
Parent article: Loaded terms in free software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#Naming
Posted Jun 18, 2020 3:19 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (37 responses)
Posted Jun 18, 2020 8:07 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Cheers,
Posted Jun 18, 2020 11:15 UTC (Thu)
by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
[Link] (35 responses)
What if systems engineers (dozens of thousands of them) around the world cringe hearing about a "system" with no physical 4D-extent, no external roles defined and no emergent function assigned, would that be enough to ban "system" from all the software?
Posted Jun 18, 2020 17:44 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (34 responses)
> What if systems engineers (dozens of thousands of them) around the world cringe hearing about a "system" with no physical 4D-extent, no external roles defined and no emergent function assigned, would that be enough to ban "system" from all the software?
Posted Jun 19, 2020 11:02 UTC (Fri)
by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Jun 20, 2020 6:02 UTC (Sat)
by comex (subscriber, #71521)
[Link] (4 responses)
In the actual situation, the word "master" causes discomfort by itself, which is why its use is problematic even if you aren't using it to refer to actual slavery. A systems engineer, on the other hand, is not discomfited by the word "system" itself. I suppose they might have the discomfort of a pedantic itch to correct a supposed misuse of terminology? Of course, there is no actual misuse, since the colloquial use of the word "system" predates the discipline of systems engineering by millennia. But even if there was a misuse, the "discomfort" caused by being aware of it wouldn't be remotely comparable to what's involved here.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 11:08 UTC (Sat)
by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
[Link] (3 responses)
Where are the first-person accounts of discomfort? Why talks about the change don't cite them and instead hand-wave "this is bad, mmkay?"
For me it definitely smells of someone usurping the voice of suppressed for political advantage (Level-4 arguments), and without independent confirmation from the actual victims it's hard to verify if this claim is actually true at all.
> Terminology linked to histories of bloody suppression tends to cause rather deeper levels of discomfort than… well, I'm not even sure what the comparison is.
You know, I'm Slavic by nationality, and you sure know the etymology of the word. The area where I grew up was repeatedly ravaged by waves of Mongolian hordes (and according to my facial features rape also took place). Moving closer to the present time several of my ancestors were killed in WW2. Do I loathe words "slav" (or "slave" for that matter), "mongol", "national" or "socialist" either in my mother tongue, or in English? I don't give a damn, it's history.
This is my Level-1 account of how "terminology linked to histories of bloody suppression" causes deep levels of discomfort for me.
Now I'd love to hear similar Level-1 accounts from people who are discomforted by words "black" or "master". I don't mind them be anonymised if the author would feel safer (though nowadays it seems it's me who needs to be afraid of online lynching for voicing an unpopular opinion), but they need to at least make it somehow comparable to other levels of discomfort that can be related to by people who are not black.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 14:03 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Yet another word who's meaning has changed (and distorted history as a result) over time.
When the Vikings came raping and pillaging our shores, it did NOT mean having non-consensual sex with the local women. Okay, that may well have taken place, but that wasn't the meaning of the word.
Cheers,
Posted Jun 20, 2020 19:57 UTC (Sat)
by comex (subscriber, #71521)
[Link] (1 responses)
Good question, and more relevant than your earlier systems engineer analogy. No doubt, most of the comments supporting the change are not first-person accounts. But that's not all that surprising, since most developers are not part of the marginalized group in the first place (and even those that are, if they are not also politically active, may be too embarrassed or intimidated to admit the discomfort in threads with such heated opposition). Nevertheless, here are 2 first-person accounts and 1 semi-first-person account, from the 2014 Django pull request that helped spawn the discussion about "master":
https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692#issuecomment-4...
> This is my Level-1 account of how "terminology linked to histories of bloody suppression" causes deep levels of discomfort for me.
It seems to be an account of how it does *not* cause deep levels of discomfort for you. That's fair enough, and a reasonable perspective from which to doubt that others in analogous situations feel discomfort. That said, I'd argue in the American context the issue is not *just* a history of bloody suppression, but the fact that the bloody suppression is perceived to have never completely ended. In other words, while, say, today's police killings that disproportionately affect PoC are not the same as century-old lynchings, they both have common roots in a continuous phenomenon of racism that has only partially abated over time. I am not sure whether or not there is anything analogous for Slavic peoples; feel free to enlighten me.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 22:23 UTC (Sat)
by jafd (subscriber, #129642)
[Link]
Roma (Gypsies) are one such group, and if you happen to be brunet and tan enough to be mistaken for one, you could hear comments or experience increased police attention — which may hurt sometimes. Also, while neo-nazi groups are fewer and farther between than some would like to paint it, you might get to know how many of them exactly are there in your town rather quickly, and rank them by their readiness to use violence. Oh, and there are little things: security people in supermarkets will get twitchier when you're doing shopping there, for example.
I don't remember Roma ever having been slaves to anyone, but to get a picture you could probably roughly compare them to the Mexicans in the poorer neighborhoods of the US if stereotypes I hear about them exist (that they are all involved with drug cartels, or some such).
Posted Jun 19, 2020 18:59 UTC (Fri)
by gray_-_wolf (subscriber, #131074)
[Link] (27 responses)
Could you please share what the number is? How many is enough?
Posted Jun 19, 2020 19:03 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (26 responses)
Posted Jun 19, 2020 19:07 UTC (Fri)
by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
[Link] (25 responses)
Posted Jun 19, 2020 19:13 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (24 responses)
You know, I used to be on the side that technical terms shouldn't be shunned based on cultural contexts. But then I saw that a significant part of people defending that approach are basically shitstains and I don't want to be associated with them even tangentially.
And after all, changing a few terms doesn't cause any issues. Just do a sed replace and move on.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 7:23 UTC (Sat)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link] (15 responses)
Posted Jun 20, 2020 10:32 UTC (Sat)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link] (12 responses)
(*) There is the argument that "master" in git comes from "master" in bitkeeper where there was a "slave", but in git there is no slave it's only an obscure historic connection. How many of the people offended by "master" in git do know of this connection to bitkeeper? As was argued several times, factual historic origins don't matter only current usage and in git there is no concept of a slave branch.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 10:53 UTC (Sat)
by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
[Link] (11 responses)
N- words were banned, and now "black" is a new N-word. After "black" will be banned another word will take on the same function and will be banned in turn.
Banning words won't help if the underlying problem is not addressed.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 19:42 UTC (Sat)
by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
[Link] (8 responses)
You can't ban "black", it's a freakin' color. The association with white=good and black=bad, however, is fundamentally broken. It's beyond time to stop perpetuate that nonsense. Yes it's ingrained in our culture, but that's precisely the point.
Do NOT for a single moment assume that language doesn't shape thinking. For a completely unrelated example, ask people from various European countries what they associate with a bridge spanning a valley. You get answers which are strongly associated with either "grace" or "power", depending solely on whether that word happens to carry a female or male grammatical gender in their language.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 22:03 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
For example, although a ship has no gender, they are generally considered "she". But "my ship" is "he". And I wouldn't have a clue which of those two associations I would apply to a bridge.
Cheers,
Posted Jun 20, 2020 23:42 UTC (Sat)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link] (2 responses)
And what do you think the so called N-word was before the ban?
Have you ever heard of Montenegro (black mountain)?
That a word has a simple descriptive meaning hasn't ever precluded a ban. And if a descriptive word is banned another word has to be used instead for describing the same thing and soon there is demand to ban the new word.
It is interesting that we have today arrived at the phrase "people of color". In my eyes this is one of the racists phrases I know of. It's basis is the construction of a fundamental divide between white and non-white whereas all non-white form an indistinctive mass with no further differentiation necessary.
Imagine you have a group of "people of color", Aborigines of Australia, African American, San people and whatever you think belongs to this group, and than you say to them: your differences are meaningless because you aren't white, being non-white is all you get as description.
One has to invent Level-5 to categorize this kind of underhand racism.
Posted Jun 21, 2020 0:46 UTC (Sun)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (1 responses)
Yeah, I happen to have a couple kilograms of "frijoles negros" (ie "black beans") in my pantry.
(Meanwhile, my English family name, if pronounced correctly, is a highly pejorative insult to a Turk!)
Posted Jun 22, 2020 15:12 UTC (Mon)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
:-)
Cheers,
Posted Jun 22, 2020 10:45 UTC (Mon)
by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958)
[Link]
In USA. In italian it was just a neutral descriptive term that got banned as well because of USA always exporting their culture abroad.
Posted Jun 23, 2020 9:15 UTC (Tue)
by xoddam (subscriber, #2322)
[Link] (1 responses)
China and Iran are not known especially for their lack of sexism, however.
Posted Jun 23, 2020 10:31 UTC (Tue)
by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
[Link]
In any case, our esteemed editor has kindly asked us to shut up now. Did you miss that?
Posted Jul 1, 2020 19:09 UTC (Wed)
by danilo (guest, #57549)
[Link]
What does not make any sense is calling people "black" or "white" because of their skin colour! I've never met a white person (my boy calls his hands to be "creamish"), nor did I meet a "black" one. But so far, that's exactly the same as white for daylight (it's not really white — black as absence of light reflection is actually pretty apt).
However, where it terribly falls apart is in calling descendants of "black" and "white" people exclusively "black". If that's not use of language reaffirming prejudiced stereotypes, I do not know what is.
So while I agree language can have an effect, I am surprised nobody worries about this particular issue which seems so much greater to me!
Posted Jun 22, 2020 13:09 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
(Do you get unhappy about the fact that you can't look at coneys hopping through the fields? Yes, a word as commonplace as "rabbit" was relatively rare until the late 19th century. And that spin of the euphemism treadmill wasn't even because "coney" was itself considered offensive, at least not in the UK: it's because it was *pronounced* the same way as a piece of anatomy that had itself caused many spins of the treadmill before then.)
The north-eastern US is going through a change in pronunciation almost as extreme as the Great Vowel Shift. Why not go and get all offended about that? It's much more linguistically significant than yet another change triggered by emotionally intense words in places people don't really *want* that emotional intensity.
Posted Jul 3, 2020 17:40 UTC (Fri)
by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
[Link]
Fun and appropriate fact: Red Guards committees in Beijing decided that red traffic light for "stop" is un-communistic and decreed to change green/red meaning to opposite. As you can imagine, this decision was reverted shortly afterwards, but not only before thousands of people died.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 11:49 UTC (Sat)
by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
[Link]
If the message is "blacklist/whitelist are bad terms anyway, why don't we change them?" then there is no problem (personally I don't see why I would use blacklist/whitelist in a new software — allow/deny are better terms).
However the message from the more aggressive proponents of the change is "you are bad person for using such racial slang, shame on you!", with implicit "there will be a smear campaign against you if you don't yield to our demands" then the answer varies from "go away" to "I'm calling my lawyer".
A side note: there is a difference between "blacklist/whitelist are bad terms" and "master is a bad term" — former is true, latter is not, so if one conflates two term changes then they are sure not interested in improving terms.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 12:12 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
CHANGE can be an absolutely MASSIVE issue. Whenever something changes in Windows it causes me a hell of a lot of grief. My inlaws are still on Windows 7. My wife wouldn't move off XP until I practically forced her on to 10.
This change will impact me, but I have no strong feelings either way. I fully sympathise with the people who oppose "change for change's sake" though, because change the context slighlty, and I will be the one screaming "don't change things, for $DEITY sake!"
Cheers,
Posted Jun 20, 2020 10:50 UTC (Sat)
by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
[Link] (7 responses)
Translation: "you are indecent person by my definition of decency, you must be ashamed of yourself!" Please keep it civilized.
> But then I saw that a significant part of people defending that approach are basically shitstains and I don't want to be associated with them even tangentially.
Yes, throwing the shitstains out is harder than giving up.
> And after all, changing a few terms doesn't cause any issues. Just do a sed replace and move on.
https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091#issueco... — if a rename touches on any external interfaces it might take years to deal with all the fallout.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 17:00 UTC (Sat)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (6 responses)
> https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091#issueco... — if a rename touches on any external interfaces it might take years to deal with all the fallout.
It's not hard.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 17:59 UTC (Sat)
by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590)
[Link] (5 responses)
There is a problem you acknowledge: a bunch of shitstains. They are hard to deal with! You may get in trouble!
The solution you propose? Start picking on people who are more easily browbeaten by the threat of "being treated with disgust". To add to the insult, you're picking on people who refuse to cede the territory to those shitstains, who should be your best allies in solving the problem.
You are a coward.
Posted Jun 20, 2020 22:36 UTC (Sat)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (4 responses)
It doesn't work. If a hateful group appropriates a symbol or name then this symbol is basically tainted for a long time (see: "ISIS" or swastika). You can try to fight it, but it would always look like you're just trying to use a dogwhistle.
Posted Jun 21, 2020 5:01 UTC (Sun)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
[Link] (3 responses)
Every time I hear it makes me think of religious fanatics into numerology trying to predict the end of the world by how the Greek letters of Revelation add up.
Posted Jun 21, 2020 6:31 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
"Dogwhistle" (n) - " Politics. a political strategy, statement, slogan, etc., that conveys a controversial, secondary message understood only by those who support the message"
Posted Jun 21, 2020 7:09 UTC (Sun)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 21, 2020 7:12 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
"Dogwhistle" is pretty clearly defined. Example from the recent events: "All lives matter".
Posted Jun 18, 2020 16:47 UTC (Thu)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 18, 2020 23:24 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Cheers,
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Wol
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Yes.
The word "system" is not related to the history of bloody suppression of systems engineers.
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Wol
Loaded terms in free software
https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692#issuecomment-4...
https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692#issuecomment-4...
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
> Yes.
Loaded terms in free software
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Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Wol
> You can't ban "black", it's a freakin' color.
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
> Have you ever heard of Montenegro (black mountain)?
Loaded terms in free software
Wol
Loaded terms in free software
ungendered language
ungendered language
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Wol
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
So now you're proposing somehow limiting other peoples' freedom to keep using your words?
I don't think anybody is proposing renaming everything at once. Just stop adding new uses of objectionable words.
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
> Yes, throwing the shitstains out
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
A total non-sequitur.
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Loaded terms in free software
Wol