Microsoft Helping Out In Making The Linux Kernel Language More Inclusive

[NuAngel]

And the head of any given household is the "master of the house". A post-graduate degree is a "master's degree". None of these things have anything to do with slavery or racism or whatever. Wokeism gone wild turns everything to sh%t.

Cool. Now do "slave."

[ssokolow]

Cool. Now do "slave."

Does it really matter? It's a slippery slope. "Robot" comes from the Czech for "slave". "Barbaric" comes from an ancient roman slur for foreigners whose non-Latin languages sounded like gibberish to the Romans. (Literally "Blah-blah-ian")

The list goes on and on, until we're all speaking newspeak, writing poetry is impossible, and it's generally doubleplus ungood... unless you stop early, and then it's discriminatory against people whose complaints didn't make the cut-off.

(eg. If we're going to get rid of "blacklist" and "whitelist" because it's offensive, then we should also stop using red and yellow to denote errors and warnings because those are just as big a problem for First Nations and Chinese people... and, for the record, I keep running across comments from "Native Americans" who say they prefer "American Indians" and don't approve of upper-middle-class white people unilaterally deciding when they get renamed and to what. Likewise for Latinos and Latinas who don't like how "Latinx" is being forced on them by rich white people with access to media.)

I keep getting reminded of this snip from the Identity politics as a vehicle for oppression section of RationalWiki's Identity politics article... especially the part about how it creates a permanent underclass of people incapable (eg. because they actually have to work to put food on the table) or unwilling to keep up with the constantly changing definition of what is acceptable speech.

The social constructionist basis of modern identity politics makes it attractive above all to sheltered academics. Postmodernism and deconstruction, broadly speaking, are its handmaidens.

While a basic concern for issues of representation and social influence is perfectly necessary to all walks of liberal progressivism, more radical identity politicians have a track record of offering absurdly oversimplified interpretations of society — judging, for example, the mix of skin colors of models and actors that appear in advertisements as an important civil rights issue, and views the integration of advertising materials as a significant civil rights victory, rather than as mere tokenism.

Its chief political victories resemble this; "speech codes" and other new forms of etiquette are some of its more conspicuous successes. In essence, identity politics is constantly generating new forms of etiquette. But, since the function of etiquette is to perform social status and rank, and all etiquettes create an underclass of the rude and uncouth[18], identity politics constantly undermines the egalitarianism it aspires to in theory, and as such tends to exaggerate class resentments the more rigorously its new etiquettes are enforced.

Social constructionism invites us to believe that we can change the world by using different words. As such, building on its postmodernist tendencies, identity politics as an academic exercise generates a great deal of jargon. This obscurantist approach comes at a price, however — deconstructionists have been criticized for constructing elaborate systems of such jargon which seems indistinguishably like a device for wrapping empty ideas in the appearance of sophistication.

[BaumKuchen]

Just an idiot collecting corporate badges.
Actually looking at his work I wanna start being racist/sexist/homophobic/etc just out of pure spite. His PR just contributed to racism.

[microcode]

Stop giving a shit about this stuff.

First they came for...

[kneekoo]

Gay was used as cheerful. The way we use it today is completely unrelated. The fact that some people can be triggered by technical terms that are unrelated but remind them of a period in the US history shows how it's all about their feelings, and how they want to impose themselves onto others.

What would actually be nice is for slavery to be a thing of the past. Changing a few words, that are even detached from what they decry, doesn't fix anything. If only it were that simple.

[fche]

im glad microsoft is helping out with making the linux kernel more inclusive. this is very nice and welcomed.

welcomed by whom

so what

[fche]

I'm not going to stop wearing pants just because Hitler wore pants.

You know who else wore pants? Um, wait, you already know.