Social Justice out of control

[DrZoidberg]

If anybody has doubts of whether the social justice warrior society is out of control, take a look at this.

"Social media platform Twitter is dropping the terms "master", "slave" and "blacklist" in favour of more inclusive language."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53273923

This is in the code. It's not in communication material. It's in the code, which nobody other than programmers see. These are also terms that are standardised and universal within programming. They are also useful because they are clear and descriptive. If you have two thingy's on a network and one is called "the master" and the other "the slave" there's no doubt about which does what.

It's also going to be expensive. These kinds of code changes cost a lot of money to push through. I don't think they're thought this through. I think this is something the communication department came up with without fully involving the nerds, because this is just dumb.

I'm a lefty... but right now my chips are being moved over on the conservative side because this sort of lunacy has to be stopped. It's Newspeak. Reality is being replaced by virtue signalling symbols. Progressivism is being forced upon us in Moaist people's courts. While China just turned Hong Kong into an actual totalitarian Big Brother state, Putin became president for life, and the West worries about whether or not code might offend the handful of black programmers that come into contact with it. I suspect that most of their programming is done in India anyway, by people who have no reason to be offended by the term "slave".

 

[bigfield]

My first impression is that this is just a cynical PR move by Twitter management; they don't really believe this needs to be done for social justice.

In 1984, Oceania's government uses Newspeak to suppress any kind of dissenting thought of expression. In the real world, corporations are making token gestures to humour political activists and protect their advertising revenue. I don't think that is what Orwell was trying to warn us about.

 

[DrZoidberg]

My first impression is that this is just a cynical PR move by Twitter management; they don't really believe this needs to be done for social justice.

In 1984, Oceania's government uses Newspeak to suppress any kind of dissenting thought of expression. In the real world, corporations are making token gestures to humour political activists and protect their advertising revenue. I don't think that is what Orwell was trying to warn us about.

Sure it's a PR move. But that's just the point. It's insane that is received positively, or even that they thought this was a good idea. The slave drive really is a slave to the master drive.

The term "newspeak" was coined by George Orwell in his 1949 anti-utopian novel 1984. In Orwell's fictional totalitarian state, Newspeak was a language favored by the minions of Big Brother and, in Orwell's words, "designed to diminish the range of thought." Newspeak was characterized by the elimination or alteration of certain words, the substitution of one word for another, the interchangeability of parts of speech, and the creation of words for political purposes. The word has caught on in general use to refer to confusing or deceptive bureaucratic jargon.

 

[bigfield]

Sure it's a PR move. But that's just the point. It's insane that is received positively, or even that they thought this was a good idea. The slave drive really is a slave to the master drive.

The tweet's replies seem consistently negative.
https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/status/1278733303508418560

I feel like it's an open secret at this point that corporations are completely full of shit, and people are just pretending that they aren't.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Sure it's a PR move. But that's just the point. It's insane that is received positively, or even that they thought this was a good idea. The slave drive really is a slave to the master drive.

The tweet's replies seem consistently negative.
https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/status/1278733303508418560

I feel like it's an open secret at this point that corporations are completely full of shit, and people are just pretending that they aren't.

Hmm... Corporations do marketting. Aren't they expected to always be full of shit? Or let me re-phrase it. From the birth of marketting companies have had a lax attitude to truth. The goal was to trick the customer into buying a product. Once sold there was no need to look back. But today customers talk to eachother on social media. Marketting has to be true. That was no fun. So they switched from talking about their product to their values. Enter "the story". Marketting shifted to creating a narrative where the buyer was supposed to feel as a part of something greater than themselves. So each brand had to pick a moral crusade to be for or against. Which worked great as long as everybody agreed on what was good and what was bad. But that's run aground now as victim culture and pomo feminism seems to have taken over the leftist story and consumers are starting to react.

Isn't that just what is going on?

 

[bigfield]

Sure it's a PR move. But that's just the point. It's insane that is received positively, or even that they thought this was a good idea. The slave drive really is a slave to the master drive.

The tweet's replies seem consistently negative.
https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/status/1278733303508418560

I feel like it's an open secret at this point that corporations are completely full of shit, and people are just pretending that they aren't.

Hmm... Corporations do marketting. Aren't they expected to always be full of shit? Or let me re-phrase it. From the birth of marketting companies have had a lax attitude to truth. The goal was to trick the customer into buying a product. Once sold there was no need to look back. But today customers talk to eachother on social media. Marketting has to be true. That was no fun. So they switched from talking about their product to their values. Enter "the story". Marketting shifted to creating a narrative where the buyer was supposed to feel as a part of something greater than themselves. So each brand had to pick a moral crusade to be for or against. Which worked great as long as everybody agreed on what was good and what was bad. But that's run aground now as victim culture and pomo feminism seems to have taken over the leftist story and consumers are starting to react.

Isn't that just what is going on?

I think there are different groups of people to consider:
- Cynics who think Twitter is full of shit but will keep using it anyway.
- Idealists who think it's good and meaningful that Twitter is making these changes, and will keep using Twitter even though Trump is on it.
- Idealists who are outraged that Twitter has gone mad with political correctness, but whose outrage can be framed as a good thing to boost Twitter's brand.

I don't see how victim culture and pomo feminism ties into this. The timing and stated justification indicates that this is a response to BLM.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Hmm... Corporations do marketting. Aren't they expected to always be full of shit? Or let me re-phrase it. From the birth of marketting companies have had a lax attitude to truth. The goal was to trick the customer into buying a product. Once sold there was no need to look back. But today customers talk to eachother on social media. Marketting has to be true. That was no fun. So they switched from talking about their product to their values. Enter "the story". Marketting shifted to creating a narrative where the buyer was supposed to feel as a part of something greater than themselves. So each brand had to pick a moral crusade to be for or against. Which worked great as long as everybody agreed on what was good and what was bad. But that's run aground now as victim culture and pomo feminism seems to have taken over the leftist story and consumers are starting to react.

Isn't that just what is going on?

I think there are different groups of people to consider:
- Cynics who think Twitter is full of shit but will keep using it anyway.
- Idealists who think it's good and meaningful that Twitter is making these changes, and will keep using Twitter even though Trump is on it.
- Idealists who are outraged that Twitter has gone mad with political correctness, but whose outrage can be framed as a good thing to boost Twitter's brand.

I don't see how victim culture and pomo feminism ties into this. The timing and stated justification indicates that this is a response to BLM.

I see them both as different expressions of victim culture

 

[steve_bank]

I am watching it happen in real time.

The Seattle so called 'autonomous zone protesting police action ended up with armed vigilante justice. Result, a car riddled with bullets and a dead kid. Surpession of free speech in the zone sometimes with force.

No due process. The power faction that emerged decided what was right and wrong.

A study in human dynamics. Power corrupts.

The graves of the parents in a cemetery near the zone of someone in my building's parent have been defaced.

It is out of control. Right now near where I live there are bands oif roving people ranting at police and throwing objects, and damaging property.

 

[fromderinside]

Wow. All those surmises without any evidence of being on dope.

 

[fromderinside]

I am watching it happen in real time.

The Seattle so called 'autonomous zone protesting police action ended up with armed vigilante justice. Result, a car riddled with bullets and a dead kid. Surpession of free speech in the zone sometimes with force.

No due process. The power faction that emerged decided what was right and wrong.

A study in human dynamics. Power corrupts.

The graves of the parents in a cemetery near the zone of someone in my building's parent have been defaced.

It is out of control. Right now near where I live there are bands oif roving people ranting at police and throwing objects, and damaging property.

Wasn't it in 1967 that someone put up a sign just south of Seattle "Last one to leave shut the door"? Yet, Boeing having caused this, went out and acquired a failing MDC 30 years later.

Seattleites can't get enough of them can we? Oh, wait ... Boeing went to Chicago.*

*^{_{I think that Boeing moved because they were in love Lockheed-Martin which moved from LA to Atlanta. So rather than coming south to LA they changed their minds and went to the Windy City. No way were they going to St. Louis. They already had that turkey. The real reason Boeing left Seattle was because they can't stand being compared with competent companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Starbucks. In conclusion all can't be bad because there are competent people up there.}}

 

[steve_bank]

That was purely economic. Before MS and Amazon as Boeing went so went he state.

 

[fromderinside]

It was both political and economic. Back in the day, 1964, I was chief strategist for democrat running Congress in SE Washington. We won by going all Mushroom cloud on our republican friends (Hanford area). My MG was decked out with No AuH20 and Bury Barry, both with a little girl picking flowers in front of a mushroom shaped cloud. In 1967 Washington had more flower children in Seattle area than did San Diego or Anaheim in California.

I think I acknowledged the before Microsoft with the 'turn off the lights' sign (it wasn't shut the door). I should have given Adobe a shout out as well.

I came up to Seattle to troubleshoot for Boeing Military T&E and Commercial R&M on everything from TQM to Man machine certification to Tactical Electronic systems Integration six times between 1998 and 2002. They didn't seem to be data driven enough. Boeing had a reputation for more of an engineer's touch and feel approach.

I think that's why Lockheed-Martin won the Advanced Tactical A/C contract over the MDC/Boeing team. My brother worked for Lockheed from 1980 to 1992 (early phase competition) while I was with PMTC (competition evaluation) , then MDC/Boeing from 1980 -2002 (early and phase two competition).

Not a lot to do with social justice. Very much to do with Engineering aspects of social science.

Back to the core issue. It's tough for politicians, particularly democrats, to choose between BLM and L&O when voting constituencies are involved. I share the Mayor's reticence. Hijacking by militants is always a potential problem with justified anti-authority social protest.

My view is that the fearful are always more sympathetic to racist responses. I believe that is why our Police forces now seem to look and act like military units.

Gotta thank Reagon for wiping social and mental services in the name of budget, for profit solutions, and status quo, donchathink?

We actually had a pretty good public mental health and drug intervention system before he came along.

I'm claiming the right of an old pfart to mentally wander around a bit.

 

[steve_bank]

Right now there are about 20 bicycle police lined up across from building.

 

[fromderinside]

Right now there are about 20 bicycle police lined up across from building.

It would be helpful if you used the citation I posted to show what you are talking about steve_bank

https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis....x.html?appid=94c31b66facc438b95d95a6cb6a0ff2e

 

[ronburgundy]

If anybody has doubts of whether the social justice warrior society is out of control, take a look at this.

"Social media platform Twitter is dropping the terms "master", "slave" and "blacklist" in favour of more inclusive language."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53273923

This is in the code. It's not in communication material. It's in the code, which nobody other than programmers see. These are also terms that are standardised and universal within programming. They are also useful because they are clear and descriptive. If you have two thingy's on a network and one is called "the master" and the other "the slave" there's no doubt about which does what.

It's also going to be expensive. These kinds of code changes cost a lot of money to push through. I don't think they're thought this through. I think this is something the communication department came up with without fully involving the nerds, because this is just dumb.

I'm a lefty... but right now my chips are being moved over on the conservative side because this sort of lunacy has to be stopped. It's Newspeak. Reality is being replaced by virtue signalling symbols. Progressivism is being forced upon us in Moaist people's courts. While China just turned Hong Kong into an actual totalitarian Big Brother state, Putin became president for life, and the West worries about whether or not code might offend the handful of black programmers that come into contact with it. I suspect that most of their programming is done in India anyway, by people who have no reason to be offended by the term "slave".

One company has chosen to stop using coding language with obvious and strong associations with slavery and concepts of "white" = good, "black" = bad. Even if it's historical coincidence (and it may not be) that "blacklisting"/"whitelisting" have meanings perfectly aligned with white supremacist ideology, the similarity in meaning makes the psychological association real and strong.

Also, it is ironic that one of your arguments against this is that only "a handful of black programmers" even see that coding language.
So, you think that a company being sensitive (arguably over sensitive) to the objective semantic overlap between these terms and racist ideology and racist historical events is a a bigger problem for society than the fact that due to that ideology and events blacks in America continue to be so poor and receive such poor education that they represent only a handful (4%) of programmers. You think that the left's concerns with the objectively rampant racism and white supremacy in the US which may lead to some over-sensitivity to language concerns warrants leaving the left for the very conservatism that has and still does promote real white supremacist ideology. Unless you OP is just an off the cuff drunken rant showing you over-reacting to someone else's potential over-reaction, then you aren't close to a liberal let alone a lefty.

 

[steve_bank]

In manufacturing the word jig was common for mechanical fixtures. It was phased out because it is also a slur.

 

[fromderinside]

So no more lefty jokes? It wound make me a person of the sinister attribute happy.

 

[Copernicus]

I don't believe that Twitter's overreaction to a somewhat misguided article on linguistic usage justifies the generalization that "the social justice warrior society is out of control". These efforts to reframe debates by changing language happen all the time, and they almost always go nowhere. The failed efforts of the Acadèmie Française prove that tails don't wag dogs when it comes to language change. Most people pay no attention to linguistic witch hunts.

 

[DrZoidberg]

If anybody has doubts of whether the social justice warrior society is out of control, take a look at this.

"Social media platform Twitter is dropping the terms "master", "slave" and "blacklist" in favour of more inclusive language."

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53273923

This is in the code. It's not in communication material. It's in the code, which nobody other than programmers see. These are also terms that are standardised and universal within programming. They are also useful because they are clear and descriptive. If you have two thingy's on a network and one is called "the master" and the other "the slave" there's no doubt about which does what.

It's also going to be expensive. These kinds of code changes cost a lot of money to push through. I don't think they're thought this through. I think this is something the communication department came up with without fully involving the nerds, because this is just dumb.

I'm a lefty... but right now my chips are being moved over on the conservative side because this sort of lunacy has to be stopped. It's Newspeak. Reality is being replaced by virtue signalling symbols. Progressivism is being forced upon us in Moaist people's courts. While China just turned Hong Kong into an actual totalitarian Big Brother state, Putin became president for life, and the West worries about whether or not code might offend the handful of black programmers that come into contact with it. I suspect that most of their programming is done in India anyway, by people who have no reason to be offended by the term "slave".

One company has chosen to stop using coding language with obvious and strong associations with slavery and concepts of "white" = good, "black" = bad. Even if it's historical coincidence (and it may not be) that "blacklisting"/"whitelisting" have meanings perfectly aligned with white supremacist ideology, the similarity in meaning makes the psychological association real and strong.

Also, it is ironic that one of your arguments against this is that only "a handful of black programmers" even see that coding language.
So, you think that a company being sensitive (arguably over sensitive) to the objective semantic overlap between these terms and racist ideology and racist historical events is a a bigger problem for society than the fact that due to that ideology and events blacks in America continue to be so poor and receive such poor education that they represent only a handful (4%) of programmers. You think that the left's concerns with the objectively rampant racism and white supremacy in the US which may lead to some over-sensitivity to language concerns warrants leaving the left for the very conservatism that has and still does promote real white supremacist ideology. Unless you OP is just an off the cuff drunken rant showing you over-reacting to someone else's potential over-reaction, then you aren't close to a liberal let alone a lefty.

Yeah, thinking that changing some symbolic words can lessen the effects of racism is retarded.

Black/white terminology has perhaps more to do with illumination than skin colour, perhaps?

Lessening the effects of racism requires class analysis. Otherwise you're only removing the symptom. Not the cause. All I see is theatre. Not any genuine attempts to stop racism

 

[DrZoidberg]

I don't believe that Twitter's overreaction to a somewhat misguided article on linguistic usage justifies the generalization that "the social justice warrior society is out of control". These efforts to reframe debates by changing language happen all the time, and they almost always go nowhere. The failed efforts of the Acadèmie Française prove that tails don't wag dogs when it comes to language change. Most people pay no attention to linguistic witch hunts.

Its just the latest example. I think it became pretty nuts a long time ago. Now it's just insane.