Social Justice out of control

[DrZoidberg]

They are not.

But some coders are the direct descendants of people who were subjected to the American version of slavery a little over 150 years ago, and still know stories about some of them, or at least their names and rough bios (genealogy is an amazingly popular hobby in the US).

Your failure to put yourself into their shoes doesn't make them deranged.

No living coders will tell you stories of their great-great-grandfather who was a Roman slave.

That's my whole point. I don't see what's so hard about it.

I maintain that you have a particularly US-centric view of this. You're taking your local experience and treating as a universal for all humanity. Slavery has been practiced all over the world and in every culture, and I'm pretty sure we all have our own association depending on where we live.

 

[Jokodo]

I highly doubt that. Most English speakers are NOT American.

Most native speakers are. Furthermore, people who know the names and surnames of recent(ish) ancestors who were slaves tend to have stronger associations with the term than people who only heard of it in history books.

I'm willing to bet you 1000 euros of mine against 10 of yours that most coders who fit that bill are indeed American.

India? There's way more native English speakers in India than USA. USA isn't even close.

Exactly where are you getting your facts? According to the 2011 census, only about a quarter million people in India spoke English as their first language, with another 130 million stating it as their second or third language. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-english-and-where-1557814101428.html

And without researching I'm pretty sure most native English speakers live in Africa. I think it's a native language to about half of all Africans.

Maybe you should research then. Most Africa belongs to the Francosphere, so English is, at best, a third language. Even in those countries where English is the primary language in commerce and education, only a minority speak it as their first language. In fact, the exclusive use of English (or French, as the case may be) in "higher" spheres, which many poor people don't speak, is a major factor solidifying social stratification in many places in Africa.

While the Atlantic slave trade was horrific for the Africans, it dwarfs the Arabian slave trade in Africa. The Atlantic slave trade only went on for a couple of centuries. The Arab one has been going strong for thousands of years, and is still ongoing.

And that is an argument for claiming that the term "slave" is fairly benign how?

I didn't look any of this up, but it's common knowledge.

2 out of 3 factual claims clearly wrong, one debatable (and irrelevant). Not a bad result for "common knowledge" at all - a lot of it tends to be false.

 

[Jokodo]

They are not.

But some coders are the direct descendants of people who were subjected to the American version of slavery a little over 150 years ago, and still know stories about some of them, or at least their names and rough bios (genealogy is an amazingly popular hobby in the US).

Your failure to put yourself into their shoes doesn't make them deranged.

No living coders will tell you stories of their great-great-grandfather who was a Roman slave.

That's my whole point. I don't see what's so hard about it.

I maintain that you have a particularly US-centric view of this. You're taking your local experience and treating as a universal for all humanity. Slavery has been practiced all over the world and in every culture, and I'm pretty sure we all have our own association depending on where we live.

I have never even been to the US.

This is, however, a thread about a policy decision by an American company. That alone makes the American experience more relevant than those elsewhere.

 

[Worldtraveller]

India? There's way more native English speakers in India than USA. USA isn't even close.

Exactly where are you getting your facts? According to the 2011 census, only about a quarter million people in India spoke English as their first language, with another 130 million stating it as their second or third language. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-english-and-where-1557814101428.html

And without researching I'm pretty sure most native English speakers live in Africa. I think it's a native language to about half of all Africans.

Maybe you should research then. Most Africa belongs to the Francosphere, so English is, at best, a third language. Even in those countries where English is the primary language in commerce and education, only a minority speak it as their first language. In fact, the exclusive use of English (or French, as the case may be) in "higher" spheres, which many poor people don't speak, is a major factor solidifying social stratification in many places in Africa.

While the Atlantic slave trade was horrific for the Africans, it dwarfs the Arabian slave trade in Africa. The Atlantic slave trade only went on for a couple of centuries. The Arab one has been going strong for thousands of years, and is still ongoing.

And that is an argument for claiming that the term "slave" is fairly benign how?

I didn't look any of this up, but it's common knowledge.

2 out of 3 factual claims clearly wrong, one debatable (and irrelevant). Not a bad result for "common knowledge" at all - a lot of it tends to be false.

Welcome to TFT, have you met "Dr." Zoidberg?

 

[Jokodo]

Exactly where are you getting your facts? According to the 2011 census, only about a quarter million people in India spoke English as their first language, with another 130 million stating it as their second or third language. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-english-and-where-1557814101428.html



Maybe you should research then. Most Africa belongs to the Francosphere, so English is, at best, a third language. Even in those countries where English is the primary language in commerce and education, only a minority speak it as their first language. In fact, the exclusive use of English (or French, as the case may be) in "higher" spheres, which many poor people don't speak, is a major factor solidifying social stratification in many places in Africa.

While the Atlantic slave trade was horrific for the Africans, it dwarfs the Arabian slave trade in Africa. The Atlantic slave trade only went on for a couple of centuries. The Arab one has been going strong for thousands of years, and is still ongoing.

And that is an argument for claiming that the term "slave" is fairly benign how?

I didn't look any of this up, but it's common knowledge.

2 out of 3 factual claims clearly wrong, one debatable (and irrelevant). Not a bad result for "common knowledge" at all - a lot of it tends to be false.

Welcome to TFT, have you met "Dr." Zoidberg?

Dr. I'm-a-lefty-but-I-will-defend-the-stupidest-conservative-arguments-because-stupid-arguments-are-my-thing?

 

[Jokodo]

Going back to your OP:

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

So a private US enterprise decides to divert a minuscule fraction of their revenue to changing terminology that they feel might be inappropriate in the US context. How is this any of your business? Why do you even care? And what does ancient Roman history have to do with any of that?

This is in the code. It's not in communication material. It's in the code, which nobody other than programmers see.

And the reason it is in the code is because it seemed like an apt and innocuous metaphor to a handful of predominantly white American lead engineers growing up in a largely segregated society who coined those terms back in the 1950s to 1970s when computer science came of age. The reason they even thought of those metaphors instead of any other equally apt pair of words is because the concepts felt familiar coming from their cultural knowledge of US history. What those terms might evoke for African-American programmers seeing them everyday wasn't even on their radar, and as far as I can tell, no-one's blaming them for it - not the engineers who instigated the change, not Twitter's management, not the people welcoming the change. The only proposition made by those "social justice warriors" you so fiercely oppose is that this isn't the 1960s anymore, and maybe in retrospect their choice of terms wasn't the most sensitive. If you think that's "out of control" or "deranged", you'll have some explaining to do.

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.

There's no doubt about which does what when they're called "leader" and "follower", or "allowlist" and "denylist" either. If anything, the proposed new terminology is even clearer and requires less historical and cultural context to assign an interpretation to someone hearing it for the first time. (For what it's worth, I don't think the background for "blacklist" or "whitelist" is racial, but "allowlist" and "denylist" are still clearer.)

It's also going to be expensive. These kinds of code changes cost a lot of money to push through.

Why don't you let that be a concern for Twitter's shareholders and costumers? Also, can you quantify "a lot of money", as a percentage of Twitter's annual revenue? Can you compare the figure to the cost of moving from one docstring convention to another, or from one Java version to another? I'm willing to bet a substantial sum that the cost will be minuscule in comparison. Where's your drunken rant about about the lunacy of keeping up with the most recent Java releases?

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.

You're wrong about that, and all it took to verify it is to follow up the links in the article you yourself provided. The policy change was spearheaded by a pair of engineers by the names of Regynald Augustin and Kevin Oliver. Maybe you should read more nerdy sources? https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially-loaded-tech-terms-like-master-slave/

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.

A textbook example of whataboutism. Yes, there's a lot of problems in this world that are more pressing than whether a subordinate device is called "slave" or "follower". I don't see where Regynald Augustin, Kevin Oliver, or anyone else for that matter has claimed otherwise. Most of those more substantial problems are, however, not for Twitter to solve.

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".

They have no reason to be offended by the the term "follower" either. So it's a win-win: Where previously some people were offended while others weren't, now no-one has reason to be offended. Other than whiny "I'm-a-lefty-butts" who get offended by change (any change pretty much) for the sake of getting defending the good old ways (a.k.a. conservatives in the narrowest sense of the word).