What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in my native language. It is so weird, because it adds yet another layer of distance between "us" and the "normal" people. You can almost feel how the stumbling-word is making communication even more awkward. I (and almost all of my friends with a similar disability) make a point of letting people know that we actually prefer the word blind over everything else, and not even that does put people at ease.
It sounds a bit provocative, but it feels like that: The language terror they were subjected to has made them so unsecure that they actually dont want to hear that blind people have no issue with being called blind. They somehow continue to argue, sometimes not wanting to accept that and going on to use weird language.
Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller.
It is so condescending to believe your own language-police more then the person you are talking to. Yet, the peer pressure seems to be so high that this actually happens. Sad.
I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending. Minorities don't need white Knights to save them, neither do the disabled. If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem. But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide that a group as a whole needs saving. It very much forces otherness on people and to your point furthers the divide. it forces us to see them as different.
Side note, and this is completely off topic and I really mean this in the most positive way but you typing here has completely altered my perception of the need for following web standards for accessibility. I don't know any blind people in real life so really just assumed that accessibility standards really weren't worth the effort as they wouldn't make a difference. But here you are reading and responding in a manner that's probably better than I do. I am 100% on board now. You opened my mind today, thanks for that.
Web accessibility is indeed a very important thing for people like me. I am aware we are a very small minority with rather special needs in this regard, but believe me, investing in accessibility and therefore allowing people with visual and motor disabilities to interact with the digital world can have unexpectedly wonderful consequences for those benefiting from it. It is not often that I manage to pull tech people into this topic such that it actually lasts, but the few I know have made quite a difference. I am pretty thrilled to hear I might have sparked an interest in web accessibility in you. Thanks for caring! Its a wonderful rabbit hole.
I'm only colour-blind, but I am too, benefitting from accessibility work meant primarily for blind people.
And so do the elderly. Which will be all of us in the future (except those who plan to live fast and die young). Humanity is getting older and older on average, too.
Thats right. My girlfriend works for an assistive technology reseller. A growing number of their customers are elderly people who end up using technologies designed for the blind to keep on communicating. iOS with VoiceOver comes to mind. This was designed for the blind. But a determined elderly person whoes vision has deteriorated enough can also use it to avoid being cut off from everything.
I'm interested as well. I run a small science club for kids, mainly coding and electronics. Accessibility and being more inclusive is a very old bullet point on my long list of things to do, but I never found a place to start. Do you have any recommendation on where to learn this?
Hard question, because the field so diverse. In a sense, accessibility is much more then just trying to make computers useable for the blind. At a fundamental level, it is about making software flexible enough to be used in different modalities. People with very little motor capabilities are quite capable of looking at a screen, but they need help moving the mouse and perhaps a good predictive onscreen keyboard to be able to type. Blind people on the other hand are mostly quite content with a standard keyboard, but they need a totally different way of output, like tactile braille or synthesized speech. For the output part, it boils down to having an API which makes a third party app (like a screen reader) able to traverse the logical structure of what the application is presenting on-screen. That is mostly a sort of tree which reflects which widget contains what, and the different types of content. Such an API, however, is not only required for screen readers, but also very useful for things like automated testing, for instance. So a web automation or testing framework could actually be written on top of the accessibility APIs, and sometimes actually is. I am rumbling about this to get you in the right mindset. Its so hard to not see the forest because of all the trees around...
That said, if we're talking about web accessibility, the obvious recommendation is the WAI WCAG. Maybe not the best reference for learning on how to implement things, but its a good start.
Depending on the platform you're at home with, there are screen readers (NVDA, Orca, BRLTTY) which are open source and can be studied. On the user side, and on the "how is this implemented" side.
Installing NVDA on Windows and turning the monitor off is a good way to get your feet wet. It might feel strange at first, but you will notice that things can actually get done this way. Its also a good way to test a website if you have no specific accessibility knowhow yet. Just try to navigate and read its contents.
> [...] and turning the monitor off is a good way to get your feet wet.
Is it weird that I, as someone with normal sight, had never thought of that as a simple way of testing whether your software (and the whole operating system together with it) works correctly with screen readers? It's like there's some sort of unconscious bias which links typing on a computer with its monitor being turned on.
And I lived through the times when most computers didn't come with any pointing device, which led to most software back then being accessible to keyboard-only users (notable exceptions being things like Paintbrush, which required a mouse), so I understand the link between the lack of a device and software being designed to work well without that device.
There seems to be a quite widespread confusion regarding input and output devices when it comes to assistive technologies for the blind. I am being asked a lot how my "braille keyboard" works. Even by people from the tech industry. Thats when I typically gently explain that a good secretary doesn't need to look at their keyboard, the faster you type, the more you need to type blindly. Most assistive technologies for the blind are about output, and not about input... But it is frequently being confused.
> In a sense, accessibility is much more then just trying to make computers useable for the blind. At a fundamental level, it is about making software flexible enough to be used in different modalities. [...] For the output part, it boils down to having an API which makes a third party app (like a screen reader) able to traverse the logical structure of what the application is presenting on-screen. [...] So a web automation or testing framework could actually be written on top of the accessibility APIs, and sometimes actually is.
I agree. If the features are well-designed, then they can be good for many uses, whether or not you are blind.
You could also add pronouncing file (especially if a document is using unusual words), it is useful if you are blind and using synthesized speech, but also if you are not blind and do not know how is the word pronounced then you can easily learn. (Likewise, if you watch television then you can put on caption in case you do not know how to spell some unuusal word (such as someone's name). Captions could also be useful for a "caption scrollback" menu to display prior captions in a list, although I have never seen this implemented, but I think it would be useful.)
Another situation where speech synthesis is often used (by people who are not blind) is GPS-based navigation systems. They often pronounce the street names wrong, so adding data for pronouncing, and then implementing that properly, would be better.
(I have mentioned before that I think that adding a "ARIA view" (with user-defined CSS) might be a best way to make a consistent visual display which uses ARIA instead of the visual styles defined by the web page author (widgets, etc can also be used, and would also be consistent instead of each web page having its own widget styles). However, I have not seen such a thing implemented in a good way.)
I'm currently debating with myself whether I should create GUI programs (with the main code written in Rust) using Qt or Tauri. Tauri is a Rust based GUI framework based on a webview, similar to Electron, although it can use the OS's native web renderer [1]. Do you think one would be better than the other with regards to accessibility? Or is it mostly a question of how I, as a programmer, make use of the tools? For context, those are currently just small tools and utilities I make on my own and provide as Open Source.
I don't currently have Windows. Is there a good way for me to test accessibility on Linux? As a fallback, I will get myself Windows once I port the tools to Windows, so I could test accessibility then.
I have no experience with webview based local apps and their accessibiility, nor did I ever look at Tauri. So to assess if it works, I'd have to check. I am a bit reluctant to recommend Qt because they have let me down in the past at times, but all in all, Qt is mostly accessible, even cross-platform.
Which brings me to your second question. Linux has a GUI accessibility API as well, the AT-SPI. GNOME Orca is the screen reader to use on Linux. If your distro configures things right by default, you should be able to access your Qt application with Orca as a screen reader on Linux.
I recommend taking a look at https://teachaccess.org/ as a starting point. They are non profit focused on bridging the gap between accessibility and education.
I think they are mostly focused on college level exercises, but if your kids are doing coding I'd imagine their tutorials would be something to take a look at: https://teachaccess.org/initiatives/tutorial/
As a complete aside for anyone reading this post, I think of improving accessibility as the "curb-cut effect", curb cuts (those ramps on sidewalks while cross streets) were created to improve urban access for those in wheel chairs, but also make it easier to use strollers, bikes, carts, and really for everyone walking in a built environment. When we as technologists make design decisions to make things more accessible I believe we end up with better products for everyone.
After reading Ian Hickson's proposal[1] to kill HTML and replace it with proprietary, binary content structure, I'm starting to think accessibility APIs might end up being the future of open, interoperable web publishing.
One way to look at accessibility is that it’s a side effect of a well designed data exchange format. The same type of semantic document structure that let screen readers work, or increasing font size, is allowing all kinds of advantages to the user, such as adblocking and customizations. Every year that the state of software and apps deteriorate further, I am more and more impressed how the initial web struck such an incredible balance of all facets of a healthy software ecosystem. It stands as one of the marvels of the world, imo, that it remains virtually the same today, surviving the most vicious attacks on openness by both mega corps and governments alike.
Hey man, what software do you recommend for screen reading? I'm trying to test my websites on accessibility and I've tried JAWS and NVDA so far (while using Lynx to navigate it) but found them a bit confusing. I'm not sure how one would use them in practice to navigate a site like Hacker news, which is relatively simple.
I am not quite sure I understand. If you're really trying to use JAWS or NVDA to work with lynx on the web, you are mixing things up. There are basically two worlds for blind users: the "old" text-only terminal interfaces thing which started in the good old DOS days at least for me) and was kept alive in Linux terminal applications. And the GUI world, where you have a screen reader interact with the various elements an application is putting on-screen. In the first world, the screen reader basically just sees a grid of characters. In the second world, the screen reader needs to reconstruct a text representation from the widget info it can obtain.
In other words, if you want to work on the web, with something like NVDA as a screen reader, you want to use Firefox or some other modern browser, not lynx.
If you are like me, spending 99% of your time in tmux, lynx is a nice thing to use, but there is nothing really accessibility specific here. Lynx is just a terminal application. And if you are a skilled blind user used to dealing with plain-text grid-stuff, you can use it just fine for whatever it still works for...
> If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem.
It's a pretty big cognitive load though, to remember what everyone finds or doesn't find offensive. This is what bothers me about the recent obsession with pronouns - I have enough trouble remembering people's names; and now I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person? That's the complexity I don't want.
We have externalized what used to be an internal issues
Offense is a you problem, not a me problem. We have abandoned the axiom of "sticks and stones" and replaced it with "words are violence" or even worse "silence is violence"
Today it no longer enough to be "tolerant" you have to actively affirm, support, and validate everything about everyone at all times and support their emotional state no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.
> Offense is a you problem, not a me problem. We have abandoned the axiom of "sticks and stones"
I think you miss the point of "sticks and stones". The point is not that it's ok to say whatever you want to anyone else. The point of "sticks and stones" is not to let other people bring down your self-esteem.
Other people will intentionally try to denigrate you. They'll call you "stupid". They'll call you "ugly". Or they may call you a racial slur. That's all unacceptable. That's a "me" problem for the speaker. The point of "sticks and stones", on the other hand, is to resist internalizing these external insults and degradations. It's to put on a virtual suit of armor to protect you from verbal attacks — and let's be clear, they're real attacks.
You don't just "accidentally" beat someone with physical sticks and stones, right? The intention is to hurt, to break their bones, as it were. That's the analogy, with intentionally hurtful words.
> Today it no longer enough to be "tolerant" you have to actively affirm, support, and validate everything about everyone at all times and support their emotional state no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.
That’s absolutely not true though - you only have to affirm/support/validate people’s identities and emotional states when their identity/emotions aligns with the zeitgeist; if those things contradict the zeitgeist, then affirmation/support/validation is somewhere between optional and evil.
Most definitely not. Of course people need to work on themselves to avoid being offended.
But if you communicate with other people, it's because you want to achieve something. Probably not offending the target (or else fuck you I guess ;-)). So, usually, offense gets in the way, so you should care about not offending your target. And beyond this, as human beings, we usually care not to hurt other human beings.
It's a we problem.
> no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.
Do you have example of this? Of course you are expected to show some empathy/sympathy, but I've never seem people impose unrealistic expectations.
How about the push to rename words in technology that have been in use for decades, like changing the default git repo from master to main.
or the parent comment I replied to originally -- "This is what bothers me about the recent obsession with pronouns - I have enough trouble remembering people's names; and now I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person? " for which there is not even any social indicators of this, and for a given person could change at any given time from week to week or day to day. A person that changes their pronouns daily seems to me to have an unrealistic expectation that people will be able to keep track of that.
> Some people adopted main, some people kept master
Some people used “trunk” since well before Git existed. If ever there was an example of how the umbrage at renaming things was baselessly manufactured, master -> main has to be right up there.
Have you come across anyone who changed their pronouns daily and expected you to keep track of it?
It annoys me how often this discussion gets bogged down in weird hypothetical scenarios. In my experience, people who use nonstandard pronouns (or pronouns that you might not guess from their appearance) are completely reasonable about it. They only ask that you make a genuine effort to remember the correct pronoun choice – which is not very much to ask. It's certainly no more work than, say, remembering the correct pronunciation of their name.
I might add that almost anyone will be ok with singular 'they', if you're ever unsure, as it is gender neutral.
I have met people like this. And heard someone correct someone else for using it wrong. In fact, when during introductions, this person said their pronoun so loudly that I forgot their name (partly because it made no sense to put two pronouns after a name, so it spent a lot of time trying to parse the grammar, as I had just recently moved to a very Progressive city and it was the first time I had encountered it personally).
There is another group I am in that has name tags and there are stickers with pronouns I've never even heard of (something like ver/ver, xe,xer, etc.).
I cant imagine ever getting to the point where I care enough what people call me to make a big deal out of it. I work with people that have been saying my name comedically wrong for months now and I couldn't care less. I have a couple other people that think my last name is my first name and call me by that. Its hilarious. Imagine getting upset or aggressive with someone just because they don't remember the pronouns you made up. That's a you problem, not a me problem.
I don't know the name's of 75% of the people I work with (I work with a 100+ people a week) and I really have no time or inclination to make the effort. If someone makes up pronouns that don't correspond to their image they are going to get mad at me because I am pretty much incapable of remembering their name let alone their pronouns. If I remember, cool I will use them but I'm really not going to spend hours practicing. Its not an intentional insult, I want everyone to be happy, I just don't have the effort or inclination in me to expend on it.
So many ifs in this thread! It sounds like no-one has ever got really angry with you in reality for using the wrong pronouns, right? I’ve never experienced anything other than a polite correction. The person you’re replying to also doesn’t describe any such experience. They said (1) that someone they met loudly emphasized their preferred pronouns and (2) that they went to an event where some people put neopronouns on their name badges.
Those don’t sound like people who are changing their preferred pronouns daily, unless I’m misunderstanding. You’re just talking about people who use non-standard or difficult-to-guess pronouns.
The more times I read through your story the less there is to it. Someone introduced themselves, said their pronouns, and you didn’t remember their name. Ok, so what?
Neopronouns are an interesting case, but my previous comment about ‘they’ applies. It’s gender neutral, so use ‘they’ if you forget which more specific pronoun is applicable.
To some extent this is a hill I’m willing to die on. Singular they is pretty entrenched usage now, and as it implies nothing about its referent’s gender, I don’t see how someone could legitimately object to being referred to in that way.
However, if someone tells me that they don’t want me to refer to them using singular they (something which has never once actually happened to me outside of arguments on the internet!), then I would respect their wishes.
If you live in an English speaking country, listen closely for a week or two. You’ll probably find that people around you are already (without conscious intention) using singular they to refer to individuals of known gender.
I also wonder if you might not be undermining your own line of argument elsewhere in the thread. If you get to be fussy about being referred to using singular they (which is certainly unobjectionable from a grammatical and semantic point of view in modern English), then presumably everyone else gets to be picky about their pronouns too.
The singular they is entrenched when you don't know who the person was ("I hope they realize they left their umbrella here and come back and get it.") It is not entrenched at all for referring to an individual who is standing right there.
I recall being contacted by a distressed neighbor who had been referred to as "they" in a thread on NextDoor. She has a name that could be male or female (it's short for different things), but her photo was unmistakably female. She was offended that someone referred to her as "they" and asked me if her photo looked at all male.
I would also imagine that someone who is presenting as a particular gender and wishes to be referred to as that gender could also be offended to be referred to as "they" because it could imply that the person is in-between, and not successfully presenting as their desired gender.
Lastly, people who are unaware of the changes in pronoun usage (older people, people who don't interact with people in liberal enclaves) may be confused by usage of they. They may think you're talking about multiple people, for example.
It is in fact quite common (at least in some parts) to use singular they for people of known gender. I hear it all the time here in London. Here’s an abstract that covers some of the patterns of variation: https://www.colorado.edu/event/cuny2019/sites/default/files/... There’s even an example in Shakespeare: “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend.” It would clearly be ok to use ‘his’ here, but we find ‘their’ nonetheless.
> could also be offended to be referred to as "they" because it could imply that the person is in-between
‘They’ is gender neutral; its use implies nothing about a person’s gender. If someone gets offended anyway then the simplest solution is obvious - use their preferred pronoun. But taking offense at singular they doesn’t seem to be something common, at least in my experience. It’s certainly the option that’s least likely to cause serious offense if you can’t remember (or were never told) a person’s preferred pronouns.
If we’re ok with cis people being fussy about being referred to using singular they, then presumably we must also allow trans or non-binary people to be fussy about their own preferred pronouns.
> [older people] may be confused
Confused != offended. But singular they has such a long history that I think such confusion is rather unlikely in practice. (Are older people confused by the Shakespeare quote above?)
> taking offense at singular they doesn’t seem to be something common
That's probably because most people don't refer to people as "they" except when specifically asked to. If people went around using "they" as the standard pronoun when referring to known people, there would be much more offense.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree on that point. I often hear 'they' used in that way and have not see anyone take offense to it. Nor can I see any logical reason why people should take offense. There are plenty of languages where pronouns are gender neutral (e.g. spoken Chinese). People who speak these languages seem to do ok without constantly explicitly referencing each other's gender. There's a huge difference, both logically and emotionally, between misgendering someone and simply not making reference to their gender.
By the way, I am totally fine with not using singular they to refer to people who are genuinely offended by it. I just have not actually encountered any such person outside the class of 'argumentative people on the internet'. For this reason I think that 'use singular they if unsure' is good, though not infallible, advice.
> There's a huge difference, both logically and emotionally, between misgendering someone and simply not making reference to their gender.
Referring to someone as a "they" would be considered misgendering to a lot of people. It is not "not making reference to their gender" because the vast majority of people who want to be referred to as "they" are not cisgender. Referring to someone in this way suggests that you think they are not cisgender.
> I just have not actually encountered any such person outside the class of 'argumentative people on the internet'.
The neighbor who approached me after having been referred to as "they" was not an argumentative person on the internet. She was someone (who lives in a very liberal area, BTW) who was perplexed and offended to have been referred to that way.
I see what you mean, but I think it's slightly the wrong analysis on a linguistic level. 'They' doesn't generally introduce a presupposition of non-binarity (either semantically or via pragmatic inference). If it did, it would be hard to account for the innumerable examples of 'they' being used with unambiguously masculine and feminine quantificational antecedents.
For this reason I think that people who are offended by being referred to by 'they' are wrong to be offended. I think they're wrong in a way that, say, a trans woman is not wrong to be offended if someone insists on using 'he'. In the former case, the person may feel that they are being misgendered – but only on the basis of a dodgy linguistic analysis. Of course, we should accommodate people's pronoun preferences, regardless of whether we agree with their underlying logic in any given case.
The story about your neighbor doesn't really make sense to me. Surely it occurred to her that the other forum poster might not have cared much what her gender was, or have paid much attention to her photo, or simply didn't care to take a guess even if she appeared clearly female. To interpret this as intentional misgendering seems a bit nuts. If she was simply worried about whether she appeared clearly feminine in the photo, then that's an understandable anxiety, but one that has little to do with singular they. (If singular they were off limits then I guess the poster might have used 'he' instead, which hardly seems better.)
> For this reason I think that people who are offended by being referred to by 'they' are wrong to be offended
My understanding is that these days, we are not allowed to opine on whether others are wrong to feel offended. In modern parlance, I'd say that you don't understand why they're offended. It seems you're trying very hard not to, considering that this term is not the preferred term of reference for practically anyone who is cisgender.
Are we not? I’m doing it right now and no-one has come to arrest me yet.
If the best you can do is tell me that I have to accede to the ineffable and indefinite reasons for your neighbor taking offense, then I suppose the discussion is over. (Of course I do accede in practice - I’m not going to refer to her as ‘they’ just to be a dick.)
If you really believe that people are entitled to be arbitrarily offended by pronouns, then you can have no objection to trans or non-binary people being arbitrarily fussy about their use. I mean, I’m “woke” by HN standards and am all in favor of respecting people’s pronoun preferences. But even I don’t believe that the subject is entirely in the realm of subjective feelings of offense and beyond rational discourse.
The point in this case was simply that singular they isn't a recent phenomenon. This is relevant when considering the (probably incorrect) claim that singular they is confusing for older generations.
In any case, my mention of Shakespeare was an aside and not crucial to the overall argument of my post. So it is arguably you who are missing the point.
Nice example. So the photo should be enough to infer the gender, and the person somehow expected that, failing it, was offended. Very nice. Imagine how a blind person must feel, in this social minefield? Thats exactly a problem we have. Given unspecific voices and unusual names, we are left pretty much out in the cold regarding how to address someone. We cant just look at the body or clothing.
I would not call anyone the N-word but would ask for a brown paper bag if I needed it at the grocery store. I have personally never met someone that is offended by the use of eg. colors as a concept but yet some people are trying to remove them from language.
You can name a branch master on git to your hearts content. We still have branches named master. We still have stuff we refer to as "whitelist" even though that was never an accurate descriptor for it in the first place.
This shit isn't banned. Nobody stops you from using them.
Companies now have "inclusive language" policies. There are dashboards that track team compliance and people that cheer this stuff on.
Master branch gets renamed to main meanwhile one can freely talk about how they used their MasterCard to buy a new Jazzmaster guitar that they keep in their master bedroom with a Master lock on it and they're almost done with the master of their new album showing off their mastery of musical and production that they learned taking lessons on MasterClass. Did I mention there's a cover of Master of Puppets?
It would be unconstitutional in the US to ban it, the question or comment thread is not about being illegal to use the word..
The issue the social pressure against these terms, and the ever changing landscape one political segment of the population has in being forever offended by everything
This entire comment thread should be a master class in logical fallcies as every reply shifts the goal posts back and forth....
Which i suspect is the end goal as that way no one actually have to address the underlying issues of compelled / socially enforced speech and the ongoing attacks on free expression on top of the ever shrinking mental health of the population has society coddles people into believing everyone else has to manage an individuals mental health instead of having to harden your own mind and come to terms with the fact the life is rarely fair, kind, nor do people (nor should) about your "feelings"
> This shit isn't banned. Nobody stops you from using them.
Speak for yourself. I had a PR rejected because I named a variable `blacklist` and was unaware that it's now considered a social faux pas. Of course, changing it to `blocklist` was simple enough, but wasted a couple hours because I had to ping the person again after finding out the PR was rejected, fixing it, retesting the code to make sure it didn't break stuff, pushing the changes, waiting for those tests to rerun, and then finally waiting for the person to re-review the code.
It feels a bit hypocritical to make this sort of proclamation on a social media site with extremely strict moderation.
Almost as though this isn't as simple a topic as "stick and stones" and that everyone has different tolerances for what they'll put up with depending on the setting and context.
> I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person?
No? Same grammar regardless of who is near, just need to remember which pronouns to designate which people, which:
- is the intuitive one for most people
- the asked pronoun for the few people who have pronouns that don't match your intuition.
(I also have troubles with remembering names, but pronouns are fine)
And for not implying a gender when speaking of someone for who we don't the gender, it's a constant exercise that also does not depend on the vicinity of a given person.
I work with maybe 100 people on a consistent basis. I probably know 25 of their names. Many of these interactions are random one offs, large meetings, etc. Many of them are foreign (to me) compounding my difficulty with their names. In addition I'm remote so can't associate names and faces, everyone is just white text on a black background. If any portion of this group started requesting I use varied pronouns I would probably lose my job in short order. Not because I don't care but because I am so incredibly busy I simply don't have the mental reserves to do it. Currently I am regularly working weekends and until 4 in the morning. I'm burnt. To expect me to somehow remember people's pronouns is a mission impossible.
I don't remember individual interactions with many of my coworkers at all, they all blur together.
If work wants me to do it then they'll need to reduce my workload by half just so my mind can absorb it.
You situation doesn't seem very healthy regardless of the topic at hand. I hope you'll be able to find a way to get a lighter workload.
Remote too, but I met most people in person at least once, we use avatars, and definitely don't work with 100 people.
That said I know a few trans people, the number of people I know with pronouns that don't match the name is 0. The number of people wanting the equivalent of they in my language is so small I can remember it easily.
Why would you need to know someone's pronouns just to speak to them.
This is what I do not get, these pronouns refer to someone in the 3rd person and do not affect your conversation with them in anyway. They could easily be referring to you in all sorts of derogatory manner, worse than that of the wrong pronoun, "Dickhead Dave". etc. etc.
I myself have a name that's most used with the opposite gender, I am reminded of this atleast on a weekly basis by others in society. Them accidentally referring to me as the wrong gender does not bother me in the slightest, firstly they did not know/it's not out of disrespect and secondly, why should it matter? What is wrong with being a woman if I am a man and vice versa?
Unless someone is publishing something about someone, there is very little need to know this upfront. If interactions are frequent, you can tell them if they didn't already know as your bond would be deeper. And if it's an issue you can tell them.
It's much like the whole idea of cultural misappropriation, a twisted idea that basically encourages segregation/apartheid. It's as simple as don't be a dickhead about someone's culture (don't demean it) is the common sense, age old and correct solution, not that new thing.
They requires effort... or just using they left and right for everyone, who needs pronouns when they exists anyway? Or better yet, avoid using pronouns by using the name over and over.
That is what I do, not he, not she, not it, not especial ones. Only they, they supremacy.
Repeating the name over and over would be cumbersome.
I would agree with always using a genderless pronoun, the gender should almost never matter, but I would probably be in for endless debates if I started to do this now.
I agree that would be an actual progressive agenda. But people wanting me to call them with another pronoun where I can no longer use biological cues is just cementing gender roles. Because if I present as a man but say I am a woman you just also gotta accept that since a woman does not need to conform to some societal gender role. If a guy dresses up like a woman he can still be a he, maybe he just likes skirts and nail polish. If a woman can be whatever she wants what does being a woman even mean except biology. If you want to assume a gender role previously tied to sex it clearly reinforces the idea that gender roles are an actual immutable category. How you can at the same time also hold the belief that biology is not doesn’t make any sense to me.
Maybe it is the just deserved revenge on a society that ties so much to sex and gender roles that logically has no relation to it. I am talking about things like job expectations or assuming competence at random skills, division of domestic responsibilities etc. I cannot believe though that this fixation on gender identity continues forever. It just doesn’t seem like a sensible end state.
> But people wanting me to call them with another pronoun where I can no longer use biological cues is just cementing gender roles
I believe there's more to this. IIUC, for some (most?) trans people, there's actually something, probably related to their biology, that makes them feel as the gender they were not assigned at birth. They have may look like one gender, but feel like the other one: gender dysphoria [1].
These people might be fighting more for solving this issue than for getting rid of the gender roles. Some would actually transition to the other sex for this, though I would expect trans people to also be more familiar (and sensitive?) to these gender identity questions, since they had to think about them.
Would gender dysphoria be less of an issue in a society that would not have such gender-assigned roles? Open question for me.
Now, it would be best if a trans people could directly speak about this, because this stuff is mostly theoretical for me, I haven't experienced it first-hand.
Your understanding is largely right, though I'd expand "look like one gender" to "be perceived and treated as one gender". I regularly confuse the hell out of people with my obviously feminine name and appearance and very deep voice.
> Would gender dysphoria be less of an issue in a society that would not have such gender-assigned roles? Open question for me.
Depends on the person, I think. Many trans people still would. I probably would've just shaved a bunch of body hair off and started wearing skirts and been done with it.
As for pronouns, "he" is just another sound people use to refer to other people. It has no inherent meaning beyond what we ascribe to it. I don't use it because society does ascribe a lot of meaning to it that doesn't apply to me - the same sort of feeling a man would get from being called "she". If genders weren't so much of a thing in society, I can't imagine myself caring nearly as much, though maybe in that world we'd all use the same pronoun anyway.
But there's a whole spectrum of trans people - in the same way you don't really grok dysphoria, I don't really grok e.g. genital dysphoria, so I can't and don't intend to speak for anyone else here.
I have a random question and I really mean no offence by it, I just want to get the opinion of a transexual person on something I have wondered. I know this question is out of left field. My apologies for asking but you are the only trans identifying person in the thread and are answering questions. Please feel very much in your rights to ignore me, I really do mean no offence with the question. I will not take your answer as representative of trans people as a whole.
Do you think people can be trans racial? Should society be accepting of it? For example a white person identify as black and shade their skin to pass? Why or why not?
Again feel free to ignore me, I'm not going to argue with your response I'm just curious about your perspective as you have a very different life experience than me. I am not trans anything its just a random thing I have pondered occasionally and wanted to get a trans persons opinion. I know its a loaded question so again feel free to ignore me.
I take no offense to respectfully asked questions, just as a general principle.
I have no idea, though. I've never considered that before, or even heard of it. It's hard for me to comprehend why anyone would care what race they are, but also holds up the hands of a very obviously white person
I see no reason to not let people do whatever makes them happy, though, even if I don't understand it. That's all I ask of other people for gender, no reason I shouldn't extend that courtesy to other people.
In English, "they" has two main purposes: Theoreticals where sex doesn't matter, and as a gentle nudge to the person you're talking to that you don't really know the person you're talking about. That second one is completely lost when you just use "they" for everyone.
Though I haven't felt the need for this so far, nothing comparable in French, annoying to have to stop to say the equivalent of "he or she, btw?". I guess we could use iel now. Still sounds new and weird to most people but it might become familiar at some point.
I've seen people using -@ as a suffix in Spanish to cover both the -a and -o forms of gendered words. I have no idea how it's pronounced, and it's probably comically inconvenient in actual use, but I have to admit it looks mildly clever.
I can't speak towards how other people, particularly minorities or the disabled think, but, as a woman, I hate the unintentional "othering" of people trying to do the right thing. I am typically the only woman at work, and people will often correct others who use terms like "guys" with statements like "guys or girls". I understand that they are doing it with good intentions and don't get angry, but to me it just serves to drive home the point that I am different. I am not like the others.
As a "minority" I completely agree with you. IMO, the White Knights target the "others" for an opportunity to virtue signal. It got old after the first time it happened.
I think that's not the only reason, sometimes not a reason at all.
Instead, 1, sometimes, someone is looking to make a career, or get a job, make money. And then, in identity politics, they might see an opportunity. Career, status, money then being a goal, and any division a side effect.
And, 2, I'm not saying that identity politics is or would always be bad or anything like that. So many unfairness in the world, to try to correct.
Well, it's a newish power niche that's getting exploited.
(One (postmodern) interpretation is that it's yet another "society of control" in crisis. Basically, the old tools that provided stability (social conventions, morals, beliefs/prejudices) all used to look like big formalish institutions, from family-school-factory-military-prison, and you were either in the system or completely out of it. But as this system of systems post-WWII has "eaten the world" it's now bound to face its own limitations, hence the crisis. Hence all the reforms, real and so-called ones.)
The niche is (was) that most people has (had) only a super basic over-simplistic belief about language, which could be summed up as "something something the n-word". Instead of the more correct "when talking to/about someone it's very disrespectful to call them names they don't like".
In general, creating division between classes, races, religious groups presents opportunities for individuals to gather power by taking up the cause for one group. By establishing an “other” you have an enemy to rally support for your leadership. This is the basis of power for every demagogue from the Cleon in Athens to Joe McCarthy and the American Red Scare. This is also a core theme in Orwell’s 1984.
In the context of the OPs topic, there are those who honestly are trying to improve the world, but many people have new found careers and political power created by the division on both the Right and Left.
I mean, this sets off my satire alarms but wouldn't that be a worthy goal? We can cynically deride all attempts to connect humanity as worthless hippy mumbo jumbo, and while I think perfect adherence would be impossible, I think a step or two in that direction is both possible and beneficial for us. This cynical attitude (assuming satire) is exactly the type of thing preventing us from making that kind of progress.
Call me a cynic but I am all for that. And afterwards you encounter the flat earthers and the holocaust deniers and the Putins and Alex Jones of the world and all kinds of other extremists in all kinds of extremes of all directions. And then it's not so simple.
While partially true, what most fail to see is that identity politics is played by virtually everyone. It’s just “your” side is the right approach and “not really identity politics”.
Identity politics has been the bedrock of American politics since before the Mayflower Pilgrims[1] landed at Plymouth rock, and hasn't ever stopped for even a day. Any claims of recency says a lot about the speaker rather than reality.
1. That they were "pilgrims" is enough evidence. All the jey moments in American history are underpinned by "identity politics": the the 13 colonies, manifest destiny, expansinf west, the declaration of independence, slavery, civil war, reconstruction - all of it.
The absolute worst incarnation of this is "latinx". Don't worry latin world, the english speaking world is here once again to tell you how backwards your entire language and culture is! The absolute height of "offensive sensitivity" in my opinion.
> But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide that a group as a whole needs saving
If this isn't one of the core problems with every aspect of society...
>It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them.
It also help give the later a role, some power over others (policing various such language and issues, using it against their enemies -out of good nature of course, sure), and sometimes, a full career...
I think that people feel increasingly alienated. They feel bad so they search for their special "community". In doing that they alienate themselves further from average person. They create terminology and adopt language for their niche with clear disregard of any real people and issues.
I have been told in no uncertain terms that the word “minority” is offensive, as it has come to have pejorative use. No alternative term was suggested, rather that one should refer to specific groups of people with their specific terms, and never generalise.
Additionally, “white knight” I have also been told off for, for the reasons you might expect.
In both of these cases (actually, almost every case I can think of) my language was being policed by, um, materially unencumbered birthgivers of reduced melanin.
I love the term white knight specifically because it's offensive to those I reference with it and because it does such a great job describing my view of them and ironically their unconcious view of themselves. Also the amusing thing is that they are always white.
I feel like, Materially Unencumbered Birth Gives of Reduced Melanin, is approaching an actual usable acronym for the typical pejorative, Karen. I bet chatgpt could bridge the gap
I don't see white women standing out in their behaviour, but they sure will always remain an acceptable group to beat up on without losing your progressive or otherwise credentials.
Karen at this point is always pejorative and pretty much just not well hidden sexism at best.
That's been the most impactful change of the entire progressive movement. It's now ok to be sexist and racist against white women. It's feminism stood on its head. The reduction of white women to a meme has been incredible to watch. No idea why anyone would be for this.
... but ... are "group of academics [..] sit around and decide that a group as a whole needs saving"? (Yes, probably some are, academia always has a few truly crazy people.)
Mostly they parrot the same "old tautologies" (like language matters, structural issues are real, people's personal prejudices manifest in many ways, etc) in various new forms, shapes, phrasings.
However, that doesn't mean they are wrong. (Nor that they are automatically right.)
white knights are not academics, they are usually the walking-talking examples of severe Dunning-Kruger phenomena.
... I'm writing all this, because your post uses very broad and general terms like progressives and academics, and I think that's bad. (Because it forces my ego to reconsider the `progressive` label, that I used to apply to myself. Naturally without doing anything good/bad progressive really. :| )
> I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending.
The dynamic is entirely consistent with them thinking about themselves as shepherding sheep. It's why they don't really care that nobody likes "Latinx." Who care what the sheep want to call themselves? It's also why they don't care whether the people they platform as icons of minority groups (Ilhan Omar, etc.) are representative of those groups or not. It's not coalition politics with give-and-take and compromise. It's a parent/child relationship.
Isn't it enough just to point out that Hispanic/Latino people reject "Latinx", rather than continuously trying to psychoanalyze the people (who are not exclusively white) who do choose to use it? At a minimum, you're now citing social science research to make your point, but you are yourself a vociferous critical of social science research.
You're making it hard to agree with you or to reach a shared understanding; like, I think "Latinx" as a universal term for Hispanic/Latino people is silly and mostly an elite discourse shibboleth, too, but the Extended Rayiner Cinematic Universe of paternal white behavior is not something I buy into.
"Latinx" is just an easy-to-analyze example of a wider phenomenon where elite whites intervene on behalf of minorities while being wholly indifferent to what those minorities actually want. "Defund the police," racial preferences for hiring and education, "micro-aggressions," and many others are examples.
I think the psychoanalysis is necessary to understand the phenomenon in a coherent way. Obviously I can't get in their heads. It's just a theory based on conversations where mentioning polling and statistics would be met with dead shark eyes in response.
Well, racial preferences for hiring and education was something you used to support. What were you thinking when you supported it? Does it line up with your diagnosis here?
Pretty much, yes. That was before I got kicked out of the house and become one of the objects of that elite concern. It was also before I confronted the prospect of my kids having to do some sort of diversity dance to pique the interest of some white admissions officer.
I don't understand the first part of this but I do understand the latter part about your kids. I'm a white dude who sent his kids to their flagship state school; they'd have been better off, just learning-wise, if they'd started at directional state, or even a community college. So consider that the elites might be doing you a favor. :)
> If your point is that this is noodly enough not to be interesting to anybody else: fair enough.
Not at all. Please carry on. It is a good discussion. I meant, I would enjoy hearing you guys debate this topic in person where you're not limited by text or latency.
What happened for you to get "kicked out of the house"? This is sometimes in the back of my mind. I'm usually just curious - but sometimes even asking a question is seen as an indication of wrong think.
You may be surprised at the spectrum of people who are a)admissions officers and b)support the current thing.
I think if minorities didn't want jobs as lawyers, they could simply not apply for the job. Getting hired at a big law firm isn't something done to people unwillingly.
we’re not a monolith, nor is any other minority group. and for that matter, navigating society and learning that not all people prefer the same terms/words/pronouns is just life.
i’m sorry people cant do and say what they please and offend others, but that’s just part of being an agreeable human and living in society
Absolutely, each to their own but its never really bothered me. There is obviously a difference in the tone its said when used by someone like Kanye or a neo-nazi vs a rabbi. I've never really allowed myself to be defined or bothered by things like that. I've had beers with neo-nazis before with them full on knowing I was jewish. They obviously toned downed their rhetoric and we had a pretty decent conversation. No friends were made that day but it was a fun chat. Obviously there are levels to this though, they were not marching calling for my death.
When that congressman claimed he meant he was Jew-ish I flat out laughed. Dude is a liar and a crook and totally undeserving of serving in congress but the sheer chutzpah that took was amazing. I found myself more amused than offended. I still chuckle when I run across a reference to it.
The thing that makes it weird is that "Jew" represents both a religion and a people. We really don't see that in other cultures or religions. Now as likely as my profile isn't going to be outed, but 'joining in' is a great way to be tarred as an anti-semite, whether you sincerely hate Jews or not.
And also, since you're Jewish, you're allowed to use comments and jokes like "Jewbilee". It's similar to how African Americans can use "nigga/nigger" amongst each other but is completely forbidden for anyone else. That's primarily due to the power dynamic of those words, and how they traditionally were used as a slur. This is examples where members of the group change the definition to be positive rather than negative.
I grew up with my trash of parents teaching 6 year old me to negotiate at flea markets by "jewing them down". And although I won't have children, I make a conscious choice not to continue that language. My language shapes my reality. So no.
What do you call a group of Jews though? If Jews is off the table?
I totally hear what you are saying though and I know you are coming from a good place. The Jewish race/religion thing is an odd one. Ive always considered myself Jewish by race, 99% Ashkenazi but not religion, I have no religious beliefs.
Conversation reminds me of the infamous lunar new year invite.
To be fair, its best not even to discuss. It's not like discussing Jewish stuff is normal... well, outside being Jewish or being a neonazi/white supremacist, or awkward discussions here.
But discussing here, I try to keep as neutral as possible. If we're talking about the religion, I use people of Jewish faith. And if talking about Ashkenazi Jews (hereditary), I use that term. And past that, I try to keep as matter-of-factly plain simple language, and check for any colloquiums that have alternate white nationalist meanings.
But usually, this topic doesn't even come up. It's only awkward HN comment chains that have this weird political forced neutral writing. But that too is self-defense.
> Auschwitz was effectively a factory of death. Bombing the gas chambers, crematorium, rail lines might have helped.
I think there's a misunderstanding happening here. You seem to be suggesting Auschwitz get bombed assuming it would not blowing up the Jews (and gypsies, and homosexuals, and others that made the Nazi list of "deviants") being actively imprisoned, which sounds great but would have been unfeasible.
The previous reply doesn't seem to be asking what would be specifically helpfully in blowing up Auschwitz. I think it's unanimous "that factory of death was bad and making it stop is good, " so I think it's more like they're taking into account how dropping bombs in WWII actually worked, which was a pretty imprecise process. Ultimately, bombing Auschwitz would also have blown up the people held prisoner in Auschwitz, and those people might not think being blown up was super helpful for them, regardless of whether Auschwitz was destroyed in the process.
There a historical documentary film that tells the story of people who escaped Auschwitz to bring definitive proof of the atrocities happening there to the Allies.
As I recall it, their request was for the Allies to bomb Auschwitz, though presumably targeting railway lines and other elements that could knock it out of action.
Train loads of people were coming in daily to be slaughtered, over 80% were killed on arrival and were not kept as prisoners, while deaths among prisoners was very high.
This was not a static prison camps that kept the same people during the war (except for very few). That’s why I think this was effective even if bombs had hit the living quarters themselves.
Well, they are known not to have correct answers, but in my brand of ethics risking the lives of people that are destined to die in order to save millions is pretty clear cut
Especially during a war where Dresden was fire bombed and Hiroshima was nuclear bombed
You mean the home-country-challenged people living among THE biggest oppressors in history needed help after literally-hitler was about to unalive them?
I forgot it is friday and "white Knight" is a trigger word for some.
So when there's a headline that says:
"Banning words won’t make the world more just"
and then I say "it depends" to a subpoint with white knight, then I seem to represent the woke enemy to them, who wants to dictate what words they are allowed to use (even though I am actually very pro free speech).
And as a german regarding the righteous and why there were so few of them:
I know the mindset from my grandparents and it was/is one of having a very strong taboo of doing anything against the state, or just thinking about it. They were not nazis and knew what the state was doing was wrong even though they didn't know the details. But they kept their head as low as possible, as most did. And marched in line, if ordered so. So they share their responsibility.
I would like to think, that I would have acted different, but would I? I would have been a different person, being born into that time and culture.
So it is also a tough question of what I personally feel about it. Should I feel personally sorry about industrial mass murdering done by "my kind"?
Well, I don't really feel connected to those germans as a whole at all.
But I do feel connected to my grandparents, so sorry on their behalf, that my family didn't do anything to my knowledge, to help your people. (And personally I do my best to keep the local nazis in check today)
edit: and those words still feel empty. But I don't find better words.
Because the holocaust was just outstanding industrial mass murder with the goal to wipe out a whole race. What can you say about it? Certainly not, what a member of the new german right said: "The german history is a great one and the holocaust was just a litle dirt on it"
So back on topic, I think this person should have the right to say this. Because everyone else now knows what those people (who are all officially against nazis) are really standing for.
There are always exceptions and genocide is very obviously one. I was referring more to the socially constructed self inflicted battles society has been engaging in lately.
I was looking around for societal battles that were not socially constructed. But I guess I'm visually impaired in that respect. Maybe you can help me?
I was looking around for something that is not socially constructed. But I guess I am socio-constructually visio-impaired in that respect. Maybe you can help me?
In that case I think we have to find some one-eyed man and make him king.
Maybe we can take some of the 'intellectual dark-web'figureheads and blindly follow them. They pretend to have a grasp of this scoial-construction thing.
But I'd rather like to continue searching the intellectual deep-web for a person with actual sight.
So your family members would have rejected the help of Schindler and co while under occupation and in direct death threat?
Or would have rejected the allies when they came liberating the camps?
Seriously?
As far as I know, the jews and all other surpressed minorities of europe were making great risks, to get information (like from a hidden radio) about the advance of the allies. Because this was the main thing bringing hope.
edit: and sure, it was the gestapo who flagged you and not simply people annoyed by your insulting debate style.
>So your family members would have rejected the help of Schindler and co while under occupation and in direct death threat?
They would have accepted it out of necessity. Doesn't mean depending on "white knights" is desirable or effective. Didn't work out of several other million, for starters.
Even less desirable when there is no "direct death threat", and the victims are perfectly capable of having opinions and speaking for themselves, as opposed to others co-opting and/or hijacking their concerns.
"Doesn't mean depending on "white knights" is desirable or effective."
Well sure, no one wants to be in the position, where he or she needs to be saved in the first place, but if you are in that position - help is still needed and wanted.
"Didn't work out of several other million, for starters."
And that is simply, because no one came in time.
"Even less desirable when there is no "direct death threat", and the victims are perfectly capable of having opinions and speaking for themselves, as opposed to others co-opting and/or hijacking their concerns. "
And yes, which is why I wrote: "if you want to emporer people in general, you cannot fight their battles for them and declare them uncaple of fighting their battles. "
Nope. I did not made any claims about myself here.
I merley stated, that no one came to save the jews in europe, which is why they went to the death camps.
Which you are debating for some reason, along with personal insults.
I suppose because you think the jews should have been organized better and fend for themself?
Well, maybe. But they were not organized. They were in the weaker position and chased by the Nazis. In this situation, outside help is needed in my perception, but you may think whatever you want about it all. And if you can share what you think without insults, I might read it.
Parent doesn’t say that they manufactured blight but that they manufactured famine.
This is also incorrect although they did preside over one and were reluctant to intervene for a variety of reasons, some economic and some philosophical.
Edit: and just to add, it was certainly not an attempt at genocide.
If you mean blight as in "a thing that spoils or damages something", that something being the Irish substinence, they absolutely did. Read some history.
And since a million died, it's not exactly laughing matter to joke about.
The blight in itself of course was not manufactured, however the policies that led up to the total dependency on one type of crop never failing, and the botched emergency reponse; was.
However, this famine is of course, not even a tear in the sea compared to the holocaust, which remains the most horrific act ever, forever; and every other act past or future will only be a tiny fraction of the depth of its importance. History begin and ends with the holocaust the plight of the Jews.
My partner is disabled, and by chance and via support groups she is a member of, she has many friends annd acquaintences who are as well. And while it's by no means universal, she and all her disabled friends absolutely loathe the "people first language" currently in vogue (ie, "person with a disability" over "disabled").
And it's odd! Because while there are certainly disabled people who prefer one form over another when they speak or when people refer to them (although again, in my experience, the overwhelming majority prefer the clarity of "disabled"), the only time I've ever run across someone making a universal dictate about how everyone should speak about all disabled people everywhere, the speaking has been non-disabled. And invariably backing a viewpoint which is tenditious at best among actually disabled people!
And to what end? It sometimes feels - certainly to my partner, hence her anger - an attempt to just sort of pretend the issue dosn't exist so that nobody has to be uncomfortable. Her disability is, at the moment, entirely incurable. She has experienced significant grief over her disability; she would love not to have it. But she does, and relabelling her as "differently abled" or a "person with a disability" doesn't suddenly remove the physical limitations she is struggling with.
Of course, 'disabled' is just the euphemism you grew up with, so it feels neutral enough.
The euphemism treadmill has a long history. At some point cripple used to be the neutral term for many kinds of disabled. It's long been deemed offensive. Similar with idiot or retard.
Give it a few decades, and all of the 'people first language' will perhaps turn into neutral and then offensive, too.
(I am writing the above dispassionately. But given the generation I grew up in, I share your sensibilities about the words. 'Disabled' feels fairly neutral to me as well, and 'idiot' or 'cripple' feel somewhat offensive.
But I recognise that this is just an artifact of exactly when in time I grew up. And old people complaining about shifts in language and culture is an even older trope than the euphemism treadmill.)
'Idiot' is a particularly good example of how pointless it all is. "Person of idiocy" is probably still offensive, so 'people-first language' doesn't really do anything.
Didn’t most of those terms change because they evolved into common insults? Disabled is not used as a common insult as far as I know. This case feels more like a dictate from “well meaning” groups vs a reaction to evolving use of language.
Do you know many older or elderly people? I’ve met many who basically do not know, and have a very hard time understanding, all the unspoken rules about talking about things like disability (or race, religion, etc.).
I sympathize with them a bit because it really is complicated. Why is saying “the blacks” bad, and “black guy” suspicious, but “black person” fine? Why is it ok to call someone disabled but not crippled? Why does saying the word “Jew” range so much in terms of offensiveness based on context and tone?
I know, from my perspective it’s kind of silly and not that hard too. But for people who are perpetually confused about things like that, I can totally see why they lean heavily towards the side of caution to avoid offense. Then of course there are the people doing it for performative reasons, but I’d wager a lot of those people are motivated by fear of saying the wrong thing or being branded a bigot too.
I can relate to what she told you about language changes not improving ones own situation.
I am well past the point where I have any grief related to my disability. Its a fact of life, a part of me, very much like not being able to fly, or having a nose above the mouth.
But there are of course situations in life where I feel that the world isn't always particularily accessible. But it doesn't help at all if someone uses appropriate language to explain to me that they dont want me as a customer because they are afraid of liabilities. Thats a bit cynical, I know, but thats another trend. With "awareness" about special groups comes more exclusion. Anyway, I digress.
Slightly related: in German, a strange thing happened at the end of the last century. Disabled people used to be called "behindert" (might be translated as "impeded" or "hindered"). I think the word was a good choice, because it took the blame away from people, and just described that they had to overcome bigger obstacles because of their situation.
In the eighties or nineties, people started to use the term as a slur. School children called each other "behindert" as an expletive.
This lead to a new term being used for the disabled: "invalid". Which in my opinion is the worst word you could use, since it origins in Latin and just means "unworthy". But it seems to still be in broad use.
This points towards part of what's actually going on and why people keep trying to change the terminology. There's always a subset of people that use the terminology as a pejorative, because they see the people it refers to as either lesser or embarrassing to be a part of. Often children, because they don't know any better, but adults (whether children that never stopped or for other reasons) as well. Then the fact that the term is used as a pejorative spurs people (whether part of that group or not at this point) to change the accepted terminology to something else. Rinse and repeat.
English has "handicapped" which is similar and also became offensive. I thought it was a good word because it allowed for more nuance than the binary abled/disabled.
It doesn’t feel offensive so much as a little outdated, especially for physical disabilities, since the current vogue is the term “disabled.” Which taken literally is not as nice as the term handicappped, but it works better with language like “I have a disability”
The "unworthy" meaning has been lost over time in Latin derived languages, the Italian "invalido" is (was) an official word to mean someone that for any reason was not fit for work, typically, but not only, soldiers wounded in the war and workers wounded on the job (amputees).
It was also common (with no negative connotation whatever) to extend the term to people with mobility issues, to blind people, etc.
It has been replaced first by "disabile" (disabled) and later with the more politically correct "diversamente abile" (differently able) which is (IMHO) really terrible.
The latest euphemism is "persona con disabilità" (person with disability) which makes even less sense.
"Invalid" used to be used in English in the 19th century. I see it in old books sometimes; had to look it up the first time. It's not a great word choice and sounds more like an illegal immigrant status or something.
"People with autism" carries a connotation that the person and the autism are separable. Given the deep, dark, nasty history of autism "cures" that's a very raw nerve, and stamping out that type of thinking will materially improve conditions.
Depends on if you’re talking to autistic people, or professionals who work with autistic people/their parents.
The latter group still tends to use “person with autism” and I think it’s more funny than anything but people get really pissed at people who developed this vocabulary without actually asking Autistic people what they thought of it.
I love the phrasing “person with autism” because it allows me to make a bunch of fairly accurate assumptions about the type of person you are, which is generally somebody who sees autism in a very paternalistic light. Why stigmatize the use of language where somebody self-identifies themselves as hostile to your interests and seeing themselves as being your woke saviour? What was that saying - don’t interrupt your enemy while they’re making a mistake?
Good point, weird constructed language can also be utilized as a filter to avoid hostile and/or paternalistic people. Weaponizing SJW language to fight bigots, I like it!
I suffer from a disability and so does my girlfriend. Note that our main language is French and so there is a bit of nuance to how the terms are used.
Disabled is usually said "handicapé" (this word means more "incapacitated" that anything) and "person with a disability" is usually said "personne en situation de handicap" which more literally translates to "person in a disability situation" / "person currently incapacitated".
While we don't have any problem with the term disabled, I can see some advantages to the "people first language" and try to use it when I can - but I agree it's often way more simple/clear to say "disabled", "blind", etc...
The advantages are :
- Including temporarily disabled people (maybe more in french than english). If you break your legs and spend a few months in a wheelchair, you might not feel legitimate to use the term "disabled" in comparison to someone who has never been able to walk and suffers more from it. I'd also add my personal story: I suffer from chronic pain that is very incapacitating in my life. I don't feel legitimate when I call myself disabled. It's not temporary, but it's not as clear as blindness etc... Using people-first language feels more right.
- Including more person means reducing stigma and reducing the gap between abled/disabled.
- Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.
That said, it should definitely not be a dictate because it only serves to divide more. Also, I had never heard the term "differently abled" which could sound almost sarcastic when employed to speak about someone in a wheelchair for example.
> If you break your legs and spend a few months in a wheelchair, you might not feel legitimate to use the term "disabled" in comparison to someone who has never been able to walk and suffers more from it.
I would say "I am hungry" even if I have food in the fridge, I do not need to compare myself to poor starving people and decide to say "I am currently hungry" or "I am in a situation of hunger"
> Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.
also I am still a complicated person and hungry does not define my personality.
> Including more person means reducing stigma and reducing the gap between abled/disabled.
Actually, taking too many steps to think of how to describe a person with a certain medical situation already increases the stigma, I would feel more bad if people try to avoid calling me "sick" so I don't feel bad about being sick, this is even worse.
Imagine calling a midget "A person with less height" or some nonsense like that.
Well, the difference may come from the language. "I am hungry" translates in french to "J'ai faim" using the "have" auxiliary. You "are" hungry in english, but I "have" the hunger, in french.
So for me your example does not count as a label. Is there no nuance at all between "being hungry" and "being disabled" in english ? If so, you're right, my argument does not stand.
> Imagine calling a midget "A person with less height" or some nonsense like that.
I think midget is pejorative so this is not a very good example. But I don't know much about that so I'll take your argument as if it wasn't at all.
I should have added that this is of course useful in some contexts. If you are talking to a specific person, then changing the language isn't very useful (except if this specific person feels the term is offensive, but that does not mean we should all change how we speek).
Where it is more useful, for example, is when you talk about limitations due to a problem. You are writing an article about height problems ? No need to say it's about dwarfism, there are other small people that might relate. You're a store and design a special help to get objects on high shelves ? No need to call it "dwarf help" or "midget help", but just "help for small people" or even "high shelf help".
In this case this is not about thinking about how to describe a person with a certain medical situation. It is about taking a step back and removing the medical situation altogether.
This applies much more to "deaf"/"hearing impaired" (or whatever, my argument is about generalizing, not about a specific term). A lot more people have difficulty hearing than are completely deaf.
Knowing about it is good. Trying to think about what your language implies is good. Forbidding the usage of words is obviously extreme and bad.
> I would say "I am hungry" even if I have food in the fridge, I do not need to compare myself to poor starving people and decide to say "I am currently hungry" or "I am in a situation of hunger"
But saying "I'm starving!" when you are just hungry is a bit different. It's fine where there are no starving people around. It's just a exaggeration then. But if one of your friends starved last week while you are still fat and just a bit hungry it might not sound well.
'Solving' the 'problem' of words only makes you feel good about yourself and gives you the feeling that you are helping somehow while actually doing nothing.
> - Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.
The flip side of this is that it allows / encourages others to see your disability as a mere "inconvenience" or something that should be able to be separated from you. I find at least for people I know with mental health disabilities they feel "person with X" tends to lead very quickly into "I know you have X but why can't you just be/do/deal with Y". In fact, I have a general theory (untested) that where someone with a disability falls on the "I am a person with X" vs "I am X" is probably directly proportional to how much X is a strong defining factor in their lives. I notice this particularly in ADHD and Autism spectrum disorders, where being on the "less support needs" side of the spectrum tends to be described as "I have ADHD / Autism" but being on the side of the spectrum that requires more suppoed "I am ADHD / Autistic" is more common. And for those I know who prefer the "I am X" format, part of that is because, paraphrased "this is a major part of my life that fundamentally alters how I live and interact with the world and I need people to understand that about me"
Obviously to a large degree this depends on your language having an adjective form in the first place e.g. we have yet to come up with "I am cancered", though in a related way we often. see "I am a cancer survivor" / "I am fighting cancer", but it's still relatively common even for bad cases to be "I have cancer".
I'm supportive of all those goals, I just don't see how person-first language does anything for them. Does "he's a person with visual impairment" really stigmatize a person less than "he's blind"? Or does "he's blind" really one-dimensionally define a person? It seems to me that stigmas are not bourne out of language, and that a blind person is their own person seems understood and implied no matter the language that's used. If I say "sunderw's French" then it's also understood that you're more than just "French" and that your "Frenchness" does not singularly define you.
You can construct some armchair psychology arguments such as "the language explicitly acknowledges that there's more to a person", but does that really affect people's thinking in any significant way? And if it does, does it affect the thinking in the right way? Or does it trivialize the condition? No matter what language you use, being blind is a serious handicap and it really does affect what you can and can't do in this world; trying to euphemize the very real problems blind people face also isn't a good idea.
Is this mean someone is determined or steadfast in their constitution?
I worked with someone who was really smart but annoyed me because his variable names were cartoon characters, like Tom,jerry,bugs, etc.
I asked him not to do this and he said that each variable was documented so it’s better to use an arbitrary label that never needs to change should the business change it’s name (ie if you called a variable division_names and the org decides to rename divisions to units). We argued over this and he never changed his variable names.
But now I get it. I’d rather just have some arbitrary label that means disabled and never have to change it as “prepend is foo” would stand the test of time while “prepend is disabled” might change to “pretend is of disability” might change to “prepend is not hindered by disability” to “prepend is a human first and valiantly overcomes a limitation in ability” to “prepend only has one arm” etc.
Well, that might make sense for natural language terms, but it's still really bad coding advice: changing variable names is easy, or at least should be easy, if you have tooling worth a damn.
> The language terror they were subjected to has made them so unsecure that they actually dont want to hear that blind people have no issue with being called blind.
It is unusual for the opinions of the minorities involved to be relevant.The language policing appears to be a power play within the majority. What you are observing is consistent with that - they aren't worried about offending the blind, they're worried about how their language will allow their peers to jostle for position.
It not even a majority that dictates. It’s ostensibly a vocal minority of professional offence-takers who wield power, generally on social media. My partner has MS, and I made an off-the-cuff joke about it, and got pilloried by people that neither of us know. Not one of them took the time to consider that this is how we deal with it; they were too busy being offended on her behalf.
A role that used to be filled (in Ireland) by priests and nuns, and the Legion of Mary. One of the big problems I used to have with religion was the moral policing - imagine my surprise when the power of the church waned, but the moral policing only intensified
This is the exact same dynamic that happens with comedy. When a comedian offends a group, it's typically not people from that group who complain - it's third parties who step in to represent that group.
IMO the purpose of language changing is not to improve the world; instead, it's to give the feeling of changing the world without putting any real effort.
Fun (in a sad way) fact: a friend of mine collaborates with an association that deals with diverse people. Some high-up complained that my friend's group (within the association) is "not diverse enough". Thing is: my friend is actually non-binary themselves. Go figure.
EDIT: replaced the definition of my friend from "diverse" to "non-binary", in order to be exact; the same principle stands, though!
> IMO the purpose of language changing is not to improve the world; instead, it's to give the feeling of changing the world without putting any real effort.
It's worse than that. It's a way of signaling.
When I started to read the article I hoped that it would mention Steven Pinker's Euphemism Treadmill. I was disappointed. The short story is that changing language is a quick way of differentiating an in-group from an out-group. The in-group are those that are aware of the change and align by adopting it.
We saw this with the instantaneous change of Kiev to Kyiv in news media at the start of the war. It is not just a thing that society does with the names of disabilities, oops, I'm sorry, "different conditions."
But it's still Moscow, Russia and not Moskva, Rossiya. It's Tokyo, Japan not Toukyou, Nippon and Germany and not Deutschland. If you're going to drop exonyms, you should at least do it consistently, rather than only for currently-trending locations.
The main difference is that the request to change the English spelling from Kiev to Kyiv came from the Ukrainian government. As far as I know Japanese or German government haven't requested that we stop writing "Japan" and "Germany".
The closest current example going on right now is the Turkish government wanting to change the English spelling of their country from "Turkey" to "Turkiye".
It went beyond official names of cities. Supermarkets actually changed the spelling of the Chicken Kiev to Chicken Kyiv. (But left Bombay Potato and Chicken Madras unchanged, even though Bombay and Madras haven't been called that for decades.). Zelenskyy probably has better things to do right now than dictate the spelling of breaded garlic chicken fillets.
> As far as I know Japanese or German government haven't requested that we stop writing "Japan" and "Germany".
Because they know it would be silly. Do they go to every language and ask for a change? For instance ask France to stop using “Allemagne” and use Deutschland instead? Now repeat for hundreds or thousands of languages… not only would it accomplish nothing, it is pretty disrespectful to demand of the other language users how they refer to places.
In the examples you list, AFAIK, people from those countries are happy to use those names when speaking in English. At least, I've never met a German who insists on calling their country Deutschland when conversing in English. If they did, maybe things would be different. That's the way it is with Istanbul/Constantinople, and also Bombay/Mumbai.
Allemagne's name is appealingly populist, though I suppose not much different from how all the "primitive" tribes' names also just mean "the people". You might even eat Allemansratten there -- though you might do better in their northerly neighbor, where the traditions lived a little longer. Eat it next to the hearth on Freya's-day.
One version of your question that's interesting to me is that of translating people's names, rather than countries'. This seems not to be what people do -- but why not?
There are the obvious correspondences across European languages, like with William and Guillermo. But I suppose a tweedy old Brit named Reginald could even become Rajesh when he visits Delhi, given the shared meaning and etymology. He might take to it happily.
I suppose you're generally better served by keeping your native pronunciation, so long as the people around you can more-or-less say it, because it will be more unique in your new location, and give you some appeal of the exotic. In England, who would you reckon to be sexier -- "Katherine" or "Katerina"?
Some names can be translated in meaning, but there is no shared etymology. For example, the Frenchman "Pierre" might take the name "石" ("Shi") in China. Would this make sense? There is the added complication that the latter is more likely to be a surname than a given name. I wonder what Dwayne Johnson thinks.
If there is no pronunciation at all for your name, you may become "formerly know as Prince" (there's Raj again), deposed by choice and deadnamed by necessity.
I suppose direct translation was commonly done with Native American names. We remember "Sitting Bull", not "Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake". On the other hand, we remember the Patuxet man nicknamed "Squanto" -- given name "Tisquantum", you can see how it's a longer form -- and not "spiritual power of Manitou" (the exact translation is sketchy, but the meaning seems to be something like that). And of course, "Manitou" can also be translated, so we might even say "Power of God". Perhaps "Manitoba" is "God's Country".
Allowing semantic meaning to penetrate an ethnic boundary may be fraught with controversy. Here you're playing with sacred words. Of course, after studying the Greek Titans for a while, you realize that each is simply a noun. Gaia is Earth. Chronos is Time. They are not separate characters. They are the ideas. So maybe all words are sacred. Yet here I am spelling them.
Likewise "pho" is just "soup", but outside Vietnam it's more than that. Likewise "chai" -- at home it's "tea", but abroad it's a particular style of tea. Likewise probably every food there is. And they become jealousy-guarded totems of identity. "What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?", asks Lin Yutang.
Or, should I say, asks "forest language temple", or perhaps, "sacred forest library". (Nominative determinism much?)
I would like to meet this German who insisted on saying only "Deutschland" though. I imagine he would also insist that anything with more than the Reinheitsgebot's 4 ingredients is not "beer". He would drive a Volkswagen and brag about its double-clutch. He would be a great character. I'd watch that TV show.
Do anglos read Kiev and Kyiv particularly differently in the first place? In any case, it sounds further from a normative Ukrainian pronunciation than Caillou.
I read Kiev with an /ɛ/ sound, and Kyiv with an /ɪ/ sound.
In my head, at least. I've just realized that I haven't needed to verbally refer to this place since I became aware of the renaming. In fact, I don't know that I've ever said either one out loud.
A single person shouldn't be able to be diverse on their own! That's a property of groups. You can try to define a "default person" and then say you want each individual to differ from that in your favourite characteristics, but that's a different game and provides none of the benefits of actual diversity.
It's me, actually. I'm 48, white, male, cis, hetero, graying, healthy, overweight but not obese, married with two kids, and slaving away in a wage job behind a computer somewhere.
"Diverse" specifically means different from me.
I feel it's good companies are looking for more diverse people to fill their jobs, I can't do them all.
> A single person shouldn't be able to be diverse on their own!
Agreed, but I've seen it used like this more than once, and it's both hilarious and unintentionally offensive.
A diverse group -- which makes more sense -- means something inoffensive: that the people in that group are different from each other, representing there's variety within the group according to some parameter (say, skin color).
A "diverse" person as used in PC language is... exactly what? Someone with "diverse ethnicity" (seen this used!) is someone who what? Was this person the offspring of an orgy of people with different skin colors?
Oooh.. I get it, a "diverse" person is someone who is not white, meaning the standard/normal skin color is white, and being "diverse" is to be "other than white", which is of course abnormal, because being white is what's normal. And people saying "diverse" don't even notice the irony of this!
I think you could reasonably describe a single person as 'diverse' in the 'diverse set of skills or experiences' sense. Like a jack-of-all-trades handyman. Or maybe for somebody that has a wide array of personalities which they reveal in different social contexts.
The realization that it would be pointless, alas, came to me too late. Let me just give you a taste:
While serving in Vietnam, American soldier Nick Parker was blinded by a mortar explosion. Rescued by local villagers, he recovered his health and, though he remains blind, was trained to master his other senses and becomes an expert swordsman.
So, he wears 80s sunglasses and wields a goddamn katana. He is also a hobo. Like Caine from Kong Fu he roams the earth and lowlifes always pick fights with him because they underestimate his... err... blind fury.
There is an "adorable" little kid aptly named Billy, and one dimensional baddies, 'etc. The character is masterfully portrayed by one of the best b-movie actors of all time -- Rutger Hauer (best known for the best bit of Blade Runner).
Anyway I think it is a shame woke imbeciles who run movie studios would refuse to make such a thing today because when I saw it as a kid it made me realize being blind is really not the end of the world. Here you are posting on HN and your insights about society are more astute than the majority of the population. So I just wanted to say that you certainly see what is going on accurately.
P.S. - if you wish to visualize the language police people, they typically look like vogons and pull ugly faces when they speak.
Hehe, thanks, I know about Blind Fury, Daredevil, and See No Evil, Hear No Evil...
As I am embedded in a visual culture, I do consume movies from time to time, so there is actually no reason to be self-conscious about mentioning media products like that...
Not self conscious at all my dude (I'm not one of those insensitive woke people who get off on making everybody feel like shit to try and elevate themselves at all costs), glad I made you chuckle. How do you consume movies? I didn't know that the ̶a̶c̶c̶u̶r̶s̶e̶d̶ "visually impaired" do that. Dope.
Don't know why I'm surprised. I bet blind fury would watch movies somehow too. Also, you should obviously change your username. :)
P.S. - Daredevil sucks so bad it makes me wish I was blind. You aren't missing out on anything there.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a classic. Yet another example of something great that currently wouldn't get made.
I've decided I want a blind friend. Prank potential off the charts.
Regarding how to "watch" movies: Its actually as simple as turning the TV on and listening to what comes out the speakers...
In the 80s, movies were actually much more story-driven then today. Even if you missed something happening because you didnt see the visuals, you would get it typically a few seconds or minutes afterwards, because somebody was refering to the event and therefore uncovering the riddle. Something like "Hey, did you see the car explode back there?"
These days, there is the concept of audio description.
You might have noticed a second audio channel with some movies or sports broadcasts, depending on what country you are in.
Even Apple TV has an ability to configure such a descriptive audio channel, and have it played back when the movie actually comes with one.
Makes sense actually. Now that you mention it I can imagine Casablanca to be enjoyable to "watch" even with my eyes closed. A lot of the black and white stuff. I guess they were (better) written, more like plays, with actors projecting their voices. Now they do the mumble whisper thing, even native speakers are forced to turn on subtitles for increasingly terrible plots.
BTW you should know my comments had a +5 and now are being downvoted by the woke mob, who know what is best for you.
Edit: And its back to very positive. I only remark on this when the cowardly woke losers try to bully people with downvote brigading otherwise the points don't matter. Bet there's a lot of screeching on a Mastodon somewhere.
The “subtitles for deaf and hard of hearing” on modern videos are a wonder and amazing. We regularly use subtitles because it can be hard to hear the movie over the kids, but SDH is great if you are mainly listening. Highly recommend everyone try it sometime.
Sometimes it is even a separate “language track” that describes what’s happening.
When I first got Disney+ because an ex-girlfriend wanted to watch Wanda, the app was misconfigured to have the audio description turned on. It's a pretty weird show, so it took me 3 episodes of being confused by the weirdness of the show to realize something was really off and it wasn't meant to be watched like that. Took me forever to find the setting to turn it off; and it got a bit more watchable after that.
Well, now that you mention it. My take on this is pretty subjective because I am not a native english speaker. While I watch a lot of english-movies these days, I was brought up with a rich world of overdubbed movies in my native language. These overdubs tend to have a very good quality when it comes to clarity because they are always done in a studio afterwards.
When I started to watch english movies, I was thrown into an abyss of very hard to follow dialogue, but that was mostly because I was not used to hearing the actors speak on set during whatever they were actually doing.
However, that said, I do also feel it is getting harder with more action-loaded productions, which is basically everything in the past 10 years or so.
Part of the problem with modern movies is they're designed for surround sound 5.1 systems or similar. In those systems, the middle front channel is generally used for dialogue, but that channel often gets entirely dropped when remixing for stereo systems. This predictably results in inaudible dialogue.
This was discussed on HN a few months ago, but I can't find a reference to that thread.
Some receivers have “dialogue boost” or otherwise let you adjust each channel individually.
More and more we just leave subtitles on, as too much dialog is easy to lose in the rest of the sound. I think it’s also a difference in how movies are made now; compare the pacing of Rocky with anything modern. Older movies stop the action to dialog; modern movies have quips over explosions
As you mention Blind Fury, do you know of the Zatoichi movie franchise [1], which is about a blind swordsman wandering Japan around the Edo to Meiji period? Really good films! (Blind Fury is a reimagining of the 17th movie in the series, Zatoichi Challenged.)
Exact same sort of asshole and arguments as today. He called them blasphemers and tried to cancel them. During the commercial break he would lean in to John Cleese and say "this is great television" with a wink.
Someone asked Mel Brooks the same about Blazing Saddles once.
"Today? You couldn't even make it then!"
We overestimate the effect the this sort of thing has.
I imagine someone reading that line is about to talk about the cancelling of some so-and-so, but in almost all cases that is either just a lot of hot air from Twitter or the so-and-so in question is legitimately and obviously actually a bigot.
it is definitely seems a patterns that alot of people who claim to be "canceled" or complaining about "canceling" are usually very well-off people who usually get thousands of re-tweets/posts and millions of subscribers on youtube or sell-out whenever they make an appearance somewhere...
People who say you can't make movies as offensive (or playing as much with offensiveness, anyway) as Tropic Thunder or Blazing Saddles anymore need to look into some of Lloyd Kaufman's output with Troma... the 2020 Shakespeare's Shitstorm is about as wildly-offensive (but maybe to good purpose? I'm still not sure, LOL) as it gets, and even directly targets the (in the pejorative sense) "woke" crowd (plus, like, a lot of other groups, including stuffy conservatives, big business, and shitty bigots) which is one of the riskiest moves a film could make these days, and that's just one of several risky moves it makes. Like, the movie's basically built of risky, boundary-pushing creative choices relating to very-relevant topics, which... might serve some greater, noble whole? Maybe? I think it's trying to, at least.
Now, a wide-release, mainstream movie, that might be true.
Ben Stiller himself has commented on the blackface in the movie being a satire of blackface in cinema. There would be no problem with a popular director making that kind of movie today.
I would note (and this was true at the time, too) that there are people that would either fail to make the distinction of “satire” or fail to find its invocation in the case of the particular work a convincing excuse.
I suspect there would be more resistance to the same film now, but its well within what could be made.
A school I would visit had a native American name for their sports teams. I attended a game where they opened the season with local tribe members singing, and drumming, the dedicated it to the coach of the opposing team who died during off season. If you've never heard Native American music live in person you really should, it's like nothing else.
Several local tribes supported the school using the name, but one chose not to. The school the had to use another name, logo, etc.
It struck me how nothing seemed to be gained except distance ....
>It is so weird, because it adds yet another layer of distance between "us" and the "normal" people.
Yeah, and those "sensitive" people also don't seem to get what normal means. It just means "how the majority is supposed to be/the baseline fully functioning state regarding X". It's not a moral judgement if one is not in the normal group regarding some ability.
>Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller.
I think the smaller distance is when groups can be relaxed and casual about language - and even joke about their differences.
This is as opposed to hostile (as back in the day regarding e.g. whites against blacks) and overcautious tip-toeing around the other group.
This line is probably smaller than it may appear. The reason much of this language policing started is because of the dominant group using language to reinforce the inferiority of a less powerful group.
It’s always easier for the dominant group to say “it’s just words — no one cares” since the words are never at their expense.
>The reason much of this language policing started is because of the dominant group using language to reinforce the inferiority of a less powerful group.
I think it's the inverse: the reason this language policing started was because the dominant group had reduced its hold... That why it started when it started and not when things were much worse...
Everyone is subject to slurs. That’s not what I’m referencing.
I’m talking about the use of language where you use the less-dominant group as a negative reference point. For example “retarded”. Or “fag”. You apply those terms to people who are neither as a way of disparaging them.
I’m gay. Whether someone calls me fag or gay or LGBTQI+ (this one I hate more that “fag”, BTW) is orthogonal to:
a) how they treat me
b) whether they would actually stick their neck out for me when it really matters (e.g. marriage equality).
I will almost universally guarantee that the same person who insists on non-offensive language for me would NOT fight for marriage equality if it means they have to give up something or risk something. True ally.
I think you missed my point. It isn’t about calling you a fag (which they may). It’s about calling people they think are less than in general - fags.
On your other point, you think that people who call you fag or other offensive language will fight for marriage equality? As a black person I’ve found that people who call me coon typically haven’t fought for me — even when they have something to gain (drain pool).
You’re right that someone who calls me X or you Y won’t fight for us. What I tried to communicate is that folks who spend a lot of time fighting for using specific verbiage to refer to me so as to not offend, are not really helping me. In fact, as Dave Chapelle has pointed out, when it really comes down to it, even people who obsess about using language that they think would offend me don’t stick their necks out when it really matters; they might correct speech or go to a march (gay pride for instance), but ask them to sacrifice something and it is crickets.
> It’s about calling people they think are less than in general
OT, but does anyone know where this specific usage of "less than" came from? I'd never seen it until about five years ago and now it's everywhere. The word "inferior" would have been used before. What's the origin of this?
I've been reading "Cynical Theories" by Pluckrose and Lindsay which explains this whole thing as coming from a one-dimensional, activistized Postmodern framework. In this framework, society is a subtle network of power that creates oppressors and oppressed, sustained by "truth" created through language. There is no such thing as objective truth, so truth is a social construct created through language. But since the word "blind" is used by the default, in-power group, your claim to prefer "blind" is acquiescing to the oppressive in-power structure. So if they really buy into the framework, they cannot actually use the word you prefer, or they would be furthering the oppressive structure.
Ironically, intersectionality adds that truth is created by identity groups (e.g. "blind", "blind females", "blind black females", etc.), and cannot be truly known by people outside that identity group. So even by their own assumptions, your claims as a member of the blind identity group ought to trump their assertions. But, this is functionally a fundamentalist religion, and the assumptions are sacrosanct. (I am using "fundamentalist" here meaning a one-dimensional ideology that is non-negotiable, which is essentially how Christian fundamentalism, for example, currently operates.) You might be able to mess with the minds of cultural believers, though.
This absolutely has increased the distance between groups, because the real goal is not kindness but activism to disrupt entrenched power structures.
I once had an injury in both of my legs after a long hike. It caused my legs to be so swollen that I had very limited mobility, but I could still walk - though it probably looked very awkward.
In school, children get taught that when someone looks disabled, you shouldn't look at them, because staring at them is some kind of discrimination or so. I couldn't disagree more.
When I had that injury, and was kind of crip-walking, people would intuitively stare at me for a second, then -very obviously- force themselves to look away.
The injury wasn't that bad and went away after a week or two. But the way people forced themselves to look away, was much worse. I can't imagine dealing with that every day.
I'd argue that the people who make up these kind of "rules" probably aren't themselves affected by it.
I kind of feel the euphemism treadmill is the language version of “looking away”.
Blind is stark; powerful; forces me to contemplate the lack of vision - I can’t escape it.
But if I start using “visually challenged” then it’s softer, sounds like a game, challenges can be overcome, this isn’t something I need to worry about.
> When I had that injury, and was kind of crip-walking, people would intuitively stare at me for a second, then -very obviously- force themselves to look away.
> The injury wasn't that bad and went away after a week or two. But the way people forced themselves to look away, was much worse. I can't imagine dealing with that every day.
Having experienced this, I personally find that what's worse is the way people look at me in the first place. It's not as simple as someone looking at me, I can _see_ on their face or in their eyes or ... what's going through their mind, before they reassert control and hide it again.
> It is so condescending to believe your own language-police more then the person you are talking to.
This is exactly it. They have theories that spin a narrative telling them that you just don't understand why your preferred language is oppressive. Like women who just want to be housewives and stay at home with kids are suffering from internalized misogyny, or that Hispanic people almost universally hate the term LatinX but we must keep using it because gender neutrality is way more important than pissing off almost everyone.
From non-native speaker perspective, it sounds like it also obscured the truth: visually challenged can still consume visual info, blind - can’t. For the former larger fonts, adapted color palette, simplified graphics, etc can be useful, for the latter no amount of adaptations will work and you have to completely switch to audio or tactile mode of communication.
Interesting, thanks for chiming in. I wonder if the best way to push back against language policing is to simply poll various groups, see which language they prefer, and publish the results. The deltas could be interesting as well, e.g. even if most blind people dislike the term "blind", it would still be interesting if they are more likely to prefer the term "blind" than a member of the general population.
I think public opinion polling might actually solve the problem, because the actual group has greater moral authority than language police activists. I suspect people might not cite this Atlantic article during a discussion of whether their organization should adopt language policing for fear of coming across as a reactionary old fogey. But if you were citing a poll of the group in question, that's a level of moral authority that's hard for a language police activist to argue against.
Basically the hypothesis to test here is that a latinx-type reaction is fairly common, it just doesn't generally reach public consciousness the way it did in the case of latinx.
Groups don't have homogeneous opinions on this stuff. The prime example these days being Latinx.
If people aren't called what they prefer, as long as they weren't called a slur, a simple correction is fine. Or, if you're never going to see them again, just let it go.
From what I read about Latinx, a significant majority of that community seem to hate the term that has been applied to them (which doesn’t even make any linguistic sense in Spanish anyway). Seems to be a small minority pushing it.
The challenge is when there is no single term that doesn’t offend everyone.
So you can call a group “Latinx” and offend some and call a group “Latinos” and offend some and call a group “Latinos/Latinas” and offend some.
I want to offend the fewest people with my speech. I would like to use opinion polling to both offend fewest as well as signal that I’m working to offend the fewest.
What’s annoying and frustrating to me is when someone tells me “You must use term X because term Y offends.” Then I change it and someone else tells me “You must use term Y because term X offends.” And the worst part is the circular waste of time. I work in an organization that has a communication clearance process for the purpose of scientific accuracy and we spend a decent amount of time on this kind of editorial preference change/revert. Most isn’t even “offensive” words but stuff like Oxford comma, data are plural, etc.
I don't want to be offensive to people either but I also don't want to have to keep up on polling of what the plurality of any particular group is okay being referred to as. There are an infinite set of groups that I'd have to keep track of.
I'll find out if something's offensive when I say it, with no ill intent, and someone respectfully lets me know that they'd prefer to be called something else. My language will change over time in response to the overall language changing over time.
Recently I came across a discussion on Twitter where a selection of scientists were arguing that the long-used term "blind peer review" (i.e. where the authors do not know the identities of the reviewers, and vice versa) could be construed as able-ist and should be referred to as "anonymous peer review". I'm all in favour of using inclusive language, but at the time this discussion struck me as odd because I've never connected the definition of "blind" in "blind peer review" to the disability, although its obvious that the link exists from a linguistic standpoint. What are your thoughts on such discussions? I do believe that none of those arguing for the change were themselves blind.
Not OC, but I am also totally blind, so I'll bite. IMHO, just more silliness. The biggest problems that I as a blind person face don't generally stem from my blindness. Don't get me wrong, it's incredibly inconvenient, and causes a whole host of problems. But the biggest, most life altering problems tend to stem from societies misconceptions. And the best weapon we have against misconceptions is communication. But all this fuss over words does not aid communication in any way. In fact, I think it does the exact opposite.
The only thing the language police have done for us is to make communication more awkward. How am I supposed to have a real conversation with anyone if they're constantly worried they're going to not use the right code words (which, by the way, change routinely). How is a blind person supposed to convince a potential employer that they can handle the work when they (according to the language police) can't even handle people using regular words. People learn by asking questions, and people aren't likely to ask questions if they are afraid of stepping on a verbal landmine and being labeled insensitive, or worse.
I don't know who the language police think they're serving by all this outrage and/or false concern, but it certainly isn't me. If I need to, I can get offended on my own behalf just fine thanks.
Wiktionary has attestations for use of 'blind' to mean 'concealed' or 'not visible' going all the way back to the 16th century, and if you follow the etymology it becomes likely that that was the original sense of the word, with 'sightless' coming later. This same disingenuous reasoning was used with Twitch with the phrase 'blind playthrough' (to mean 'playing a game without having seen any of it before').
Got to love scrubbing the culture of positive references to blindness in the service of inclusiveness simply because bunch of scientists are uncomfortable with disability.
I remember the second in command of a rather esteemed starship remarking that somebody should be taking notes about how a blind man teaches an android to paint.
Funny you could argue that "disabled" is language that distances us from reality. Since describing someone not present as just "disabled" doesn't tell you anything whether that person in reality is able to do one specific thing, eg tedious react frontend development in a large organization. "differently abled" doesn't tell you anything more but clearly signals that "more information is needed".
It does tell us many things, you're being obtuse on purpose. If someone is disabled you know they generally suffer from some health issue which is serious enough and probably chronic, to afford them that status by the state.
Among this umbrella you have many common things like, they can probably park closer to doors, if they are disabled. I'm not sure why people just pretend things are not how they are when discussing these subjects. Of course we have more information than less.
Yes if you are blind you have a disability, as per almost every developed country's rules. My mom isn't even fully blind and pays less tax due to her disability status, she is officially disabled.
Regarding parking closer to doors, I said "probably" and that was literally to illustrate that there is an umbrella that covers most cases even if there's edge cases. Obviously there are people with disabilities that don't even allow them to leave their bed so they can't drive. I think the most accurate part of my previous comment was about you being intentionally obtuse.
I don't know if you misinterpreted but I meant that "disabled" doesn't tell you everything about a persons ableness across all functions that a human can do. Eg. one disabled person is able to drive a car, and this other disabled person (your mom, sorry I had to do this) can't.
This is obvious ofc but my comment was about the OP stating that OMGWOKENESS, eg. saying "differently abled" is a language/semantic excercise that somehow takes us further away from reality and therefore is worse than using the traditional "disabled". In other words, using "differently abled" (with regard to the normal functions a human is able to do) doesn't hide any reality that "disabled" shows. IMHO.
Edit: Disclaimer: I haven't watched Carlin in a long time, didn't rewatch this bit now either so I'm arguing from my "I love him but sometimes he's a dick and othertimes he's wrong" view of him.
I also wish we could call it the "master" branch, renaming the primary branch to "main" is just pointless.
But it's simply less risky and less work to just call it "main".
It doesn't matter, and nobody gains anything from calling it "main" -- but if we call it "master" someone might get offended or waste my time arguing over it.
There is no incentive to insist calling it "master". So similarly, I guess we'll end up calling you "photonically disadvantaged" :)
Or maybe we can give it a positive spin and call it "darkness unimpaired"?
(Just kidding of course)
Sometimes you end up with a random mishmash of repos, some with the default branch called "master", others with it called "main", and then a handful with something else altogether (e.g. "develop"). Someone pushes for a massive "master=>main" rename – but once you get "master" baked into umpteen dozen ultra-complex CI/CD/testing pipelines, etc, it takes a lot of time to change them all and deal with all the fiddly breakage that results. So people do the rename for brand-new projects, and some of the low-hanging fruit of the existing ones, but the "too obscure" or "too-big-to-deal-with" existing projects get put off indefinitely. And then you are constantly scratching my head trying to remember which one this repo is. Even worse, a few repos someone creates a new "main" branch but keeps an old outdated "master" branch around just to confuse people. Even if your organisation has been so diligent as to finish off the rename everywhere, sooner or later you need to make changes to some open source project you are using which hasn't.
What Git really needs, is some kind of "branch alias" feature. Some config setting like "branch_alias.main=master", and then I could always write "git checkout main", and it would checkout "main" if that exists, and "master" if it didn't (and vice versa). That would solve it in most cases – except for the rarer "we decided to use neither main nor master" and "we made a new main branch but kept an outdated master branch hanging around".
I think that it is probably not necessary or helpful to rename branches in existing repositories, but you can do that if it is helpful for what you are doing.
If you upload a repository to GitHub, you can use whatever default branch name it already has with no problem. I know because I did upload one that uses "trunk" as the default branch name, and it did not cause any problem. (I used "trunk" as the default branch name because it is a mirror of a fossil repository which uses "trunk" as the default branch name.)
(And, someone does get a minor benefit to call it "main"; it is two letters shorter than "master". Of course, that is minor, but it isn't quite nothing.)
From spending time with students of my local school for the blind and visually impaired, I am under the impression "blind" and "visually impaired" are seperate things. Some of the people I knew seemed to care about the distinction, so it seems better to stick with something neutral until I am sure.
Sure, but I was not refering to the somewhat blurry distinction between blind and visually impaired. I am well aware there is a spectrum. I was talking about my own experience, and that is limited to being pitch-black-darkness-blind myself.
Of course, but I was also talking about my own experience. If I randomly met you I would be hesitant to call you "blind" until I knew more about you. It stems from a young man being very angry at being called "blind" when he could see.
Rereading your post, it sound like people are unwilling to call you blind even after you tell them you are, so we may be talking about different things.
Attitudes around such things vary by disability community, peoples relationship to it (self proclaimed “ally’s” or people who work with the disabled for a living tend to use pained language, people with the actual condition tend not to), and individual differences.
Personally though people using extra syllables to describe me when a more terse way to describe me gets the point across always comes off as condescending. People seem to be utterly obsessed with the connotation of words and if a word starts having a bad connotation they will just replace it with a different usually inferior word and consider themselves heroic for doing so. Blind becomes “visually impaired” making 1 syllable into 5 and ironically making language more complex and less accessible (since the entire point of such language is that it’s so awkward that nobody who isn’t woke will use it allowing it to have a signalling purpose). In reality what such people attitudes come off as is “you’re such weak shit everybody around you should be like me and constantly expend effort to protect your feelings”.
It’s the language of “allyship”, not the language of the disabled most of the time. If people need such terms to feel comfortable with the disabled, I’ll humour them I guess, but I just hope people understand that this language mostly exists for the sake of people who are immensely uncomfortable with the concept of disability and those people tend not to be disabled.
I think it’s a consequence of the well-intentioned, but foolish idea of “bias toward action” that doing something is good and not doing something is bad or complicit.
When people see something bad-discrimination against disabled- they want to improve the situation but don’t know what to do. So they do something, anything without considering if the action is effective or if the best course is to do nothing.
So making a list of words to use or not use is doing something. There’s no way to measure if it makes things better or worse, but at least it’s something.
If they don’t make a list, and do nothing then that might be confused with not recognizing the problem.
So I think it’s well meaning people who want to help and do something stupid rather than not doing something.
I wonder if just releasing a statement of values is more appropriate for noting that an organization is against all these injustices but not advocating for lots of dumb little changes.
That and I think these lists naturally suffer from collaboritis. Where someone makes a document and circulates it for edits. All the obvious stuff is already on there so people want to help and think up any edge case and add it to the document. It’s hard to argue for parsimony for fear of being called out as a bigot. And it’s hard to suggest removing an item for the same reason.
It's a superficial thing to complain about, because it's rare that isn't linked to action - from dropping kerbs, to adding lifts and ramps, to building special toilets for wheelchair users.
It's questionable how many of these things would have happened if the language wasn't made memorable.
Of course it irritates people who would prefer not to think about these things - because it's supposed to.
There's actually far more us/them divisive language on the right. Even if you hate progressive tropes and don't always agree with the politics they're at least making an effort to be inclusive.
Right wing language is always irredeemably divisive - usually aggressively so. Frequently with outright contempt, and sometimes with normalisation of violence.
In my experience it isn’t rare at all. In work I see this a lot where an error is ambiguous and changes make it worse. I see “bias toward action” frequently in work presentations and whatnot.
For debugging it’s not so much to change nothing, but to investigate and figure out what to change rather than change things without an understanding of the intended impact of the change.
Also, it’s not that I don’t think about these things. It’s that I think and determine the best course of action is no action. That gets conflated with not thinking about these things because on the outside it’s hard to differentiate those that thought and care and think to do nothing vs those that are oblivious vs those that choose not to think about this.
In this example, I think the best course is to not include disabled in the list. I want to include disabled people, but I think changing language in this way is not valuable.
Apparently people wanted to intensionally offend people so much the traditional swear words or offenses were not enogh so used anything they thought could hurt - disability or mere difference in the shade of the skin - that forgot the original meaning of the words (raising childs learned the offensive meaning first?).
People need to stop being intensionally offensive instead of using then banning more and more words doing that. The words are the symptom not the cause.
Isn't there is an actual difference between blind and visually impaired tho? The way I understood it blind people are a subset of visually impaired people, but not all visually impaired people are blind in a medical sense.
So the reasoning behind such language might be to include people who are not technically blind, but still require similar consideration, assistence, infrastructure and so on.
Language is odd here. The public used to call neurodivergent people "retarded" till the word had developed such a negative connotation that you wouldn't be able to use the word when adressing actual neurodivergent people without feeling like you are swearing. Of course that negative connotation didn't come out of nowhere, it is an expression of the way society looks (or looked) at the people it described. Of course people who live with mentally disabled people (or mentally disabled people themselves) often self-label themselves as "retarded" very bluntly and not without some sense of humour. But a bit like with race there are certain things you can say when you are part of the minority, that might not be okay to say when you are part of the majority.
When I was a kid people would constantly call something or someone "retarded", my niece's generation talks about how that is not okay. And they don't do it out of political correctness, but because they truly don't think neurodivergent behavior is something anybody should have to be ashamed of.
But of course there are also people who don't go that deep and just want to not offend anyone (good luck with that). They are the people who will feel uncomfortable when they describe something that isn't part of their perfect little world.
I myself, as someone with ADHD, absolutely despise the term “neurodivergent” (and also “neurotypical”). I hate how it’s used to lump everyone with different neurological, mental, and learning conditions under one umbrella. I hate how it is used to separate us from the “neurotypical” who don’t have these conditions. And I hate how offensive it sounds (“neurodivergent” sounds like some C-tier, crazed, antisocial comic book villain obsessed with building bombs or something.) I feel clear[0] adjectives and nouns are the best, most direct descriptors. I’m not neurodivergent, I just have ADHD. I’m not oculi-visuallydivergent, I just wear glasses because I am nearsighted.
[0] Yes I am aware that what counts as clear is itself very, very up for discussion and is a very loaded term. I hope I got my point across.
Yes and actually that subsetting is why we need the richness of the language. A school for the blind is specifically for people who need to learn to make do without hardly any visual input. Assistance for the visually impaired can range from screen reading and braille to large text and high contrast.
We also have a lot of definitions for blind and retarded, not referring to personal differences. A duck blind. Retarded bacterial growth. A blind sac. Sometimes people take offense at even these uses.
The difficult part of this being, some of the 100% blind people effectively don’t like the word and don’t want to be called blind. Then some people are ‘only’ 80% blind, and don’t want to be called blind. Then some family members of blind people don’t want the word to be used.
I think it’s pretty common phenomenon, like the people who call themselves “black”, those who are called “black” but hate it, and everyone in the middle usually not knowing what’s the position of any specific person’s on the issue.
I don’t think there even is a correct answer, as long as there are many people in different situations with different perceptions of what the words mean, there’s no way we get a consensus on this. At most we could get a majority sharing a common sensibility and bully the rest into submission, as it happened so many times in history.
Pretty simple if you don’t have to deal with the logistics of this. How can you judge if something was done with malice or not in the first place especially when we’re talking about disabilities which impair being able to read between the lines fairly often? People can make their preferences clear but how does one meet the preferences of many people in a mass communication?
Benefit of the doubt? Why is it important to know for sure if something so benign is done with malice or ignorance on an initial take. Just assume ignorance and if it continues it becomes clear that it's malice.
>I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short.
Have you ever listened to the tv show Avatar the last air bender? There's a character who's blind named Toph and she always goofs on her friends who aren't blind throughout the series. It's quite amusing since it's not done in a manner that insults her for being blind but that they sometimes say things which might be insensitive which she makes fun of in her own way.
I think it all starts from a good place. Would you rather people just using words "carelessly" without regard to how you might feel? It's questioning the assumption that the word used is fine throughout history.
I don't think there is anything nefarious about it, just that "people" always co-opt the motives in the end and make it muddled for their own benefit. Overthinking it I guess. I know it when I see it, but it's hard to articulate it to something that works for everyone.
> It's questioning the assumption that the word used is fine throughout history.
Bullshit. It forbids questioning of the questioning. That is all it is really about.
> "people" always co-opt the motives in the end and make it muddled for their own benefit
At least you can concede that point. Which is an enormously important point and more than enough of a reason not to go down this idiotic path of linguistic power struggles.
I'm not arguing what is currently happening or the end result, just that from even my own personal perspective I usually want to ask "is this word okay to use around you?" instead of just assuming it as such or automatically making someone else responsible for their feelings around my words. You might ultimately be right, but go down that road enough and these people are usually called "assholes" lol. That phrase isn't an indictment of good intentions, just a warning to be aware.
> or automatically making someone else responsible for their feelings around my words
If people are not responsible for their own feelings and the onus is on you, you are at their mercy. Some percentage of them are going to abuse you as a result.
Where is the win? All you are enabling is psychos and mentally/emotionally unstable people.
Like I said, people ARE ultimately responsible for their own feelings, but that doesn't mean we can't do with erring on the side of empathy in our day-to-day. Don't mistake this for me saying "policing language is fine to preserve someone else's feelings".
My comment was mainly to the parent on why it's bad for someone to feel awkward about potentially using a "wrong" word and for me sometimes it stems out of care.
All that said, I basically think all this shit gets perverted in the public space where there's a lot more gamesmanship and manipulation.
I mean sure, if I asked up front every single time to the point where people get annoyed? But that's what we are discussing here.
Yes, we humans have millions of years ready subtle signals, but we are also really fucking bad at reading minds and knowing what others are thinking. Thus, by clarifying with things like actual words in a direct and non-confrontational way we can actually communicate and understand.
I don't know why people are so keen to get me in some kind of "gotcha!" when it's pretty simple what I'm suggesting. Like since when has the intention of wanting to be sure that you're not offending someone become a replacement for inept social person who can't read subtle signs?
Your suggestion is akin to the Victorian gentlemen who didn't swear around the ladies and talk about intellectually heavy and upsetting things because they couldn't handle it.
It's the opposite of empowering somebody to speak up and decide on their own what they can and can't handle.
So yes you might get some pushback when you "simply" suggest we change our interactions.
what are you even talking about? My original post to the op was about why is it wrong to not want to offend someone? It has nothing to do with trying to dictate anything for the rest of the population, just my opinion. No where do I tell you that it’s better to shut up for fear of offending someone.
It’s you who is projecting whatever issue you have with people even remotely suggesting thinking about what we are saying to some greater problem.
Because it's patronizing. You can use normal language without intending to offend someone, but if you actively censor your own language in their presence, you're removing their agency.
Yeah you lost me there I guess, then. There are numerous instances I can think of where we censor our own language and it has nothing to do with removing someone's agency. And of course you can intend to not offend someone and still offend them; that doesn't mean your intent was wrong.
We can agree to disagree here. In the end, I would rather converse with someone who errs of the side of not wanting to "offend" me, but can still freely say whatever they want vs. someone who speaks with no regard to how their words might affect me and makes no apologies for it.
The outcome is the same, but to me, one person is thoughtful and the other person is a jerk. I have never thought that someone trying to be thoughtful with their words was patronizing me, but that's only my experience.
> The outcome is the same, but to me, one person is thoughtful and the other person is a jerk. I have never thought that someone trying to be thoughtful with their words was patronizing me, but that's only my experience.
I have the opposite visceral response to this sort of thing. If someone refers to me either singly or as a part of a collective such as "persons having a mental impairment" I immediately know I'm dealing with the sort of bastard that no human connection can be formed with.
The language betrays the intent, and the intent is to proclaim a shibboleth for the purposes of in-group/out-group reinforcement.
In my opinion, it is not wrong to not want to offend someone, but it is wrong to give that priority over actually communicating.
I do not intend to deliberately try to offend someone, but I think that it is more important to actually say things, freedom of speech, making an argument for or against something, etc, than it is to avoid offending someone.
Those same millions of years of evolution have also made us quite adept at reinforcing power and dominance structures through those same signals. Seems like there might be more to the discussion than "doesn't matter", no?
It's certainly unfortunate, but not that weird in my view. People in general don't want to offend, but rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that the acceptable terms for any person who has some "protected characteristic" are an ever-shifting minefield, and any infraction will be unforgivable. This fear is 99% unfounded of course, but due to the disproportionate prominence of such "woke takedowns" in media, has absolutely added to the distance between groups.
When I was a child, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. This is now malady non grata: For one thing, it's been folded into autism spectrum disorder, the DSM-5 being more on the lumper end of things than previous DSMs were, and, for another, it has a checkered history, with Hans Asperger using his position as a doctor in Vienna during the Second World War to choose which children were saved and which were murdered in camps. His collaboration with the Nazis and odious views have resulted in a backlash against the diagnosis.
Later still, the very word "Autism" seems to have faded out of polite speech, with people like me being referred to as "on the spectrum" with no explicit mention of which spectrum. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a straight-up euphemism treadmill: The DSM-5's lumping of Asperger's into autism spectrum disorder is something that can be defended on its scientific merits, but moving away from any mention of autism is purely down to the word's use as an insult. OK, so be it. The treadmill rolls on.
The final point is person-first language and why I don't use it: I am an autistic person. I don't say I'm a person with autism because I can't possibly be without autism. Is someone who identifies as a man a "person with gender" or is anyone a "person with race" or "person with ethnicity"? No. Some things are fundamental enough to how we experience the world that saying we're a person with that thing, which implies we could be without it, is wrong.
Autism is an insult, it’s a shortened version of “autism spectrum disorder”, disorder is intrinsically an insulting word, and the diagnostic criteria describes variations in human behaviour as dysfunctions and so on.
The increased use of “autism” as an insult and people avoiding it is because it is an insult and always was from its conception. That is why doctors regularly try and plot to screen people’s DNA for this “autism” to exterminate them from the gene pool. Because it’s a bad thing they want to destroy, despite the fact it’s a “spectrum” disorder and thus is a label of convenience and there’s not really such a thing as “the autism gene”.
Which to me makes the whole “autistic person” vs “person with autism” stuff pointless. You’re either a disordered person or a person with a disorder, put a gun to my head and I prefer disordered person. I react with offence to any such labels on the grounds that “Asperger’s” is obsolete and “autism” was never diagnosed so people and call me disordered as shorthand to describe me can fuck themselves because I don’t want to deal with the stigma of a label which was thrust upon me through incredibly pseudoscientific means. The dsm-iv which I was diagnosed under was called a “noble lie” by one of its chief author’s.
> Autism is an insult, it’s a shortened version of “autism spectrum disorder”, disorder is intrinsically an insulting word, and the diagnostic criteria describes variations in human behaviour as dysfunctions and so on.
No, people use "Autism" as an insult because they think it's a way to say "retarded" which won't get them slapped down.
I don't really agree, because I see people who use both the word "Retard" and "Autist" as a slur. It's only the left wing who will exclusively use the word "Autist" as a slur because it flies under the radar and can be wrapped up in woke dressing, but the words aren't totally interchangable.
The word "Autist" has become popular simply because more people are called "Autists". This justifies parents getting more government assistance's, schools being able to rationalise away their standardised test scores slipping as being the students fault, doctors getting fat insurance payouts, TikTok celebrities getting attention, everybody gets their piece. It's a label of scapegoating problems people have with an individual justified by the subjective observation of their behaviour and the inference their brains must be "disordered", "disturbed", "disregulated", and "dysfunctional" without any requirement to look deeper into societal or physiological problems. No wonder prevalence has increased more than a hundredfold since it first started being diagnosed, it's so convenient to so many people, and the diagnostic criteria is relativistic and thus pliable.
The rise of autism's popularity was to justify (POSITIVELY!) discriminatory treatment in schools, social groups, and work which were always wrapped up in this faux-sympathetic concern over defective brains which totally justifies differential treatment. People who just think that "Autism" is a funny way to make fun of somebody without any further motivation aren't even the problem, they merely reveal the reality of what over-socialised people have always thought when they call people "Autistic", and that look in the mirror revolts people.
Way I see it, this thing called autism being treated as a "mental disorder" is no different than transgenderism being called a "mental disorder". A difference in behaviour being belittled as a mental defect without non-inferential evidence or thought about if this framing actually helps people. That is how I see it more than I see it as a PC replacement for the word "Retard".
> Later still, the very word "Autism" seems to have faded out of polite speech, with people like me being referred to as "on the spectrum" with no explicit mention of which spectrum
It is terribly ignorant, because people who use "spectrum" as an alias for autism/ASD don't know that psychiatry/psychology contains many other "spectrums" – the schizophrenia spectrum, the obsessive-compulsive spectrum, the bipolar spectrum, the disruptive behaviour disorder spectrum, the trauma spectrum, etc, etc. The autism and schizophrenia spectrums are the only two which have officially made it into the DSM-5, but the others are all actively used in research and clinically, and the obsessive-compulsive spectrum was originally planned to be included (but for whatever reason didn't make the cut).
> The final point is person-first language and why I don't use it: I am an autistic person.
I seriously thought about paying a psychologist >$1000 for an autism assessment. Together, my psychiatrist and my psychologist [0] talked me out of it. They both said that if I really wanted a piece of paper saying that I had ASD, certainly some psychologist out there would be happy to take my money and give me one. But, their argument was, it wouldn't actually make any positive difference to my life, it would just be a waste of my time and money. And, for now at least, I decided to follow their advice. So am I an "autistic person" or not?
What is "autism"? "Asperger's"? "ASD"? Well, in part, they are scientific theories; in part, they are cultural constructs, whose existence and success is quite independent of the quality or truth of the scientific theory. Focusing just on the scientific theory side, how good is the evidence behind them? Most professionals, families, and people who identify with those labels assume the evidence must be really good. But, there are voices out there arguing that they are far from proven, that the science behind them is deeply flawed, even that we ought to drop them and look for better theories to replace them with. See [1] – and for a weaker but overlapping position, [2]. Is something really "fundamental enough to how we experience the world" if it is a scientific theory which could well turn out to be false, a dead-end, a wrong turn in the history of science? What if, one day, people look back on ASD/autism/Asperger's/etc just as we now look back on hysteria, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, the Ptolemaic model, the steady-state universe, etc, etc, etc? What if "autism" is really no more fundamental to anyone's identity than hysteria was?
[0] my psychologist isn't qualified to diagnose ASD, hence he couldn't do it, I had to go to someone else. He could gain that qualification if he wanted to – all it takes is just a few short courses – but he isn't interested in practicing in that area. Similar story for my psychiatrist – he told me if any patient asks him about an ASD diagnosis, he tells them to see a psychologist for that instead, he doesn't want to get involved in it
> What if, one day, people look back on ASD/autism/Asperger's/etc just as we now look back on hysteria, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, the Ptolemaic model, the steady-state universe, etc, etc, etc?
None of that makes sense, in that new ideas about how the world works can't change the results of old experiments. That means I'll always be me, I'll always have been me, and part of that involves dealing with things that are, apparently, significantly different from what other people deal with. I am different from other people, regardless of what name is eventually hung on that, and just saying that name can't be "Autism" for some reason or another isn't changing the important part.
Here's a paper I really like – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880188/ – they looked at the brains of four groups of children – those with a primary diagnosis of ASD, ADHD, OCD and the "typically developing" ("normal" children with no diagnosis at all). They used machine learning to assign the children to clusters, based purely on brain imaging and test results (IQ and behavioural scales) – without any reference to the diagnostic labels. The 10 clusters they got had poor overlap with the diagnostic labels – see especially figure 3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880188/figure/...
I don't think their research is at all the "final answer" to what is "really going on" – it needs replication, and you might get different clusters if you added more diagnoses – but let's just pretend for the moment it is. People with an ASD diagnosis were in all 10 clusters, so who knows which one you would be in. Now, given your emphasis on "I am different", maybe you are in one of the clusters which is "further from normal", such as 8 or 9 or 10. But, whatever "you have", it would be clear that (1) plenty of people who "have ASD" don't "have what you have", (2) unless you happen to be in cluster 10, the sole ASD-only cluster (which only had 10-15% of ASD), some people who "don't have ASD" do "have what you have". Doesn't it therefore follow, that whatever it is, "autism" or "ASD" or "Aspeger's" isn't a good label for it?
OK, I think I agree with you: We don't know if ASD or any of our current diagnoses are a particularly good model, but it is possible to cluster people and some people are farther from whatever group of clusters collectively contains the majority or strong plurality.
> It is so weird, because it adds yet another layer of distance between "us" and the "normal" people.
I like to call normal people "Normies", and with all the terror and hardship they've brought to the world (being the vast majority of the population), while self-righteously pointing their fingers at other people, assigning 100% of the underlying causality to them (usually based on heuristics or blindly accepting the mainstream narrative explanation) it only increases my enjoyment when I'm insulted and downvoted/rate-limited in response.
"We have met the enemy and he is us".
> Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller.
I often wonder if this is purely accidental/organic.
I agree with what you are saying, but I also have my own comments relating to such things.
What I had seen is that these use of banning words and using different words, mostly just makes it more difficult to communicate properly, rather than actually helping anyone. (Occasionally some specific change is helpful in some contexts, but often it just makes it worse.)
I think that all of these changes are rather excessive. Sometimes they do make an improvement, but often they don't, and may make it worse. Sometimes it is an improvement in some contexts, but it should not be applied to contexts in which it is inappropriate.
I also don't like such words like "visually challenged", etc. It is better to use words such as "blind", although it can depend on the context. Sometimes "unable to see" might be more appropriate (since, just because you are unable to see something does not necessarily mean that you are blind; e.g. maybe you are looking at something else at the time, or your eyes are closed, etc).
"Disabled" is OK (using words such as "people with disabilities" or "differently-abled" or "people living with disabilities" or whatever, does not help), but usually it is better to specify the specific disability (e.g. "blind" or "deaf"), which is usually much more helpful than writing "disabled". (Although, in some contexts, it may be sensible to write "disabled", because it isn't about a specific kind of disabilities. Even in some cases, "differently-abled" may be appropriate, possibly.)
Accessibility features can be helpful whether or not you are blind, deaf, or other kind of disabilities. For this reason, it is helpful to not restrict their usefulness or to claim that they are only good if you are disabled in this way. (For example, many people can use captions on TV even if you are not deaf, although they are also useful if you are deaf, which should not be disregarded.) I think that many kinds of features can be useful whether or not you are blind/deaf/etc, if the system is well-designed.
In some cases, there just aren't any good words to describe some unusual situations clearly, though.
I used to work for a while with blind people. The boss of the local blind people community was shooting dad-like jokes about blindness all the time, I loved that attitude!
It helped to make connection with these people and we needed that, because I was developing some app that main audience was blind people and to actually understand their needs and problems you need to make a connection with them.
Decade or so ago I was once in a room with a group of people where one person was blind. An acquaintance of the blind person came into the room and said oh hey good to see you to him. The blind person replied back to them with one of the best comebacks I’ve ever heard in my life with “well I’ve never seen you” before” and had the whole room laughing.
That’s because they care more they were bullied in the past than about your feelings.
People appropriating your disability to excuse their bullying has led to what is effectively PTSD dealing with the groups whose voice was appropriated.
That’s sad — and has impacted not only disabled people, but race and gender relations.
I miss 10-20 years ago, when people were people rather than defined by protected class.
Amen. Its sad, and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. To a degree, I am used to being treated in a condescending way. This is just a level up, the worst kind: "I know better how you should be treated then you because you are to simple to know what I already know."
Its this new concept that says you can only be a nice, respectful person if you sign up to a particular ideology and view the world through this lens.
This ideology is usually espoused by people who have only have a couple of years life experience as an adult yet believe they are best positioned to tell everybody else how to think and behave.
The continuing to dissent aspect and persisting to use the “nice” words is dark to me. It represents to me the inescapable self referential pathway of all altruistic behaviors.
That which makes cooperation and altruism possible also causes some strange glitches that sometimes reveals the motivating emotions are always self referential.
It's bafflingly common for someone on this site to say something along the lines of "woke people should stop being woke and instead should listen to my opinions as a minority and change their ways to suit me better because I have special insight into the problems I face that they don't".
Which to most people, is what being woke is.
But I guess if you are on team non-woke and some kind of a minority then things get complicated quickly.
i used to live on the coast and moved to a midwest state. i did it because property is cheaper in the midwest and also i thought it would be refreshing to get a break from coastal culture. i moved to the midwest but a metro area in the midwest, not a rural community. the state is red, we have constitutional carry and we have stand your ground rather than duty to retreat.
i have gotten into developing real estate in this place and i have had a lot of theft. naturally, i thought that because the state is red, constitutional carry and stand your ground i would be able to confront someone committing a crime. i thought that if that person attacked me, i would be well within my rights to defend myself. one day i did catch someone trespassing, looking for something to steal. i did confront him and he did try to attack me. luckily, drawing my gun was enough to make him change his mind. it was a whole incident. and what happened next shocked me to my core and changed my understanding of what is going on in this country. the police treated me like the criminal. they didnt charge me but they were really mean and aggressive with me, as if i were not the victim of a crime, and they lied to me. they said i should have just called and not followed the man. i said if they hadnt taken 20 fucking minutes then i wouldnt have needed to keep him in sight. i said if it takes you 20 minutes to show up to me following the guy, it would have taken you an hour to get here otherwise. and i said that the guy would have gotten away. if people follow your advice the criminals will get away every fucking time. how the fuck does that work? his response, from a midwestern cop, was that i should just let insurance cover the losses. the insanity of that statement is shocking. but not as shocking as this: people in the community didnt support me. nobody was in favor of me confronting criminals. these people, who are often victimized and stolen from, are not just apathetic about crime but look down on me because i was involved in a violent interaction. these people wont confront criminals or be associated with people who do because they dont want to reduce their social status. thats what it is, its snobbery. these people "support the police" and there are blue porch lights everywhere, and they claim to be tough on crime, but they are no different than los angeles liberals when it comes to actually confronting crime. and people wonder why we have crime in this country. its because people are fucking retarded. they have no fucking principles.
this mind virus has taken over the entire country. and its all connected. these are the same people who allow themselves to fumble over language, who bend over backwards to not call a spade a spade. people who stumble over not offending a blind person, as if it would make them less blind, are the same people who shy away from confronting crime. in both cases, there is a total lack of critical thought, a total blindness to the bigger picture.
the simple and plain fact is that society cannot be good or even exist unless everyone makes a little sacrifice every once in a while. people have to stand up to crime every once in a while or else crime will become rampant. and it has. people have to say what they think every once in a while even if it makes you look bad or else the truth, our only guiding light, will become extinguished. but all these idiots avoid any and all risk to their own wellbeing no matter whats at stake. these people wont even accept the tiny, tiny little loss of face involved in unintentionally offending someone. literally any loss of face or status, any tiny little deviation from the script, is simply too much for these people. its fucking disgraceful. everyone knows that the country has become much more crime ridden, much more seedy, much more crappy in recent times. especially when you control for technology. its cultural for sure, not economic.
and since we are on the topic, let me just say it: fumbling around when calling a black person black or a blind person blind is more insulting than not! when you dance around and fumble and so on, you are making a huge and embarrassing insinuation that the condition of the person you are referring to is problematic or undesirable. you are screaming in that persons face that you see them as less than and you are trying really hard to not portray them as such. thats what really cements these people in the category of "idiot." they are selfishly helping themselves by toeing the line and not helping anyone else despite the fact that the entire justification for that dogma is being selfless and helping others.
Don’t draw unless your life is being threatened and you’ve decided you’re going shoot that person. Brandishing to stop theft I think is illegal anywhere. There is no Wild West anymore. Lucky you didn’t end up in jail.
i didnt brandish because brandishing it showing a deadly weapon with the intent to intimidate. if a person draws their weapon in self defence they arent brandishing even if they dont end up firing. i didnt draw my pistol to stop a theft i did it to stop the man from attacking me. he turned around, put his fists up, approached me and verbally threatened me with violence and trust me he meant it. thats why charges werent pressed.
Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller.
It is so condescending to believe your own language-police more then the person you are talking to. Yet, the peer pressure seems to be so high that this actually happens. Sad.