I want to share my own reactions to the name change since this is a really interesting topic. For context, I'm an African American, so many of my ancestors were slaves.
- The first time it occurred to me that "master" in this context could offend anyone was when GitHub changed the name (and broke my workflow).
- My immediate reaction was, "this change is by white people for white people," where "white" means anyone who isn't black.
- My next reaction was, "they may be changing the name for the wrong reasons, but the change is brilliant."
Let me explain a little more. Whether motivated purely by virtue signaling or by more genuine intentions, changing the name doesn't fix any of the problems that black people face. The article explains this well.
What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way.
So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
As another black SWE, I'll add that I disagree with your perspective. I think the name change does more harm than good because it trivializes the movement. If the goal is to change minds and open hearts then where appropriate, we should endeavor to communicate in ways that will be well received by those who need to hear the message. Stuff like this is just preaching to the choir and alienating the rest, but also not actually changing anything that matters in the lives of black people.
>I think the name change does more harm than good because it trivializes the movement.
>If the goal is to change minds and open hearts then where appropriate, we should endeavor to communicate in ways that will be well received by those who need to hear the message. Stuff like this is just preaching to the choir and alienating the rest.
> Also not actually changing anything that matters in the lives of black people.
I couldn't have put this better myself. There are two issues
- What people want is justice, including economic justice, and progress. They want to stop being discriminated by gerrymandering politicians and trigger-happy cops. They want an economy that serves everyone and not just those on the very top, and that does not disproportionally discriminate those on the bottom and especially minority communities with a history of disadvantage. In this sense, changing master to main is nothing but a feel-good measure for privileged white people to feel good about themselves without actually having to put in any effort into tackling hard problems like improving democracy or improving the economic system.
- Besides this, it's actually a stupid move in a political, pragmatic sense. Like you're saying, it alienates precisely those you need to bring to your side ("it's pc gone mad!") and it's only going to be well received by those already pre-disposed to agree with you. It's actually my main criticism of the Left nowadays: we are shit at politics! You have to be pragmatic and somewhat calculating to actually get shit done. Many activists on the left today rather childishly think that simply being right is enough, as if you didn't have to be smart, convincing, use rhetoric, etc.
I think you overstate the level of lasting alienation and understate the cumulative impact that a bunch of small "trivial" changes could have over years.
For a hundred years after the Civil War, and then a solid 50 more after the Civil Rights movement, we had "white people doing nothing" plus "some still-racist white people actively trying to roll things back." Doing things, and keeping the issue in the forefront, even if the things sometime look silly to some people, is going to make us more progress than going back to doing nothing because some people think only the perfect things are worth doing.
(People getting affronted, offended, and alienated by actions that they think are "silly" is another problem entirely... You don't think it'll make a big difference? That's nice. Why are you making a big deal out of it, then? There's a virtue signalling of "look at how more evolved I am to not be fooled by your silly change, and still spot that the world still sucks after it!!")
As much as we pretend otherwise, people's attention and resources are limited. Time spent bikeshedding these inconsequential things is time not spent tackling more important issues. Each newsflash that opens with "pc culture gone mad! the word "blacklist" is being banned by radical leftists" is a newsflash that doesn't open with
"wages have been stagnant for the past 50 years despite gains in productivity"
"prices of tvs and smartphones falling, prices of housing and healthcare skyrocketing"
"statistical studies show voter preferences have near-zero correlation with effected legislation, while preferences of the wealthier 0.5% are very strongly correlated"
etc.
In short: you're alienating people that you could bring to your side, you're wasting time and effort in inconsequential changes, you're giving fuel to those who use these trivialities to distract the populace from the real issues. I see no upside here.
As a Native American this comes across to me the same as how the savior complex drives people to talk down to Native Americans about their persecution.
And that's pretty much what the OP article is complaining about, people with savior complexes doing performative things that don't really fix the problem on a larger scale.
If I may ask, (why) do you prefer Native American over Indian (assuming you're talking about being a United States native and not a native of other parts of America, ie. South America)?
I have no preference, so sometimes I will say Native American, sometimes its American Indian, sometimes its indigenous... No real preference other than I tend to use one or another based on context at times. Its more clear and not mildly politically loaded to say "Native American" in this context.
I do not really like using Indian to refer to Native Americans as I work with a lot of people from India. This is a personal preference, I don't correct people who say Indian to refer to Native Americans and I will often use it in a conversation where its already being used to avoid confusion or bad vibes.
An of course, there is the confusion you noted that can happen between the super-continent America and the country commonly called America.
Do USA schools teach that America is one continent divided in north, central and south America? Or is it America=USA ?
I'm from South America and we learn it's one continent
There are multiple, separate issues in the question.
As a matter of actual geological fact, North America and South America are separate continents (they have their own cratonic cores). Geographically they are considered distinct in the USA also. Central America is a cultural or political region refering to the isthmus -- it is not a continent in any sense.
Nationals of the USA are called "Americans" by USA nationals, and by people from other parts of the world, including Japan, Russia, etc (in their own phonologies). Canadians refer to USA nationals as Americans, and do not call themselves Americans.
Europeans frequently object to USA nationals calling themselves Americans, claiming that the word should refer people's of both North America and South America. People from South American nations seem to feel the same. Mexicans seem to me much more likely to refer to a USA national as "Americano" than they are "Estadounidense."
USA nationals will sometimes describe people from North and South American nations as be from "the Americas."
In my experience, a lot of people from the United States tend to conflate "America" and the "United States of America". It's a pet peeve of mine, so I sometimes correct them. But usually people just get annoyed with me. ;-)
This blows my mind, because it never occurred to me that this would actually be taught differently. But yes, afaik, in NA we're taught that North and South America are two separate continents. In Canada however, Americans are from the USA, but we don't generally refer to the USA as America. Only they do that. We refer to the middle nation in NA as The U.S.
It's hard to recall what I was taught about Central America, but I believe it was that it's sort of a region shared between both and only a colloquially separate entity.
So you learned "there are six continents"? That's really interesting. Growing up in the US, we always learned it as seven. I never really thought about that as something that was taught differently based on location.
(Unfortunately though, I think that ignorance is fairly common for a lot of aspects of life for people raised in the US.)
Side note: I was going to say "aspects of life for Americans", but realized Americans means more than just those in the US. So I propose a new term for "people from the US". USers. :)
At least from my experience, America is the US. If you want to refer to the giant landmass that makes up the majority of the land in the western hemisphere, you say "The Americas".
> you're wasting time and effort in inconsequential changes, you're giving fuel to those who use these trivialities to distract the populace from the real issues.
That's probably a valid perspective, but I see a lot of well-meaning comments like this, and this thread now has more comments on it, than github has employees. Perhaps the time "wasted" on this at github isn't as high as the time wasted discussing it.
As a software engineer, my workflow is forced to change all the time. As a software engineer, I don't complain. I've been praised for not complaining. I will work on Visual Basic code if you want me to.
Similarly, I'll change how I speak and work if it makes someone more comfortable, no problem.
I'm also desperate for there to be more conversations about unionizing, corporate lobbying, the outsized influence of the 1%.
Maybe if we both just shut up about this topic and get on with our other work, the world will be a better place?
With regards to "main" vs "master" I honestly don't care. It might make some people feel better, and it might not. Should I care, and comment here about it?
So let it happen quickly without complaining about it so that tomorrow we can be arguing about something else, instead of arguing about the same thing for ten straight years.
"People get pissed off even by small changes" is a MUCH bigger impediment towards real progress than "people are making small changes that won't fix the whole world" is.
I don't believe most of the people who say they're only problem is that the change is "too small." I think that's just an excuse of convenience to resist any change or challenge to the status quo. If your problem is that the change isn't big enough, the solution is to push for bigger ones yourself! But that's not usually what we see those people doing...
It's not the size of the change that's a problem, it's that the change doesn't address the problem at all, and that the only metric for success for these changes is how angry they make people (which, in the circles of the people proposing these changes, means the change is "working").
It's entirely possible to hire more engineers of color and pay them fairly, but it turns out that pitting workers against each other by introducing a handful of inconsequential process and standards changes is much cheaper and hinders the solidarity that enables coordinated advocacy for better working conditions.
Each newsflash could cover those things anyway, but they choose garbage wedge issues and will continue to foment them when they cant find any: biden's dog was a recent controversy because talking about systemic problems doesn't get clicks and doesn't make people upset in the same way this type of BS does.
I'd argue it doesn't just achieve nothing, it works against the cause in two ways:
* First, as others have said, it builds resentment in those that see it as not worthwhile compared to other things and who are negatively impacted like how you describe.
* Second, which I haven't really seen people bring up, by succeeding at a visible but inconsequential change, the activists who brought this about are less likely to bother with something that actually matters.
> I think you overstate the level of lasting alienation and understate the cumulative impact that a bunch of small "trivial" changes could have over years.
Not even close. Everyone I've talked to about it makes some mention about the left having lost its mind, myself included.
>I think you overstate the level of lasting alienation and understate the cumulative impact that a bunch of small "trivial" changes could have over years.
I'm a very liberal person, and have actively fought prejudice, especially the type of unconscious bias that is so difficult to stomp out, my entire professional career. I'm especially keen on the dynamics of power in conversation, it's crazy how often people from a less privilege group get interrupted, and people rarely realize the dynamic as its occurring.
But all of the PC policing and the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric has really soured me on giving a shit about any of this. While I'm privileged by being white, I was born to a lower-middle class family in a rural area and don't feel particularly privileged. I went to a backwards high school where I was bullied for being a nerd, with curriculum from 60's( graduated in ~2010 and we didn't have a single CS class, and highest achievable GPA was 4.2, while people in neighboring districts could go to the GATE high school and graduated with a 5.0). I had undiagnosed/treated mental health problems which were significantly exacerbated by my family's inability to afford healthcare (we had insurance, but couldn't afford to actually see the doctor). Despite this we were too wealthy to qualify for any student aid and I was unable to win any substantial scholarships. I was mature enough at 20 to know I wasn't doing well enough nor did I have adequate direction in school to take tens of thousands in what I understood at the time to be an undischargeable debt on the gamble that it would pay off. I remember looking for help about how to do better at the community college I was attending and basically determined that I, as a straight white atheist, didn't really have allies as when I asked people where they got e.g. counseling, it was always through a channel i didn't have access to, whether it was a church group, a family friend or some support group for people who weren't me. My parents are both 40 years my senior and were so far out of the loop that they didn't even know that GPAs went higher than 4. I also didn't know that if I saw a psychiatrist I could turn everything around, and had no access to one, so I dropped out.
>Why are you making a big deal out of it, then?
Because I, personally, find all this woke shit about race and sex from bougie whites offensive, classist, and racist. I completely support it when it is coming from the (dis)affected community in question, but when there is a dogpile of privileged people virtue signaling in a way that completely negates the actual issues (like people not having equitable access to justice, healthcare, education and housing) I find affront. I would argue most of the problems that minority communities face are also shared by poor white communities, the only difference is that those communities have virtually no actual voice in modern discourse and have privileged whites talking on their behalf instead. Admittedly a common problem generally, but I don't want people with power, and make no mistake bougie tech workers have a lot more power than the poor do, to feel they've "done something" and pat themselves on the back until they actually make poor people's lives better, changing master/slave to main/source, or whatever the fuck language change you choose is literally doing nothing to make things better for anyone but github/micorsoft. It's paying lip service, full stop.
I also find some of talk about the historic enslavement of Blacks in the US kinda weird. I can track my lineage back thru 100s of years of serfdom, my ancestors literally fleeing Europe to America during Reconstruction in 19th century to escape brutal peonage and serfdom.. and nobody cares. I'm of the "priviledged class" because people who I have no relation to but shared my skin color were of the ruling class 250 years ago when we didn't respect human rights. Sounds racist as hell to me, all things considered. I just don't get it.
I agree with much of what you've said, especially the part about the shared problems that poor minority and poor White people face. Based on what you've said I wouldn't say you were very "privileged."
But responding to one of your points, and I don't think this is taught very well in schools, the specific discrimination that Black people faced went on for a long time after the end of slavery. For example, here in what is now considered progressive Oakland, CA, Black people were kept out of many jobs through the 1940s and 50s, including as streetcar drivers. Also, they were excluded from government subsidized mortgages through the 60s, which impeded their ability to build wealth and live in good conditions. These examples of explicit racial discrimination happened well within living memory.
Oh I understand that completely, which is why I state that I do have privilege as a white person. but the left has a messaging problem wherein too many of the bougie whites narcissisticaly believe all of their privileges are shared amongst whites.
Even apart from your examples, (you missed Japanese interment camps/stolen wealth, probably the worst thing the US did domestically in the 20th century) racial profiling is still extremely real in this country. Which is on everyone radar, but it's really put into focus the times I've traveled cross country and consistently see POC on the side of the interstate.
>These examples of explicit racial discrimination happened well within living memory.
I mean, the way I see it, explicit financial discrimination is still happening today. Its just called affirmative action.
> I mean, the way I see it, explicit financial discrimination is still happening today. Its just called affirmative action.
Nope. Redlining, the entire history of USDA subsidies in the 20th century, the GI bill etc are far more economically impacting than any meager adjustments to the dominance of white people in business and government. White people need to STFU about affirmative action as it has not meaningfully changed the shape of leadership in our workforce.
That was then, and this is now. To call the descendants of people who went through that period either "privileged" or "marginalized" is no different than visiting the sins of the father upon the son. It's morally reprehensible.
Thank you for taking the time to write this and for thinking the way you do. The most common trait among successful (not necessarily wealthy) people in my opinion transcends race, creed, religion, or sex; it's persistence.
>Besides this, it's actually a stupid move in a political, pragmatic sense. Like you're saying, it alienates precisely those you need to bring to your side ("it's pc gone mad!")
Alienates at best, emboldening the racists at worst. Clearly even the author was pissed by this change, not just because it's an empty gesture but also a change to workflow. I'm imagining some f̶a̶s̶h̶y̶ ̶e̶d̶g̶e̶l̶o̶r̶d̶ "Western Chauvinist" programmer throwing a fit every time they accidentally git checkout master, racism intensifies.
> "It's actually my main criticism of the Left nowadays: we are shit at politics!"
a good point in the making until this line, where you aligned yourself with a shallow identity. fuck left and right. stop trying to find a team to mindlessly root for. yes, it's hard, and yes, it means more mindshare devoted to evaluating what you think rather than who you want others to think you are in subservience to ideological hegemony. politics is shit because not enough of us do this, but rather settle on a tribe and leave our brains behind in the process.
the left isn't right, it's a coalition for power, which is for delivering advantage to some people at the exclusion of others. power doesn't value or uphold right and wrong, so you're premise is profoundly misguided here.
You're assuming too many things about me. "Left" is a term with centuries of history. I use it because it accurately describes my positions, and the traditions and schools of thought that most influenced my views.
Suppose that 80% of the population support something that me and my friends don't like. If we can divide this group into two, by finding things that they strongly disagree over, then we can guarantee that this 80% never gets to express its majority.
So if we can put 50% of these people in a group called "Left" and 50% of these people in a group called "Right", and then prevent direct democracy with something such as elected representatives, then neither the Left nor the Right ever has to vote on the issue, because instead they are fighting over the most important thing, e.g. abortion. When the Left are in power, they are focused on the things that the Right is trying to take away, and vice versa. There is an eternal struggle. As a result, the things that a majority agrees on never get voted on, and even if they did, whoever is not in power would vote against them.
This is not hypothetical. There are several major issues that have the support of the majority (sometimes as much as 80%) of the population, and yet they are never voted on.
"Now that … workers are superfluous, what do you do with them? First of all, you have to make sure they don’t notice that society is unfair and try to change that, and the best way to distract them is to get them to hate and fear one another."
The "us vs them"ing that's been happening here for the past several decades is more than concerning, it's shocking. The number of times per year that a Congressperson will side with the opposite party during a vote has been shrinking like a cannonball for decades, and it's so limited now it almost doesn't exist. In the 60s, this wasn't the case; voting with the opposite side on certain things was fairly common. There is no way that is not directed and intentional.
And the issues we are getting wrapped up in emotionally are either 1) focused on fear or 2) 'religious' issues for which we will almost never have common agreement, but which are not of actual vital importance at a national level.
But I'm not arguing to "divide" or anything ffs, I simply used the word to describe a broad range of political positions, whose people which defend them I think are often making those two mistakes.
This is what happens when “left” and “right” are two massive blocks. Your point is a very good demonstration of why a two-parties system is not much better than a single-party one.
There is an optimum in the middle. Governments lasting for a day like several European countries have had in the past is also harmful and alienating. But if there is nothing forcing people to compromise and collaborate, what you describe is the expected outcome: frequent swings from one side to the other, each time with a slim majority, and nothing good happening over the long term.
The problem is not left and right. The problem is that you cannot represent a full spectrum of ideologies with a binary choice.
> This is not hypothetical. There are several major issues that have the support of the majority (sometimes as much as 80%) of the population, and yet they are never voted on.
maybe there just isn't really much democracy in the united states.
“ In fact, the Data for Progress poll found H.R. 1—also known as the For the People Act—has broad public support. More than two-thirds of likely voters (68 percent) said they would back the proposal. Just 16 percent said they opposed it.
The support also transcended party lines, with 70 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independent or third-party voters and 57 percent of Republican voters expressing approval for the bill.”
Except all the left voted for it and all the right voted against it. You confuse and underestimate the impact of a minority party’s ability to maintain control via gerrymandering, wealthy election finding, voter suppression and an undemocratic Senate.
Show us the litany major issues 80% of citizens support that the left kneecaps.
You won't escape 90% of the party lines non-sense until you force bill discipline and kill riders. Until such time as representatives can vote on one issue withou getting blown out stackwise by having to wadethrough 6 distinct pieces of legislation all rolled into one, there will be defensive obstruction along party lines.
GP's point is also working as designed. The Founders envisioned a country with a minimum of lawmaking. The system was intended to only respond to a fairly unambiguous signal, and warned of the dangers of a Government that squandered it's credibility on laws it couldn't enforce, or frequent flip-floppery. It's just sad no one seems to have listened.
If left is a term that “goes back centuries”, then I don’t know what it means anymore. In the 18th century it was the group that sat on the other side of the room from the royalists.
Leftism is, generally speaking, those who want to move the needle especially rapidly towards "power to the people". Those on the right generally want to keep power with the established power base.
This can be contrasted with liberalism, which is the belief in a core platform of liberty, consent of the governed, and equality before the law. Though liberalism is often conflated with leftism, it's not, and neither is it the opposite of conservatism.
Many Americans today have forgotten what these terms mean, but that doesn't mean they're meaningless. They still are relevant, people just aren't really understanding the political philosophy.
> Leftism is, generally speaking, those who want to move the needle especially rapidly towards "power to the people". Those on the right generally want to keep power with the established power base.
This is the opposite of the positions taken by those described as "left" and "right" in the US. Republicans are individualist, "power to the people", "states' rights", etc, but would never be described as "left", while it's the Democrats that tend towards centralizing power in the federal government.
> Many Americans today have forgotten what these terms mean, but that doesn't mean they're meaningless.
They are certainly approaching that point if people don't mean remotely the same thing when using them.
The left-wing perspective on "power to the people" often means the use of state power on behalf of people to counteract private sources of power (eg commercial power).
The right-wing perspective often means the removal of state power in favor of private (ie, "personal") source of power (often in the form of commercial entities).
> This is the opposite of the positions taken by those described as "left" and "right" in the US. Republicans are individualist, "power to the people", "states' rights", etc, but would never be described as "left", while it's the Democrats that tend towards centralizing power in the federal government.
I wouldn't describe these aspects of Republican messaging as their core platform. They're just conservative standards, all conservatives tend to imagine themselves this way. Rugged individualists, callbacks to tradition, even "states rights", aren't particularly leftist in that they aren't calling for moving power anywhere, but rather keeping it where it is. You vote for Republicans if you like their messaging, it just so happens that how Republicans want to achieve these goals means the old white people are empowered to do things the old white way.
If you pierce through the dreck of the messaging, the platform's the same as any other conservative ideology. Law and order, another pillar of conservative rationale, is the name of an actual political party in Poland, guess what, they're actually the majority party.
There's just not that much special about American politics when you get right down to it. What's dangerous about it is that America has more money than the average European country, but our society is far less well-educated on humanities subjects. If you think that makes us prone to misinformation and propaganda, well, it does.
such concepts are not static across a population, nor through time. beyond the author(s) and early adherents, the population itself has a separate conception of such ideas that can be markedly different from the initial conception, and that also changes through time. it's certainly useful to understand this sort of history, but trying to stake a definition in time and defy the dynamism of these concepts is inherently political (e.g., originalism). sometimes that can be done deftly and sometimes hamfistedly.
in any case, the concepts can be relevant and meaningful and still not be useful as identity markers in any meaningful and relevant way. identification principally with a single school of thought is simply a mistake of rationality, and how we get unthinking tribalist extremism. it happens with any -ism: libertarianism, socialism, nihilism, capitalism, etc. the world works as a non-linear composition of all of these ideas and much more. not a single one can be considered "correct" in any meaningful sense.
They retain meaning across populations and through time. That's the whole point of philosophy. People's opinions on the matters change, but that doesn't change the matters.
Liberalism didn't change because people are using the term incorrectly and don't understand how to use it properly. Like a market, eventually the political landscape returns to rationality. At the end of the day, Trump is a classic fascist, and his supporters are supporting fascism.
They don't get to rewrite the meanings of the words because they don't like the connotations. Many through history have used his playbook, and it all follows the same general arc.
> Liberalism didn't change because people are using the term incorrectly and don't understand how to use it properly.
Well...
Actually it has changed. Classical Liberalism[1] is primarily an economic belief system that advocates small, non-interventionist government. It evolved into Right-libertarianism in the 20th and 21st century.
"In the late 19th century, classical liberalism developed into neo-classical liberalism, which argued for government to be as small as possible to allow the exercise of individual freedom. In its most extreme form, neo-classical liberalism advocated social Darwinism. Right-libertarianism is a modern form of neo-classical liberalism."
This odd positioning is most visible in Australia, where the conservative party is called "The Liberal party" after the mid-20th century view on this.
This is a long way from any modern understanding of Liberalism particularly within the US:
"Social liberalism, also known as left liberalism in Germany, modern liberalism in the United States[4] and new liberalism in the United Kingdom, is a political philosophy and variety of liberalism that endorses a regulated market economy and the expansion of civil and political rights....
In the United States, the term social liberalism may sometimes refer to progressive stances on sociocultural issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage as opposed to social conservatism."[2]
All classical liberals are liberals, but not all liberals are classic liberals. Ditto for social liberals. When I defined liberalism, I outlined a core platform. There are many many many movements within liberalism that all share the same core platform. They have to.
You cannot have classical liberalism in a country that's not committed to the core liberal platform. A free market just doesn't work in a world where there's no equality of the law, no liberty, and no consent of the governed. If even one of these is missing, you really can't have classic liberalism either. A regime will invariably put their fingers on the scales of commerce.
Ditto for every single other political philosophy under the liberal banner. All of these things rest upon a belief in the population of those three bedrock principles.
This goes against any common, modern understanding of the plain unadorned term "liberal". For example, former (Republican) house speaker Paul Ryan has called himself a "classical liberal"[1]
I'd also note:
Core beliefs of classical liberals did not necessarily include democracy nor government by a majority vote by citizens[2]
I'm not sure why you're presenting this as an argument against me. Americans, by and large, are liberals, every last one of them. It's the ones ignorant of political philosophy who have turned it into a pejorative. Paul Ryan calling himself a classical liberal is him calling himself a liberal.
Allow me to restate. Liberalism involves a core belief in consent of the governed, liberty, and equality under the law. Classical liberalism is all of these things. They just believe certain aspects are more important than others.
Some American conservative might decide economic freedom (liberty) is the most important aspect of liberalism. That's fine, that's all well and good, under the banner of liberalism. If you suddenly took away this conservative's consent of the governed, or made someone unequal according to the law, they would object, assuming they're a true liberal, which they are, because these values are steeped into just about every American. Solve problems through the political process, not by subverting it. Very, very core America.
What's dangerous about Trump is he's seducing people away from liberalism and towards royalism. Royals are above the law and get to impose governance on the people regardless of their consent. Not even the British agree that the royal family can govern without the consent of the populace, they had many many civil battles eventually deciding the role of the monarchy. Trumpists imagine these things are true even though they're not. They want a monarchy which is above the rule of law. They decide what is true and nobody can use legal action to decide otherwise.
Liberalism is a core Anglo doctrine, every single citizen of Anglo countries is a liberal, and many Europeans as well. They may campaign on other platforms, but if the core liberal pillars of society are threatened, Americans will revert back to those pillars.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but conservatives were fine with Trump's shenanigans, up to a point. That point is essentially, where Trump started threatening core liberal institutions. Once that started happening, the establishment started backing away. Only once Trump waved his hands again after the insurrection, saying it was all for fun, all a show, "be peaceful", did they start to line up again. Trump understood that he had to thread a needle between his base and core America. He failed, because Americans aren't going to go along with a clear subversion of democracy. He thought they could be convinced to and was wrong. Republicans wanted, and still want, his political vitality, but not his tactics.
Conservatives went along with him until he really threatened to make free and fair elections a thing of the past. I'm not saying that the American right is good people, I'm saying that the core beliefs of liberalism are inherent in all of us. There has long long been a fascination with royalism, like every single other democratic nation, but when push comes to shove, those who have tasted Anglo popular sovereignty will choose to continue popular sovereignty. Royalists will always be the minority.
yah, that's a political (and politicized) assertion. you also don't get to define terms only to your convenience, without consideration for the long arc of history and the breadth of the world's imagination.
> "At the end of the day, Trump is a classic fascist, and his supporters are supporting fascism."
impulsive statements like this reveal the limitations of that kind of rigid thinking. trump isn't a fascist, he's a self-centrist. he's one of the simplest human beings to understand because of this. politicized projections such as yours are overfitted at best, and completely unfitted in most cases, as in this case.
Those are the very same thing. A fascist does not care about anything other than personal power. All philosophies and ideology are superfluous. Fascists run on the very basic political premise of "you like me, elect me and let me run things because you like me and you'll like what I want to do." That's the core message, anything else is pointless to understanding. That's what fascism is. I'm not misunderstanding Trumpism, I'm giving it the same name everybody else who understands political history and theory gives it.
Everything people like about Trump, are the same things that cause people to put fascists in power. Have a look at this explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M6CXhUS-x8
Fascism isn't some long slow slide down to Nazi Germany that Americans seem to think of when they consider the term. The Nazis are the most visible and publicly know version of fascism, but countless others throughout history, in Europe, Latin America, Africa, have managed to subvert the mechanisms of their republics using the tactics of populism to put themselves in power, unaccountable to any sort of checks.
How is liberalism not the opposite of conservatism? Conservatives wish to maintain the status quo, true? Liberals wish to change it....
Liberalism has had a horrendous crash lately, many internal contradictions and fallacies have become clear, but the I still adhere to those principals.
You're thinking of progressivism, not liberalism. The American right has turned "liberalism" into a pejorative despite mostly being liberal themselves. (Trump supporters aren't liberal, hard to be liberal when you support fascism)
The only two terms that are really opposites here are 'left' and 'right', because they literally mean which side of the aisle you're sitting on. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the extremes of both sides are going to line up around who belongs in power, the elites, or in publicly accountable institutions.
It’s been basically “power to the individuals” (one person, one vote, this sort of things), as opposed to “power to the elite” (long live the kings etc) since the beginning. The elite makes do without a king, but the aristocratic class reflex is still there.
This spectrum is limited and one-dimensional, but it still is meaningful. The people who claim it isn’t are usually con men after your vote. “The third way” always turned out to be a scam.
I think you’re overfitting history with your current perspective. It’s so limiting, and mostly a recent phenomenon, to look at the past and politics as just “deciding where the power goes”. Most humans even in the US today don’t care except in how it affects their lives. Peasants likely didn’t care who the king was, or had some deep desire to rule themselves, many were just concerned with crop yields, protecting their family, enjoying life, and so on. Colonists in the US barely cared that they were ruled by a king, at least until they got hit with burdensome taxes.
Politics isn’t about power except secondarily, it’s about determining ones way of life. I don’t think anyone would care if they were ruled by a dictator, as long as that dictator didn’t interfere with how they live their life.
This is important because it seems like you walk away with the idea that conservatives are always about concentrating power and progressives are all about diffusing it. That’s just incorrect. Both have different ways they want to live their life and their policies are a reflection of attempts to change the environment around them to fulfill that vision. If progressive policy didn’t affect conservatives way of life, conservatives wouldn’t care about progressives. The reverse is true.
This framework fits every instance in history and everywhere on Earth for why politics happen: because people want to live their envisioned life.
Left has a long history, yes. But there is so much diversity within the groups that identify as leftist. And some people you might call leftist (like the folks at raddle.me) reject the term wholeheartedly. They are committed to thorough antiracism, but do not want to be associated with communist or socialist regimes or ideologies.
'left' (and 'right') is a term to subvert thinking in ways that advantage the already powerful, and short-circuit the formation of coalitions that can bring about real prosperity and equity to more people.
No one is arguing about right/wrong, he is simply saying the term has an accepted definition (especially in historical context, zooming out past the modern US political media landscape)
the issue is that once you stake your identity on a singular position, you've lost objectivity. that's when it becomes political, not personal.
further, as argued elsewhere, there is no singular correct ("accepted") definition of "left" that isn't a political insistence rather than objective and unyielding fact.
if you believe in "power to the people" or "equal rights" then state that explicitly. don't hide under the highly amorphous tent of "left", which invariably can be contrived into any extant principles that suits the propounder in the moment. spell out what you mean, not your professed identity and (wrongly) assume everyone shares a singular definition of that identity.
coalitions can form without being braindead. it's about being cognizant of the mechanisms of control that are impinging on us and resisting those so we can have meaningful dialog on issues that matter, not this bullshit.
The world is only changed by individual people. Alliances, parties, movements, schools of thought, etc., are just mobs who have adopted the ideas of particular individuals.
Single men do nothing. They still need others to do the hard work. The people who were truly successful did so by managing large organisations. Also, blind luck and circumstances.
Single men perpetrate every single act of injustice under the sun. It’s a single person who discriminates in interviews, discriminates, or Beat someone because of their skin color.
They also make every act of kindness, justice, and compassion, so I am not sure what point you are making. We were writing about single-handedly changing history.
In their present condition men are like bees which have just swarmed and are hanging down a limb in a cluster. The position of the bees on the limb is temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They must rise and find a new home for themselves. Every one of the bees knows that and wishes to change its position and that of the others, but not one is able to do so before the others are going to do so. They cannot rise all at once, because one hangs down from the other, keeping it from separating itself from the swarm, and so all continue to hang. It would seem that the bees could not get out of this state, just as it seems to worldly men who are entangled in the snare of the social world-conception. But there would be no way out for the bees, if each of the bees were not separately a living being, endowed with wings. So there would also be no way out for men, if each of them were not a separate living being, endowed with the ability of acquiring the Christian concept of life.
If every bee which can fly did not fly, the rest, too, would not move, and the swarm would never change its position. And as one bee need but open its wings, rise up, and fly away, and after it a second, third, tenth, hundredth, in order that the immovable cluster may become a freely flying swarm of bees, so one man need but understand life as Christianity teaches him to understand it, and begin to live accordingly, and a second, third, hundredth, to do so after him, in order that the magic circle of the social life, from which there seemed to be no way out, be destroyed.
But people think that the liberation of all men in this manner is too slow, and that it is necessary to find and use another such a means, so as to free all at once; something like what the bees would do, if, wishing to rise and fly away, they should find that it was too long for them to wait for the whole swarm to rise one after another, and should try to find a way where every individual bee would not have to unfold its wings and fly away, but the whole swarm could fly at once wherever it wanted. But that is impossible: so long as the first, second, third, hundredth bee does not unfold its wings and fly, the swarm, too, will not fly away or find the new life. So long as every individual man does not make the Christian life-conception his own, and does not live in accordance with it, the contradiction of the human life will not be solved and the new form of life will not be established.
My note: Tolstoy's Christian concept of life is quite different from what most people think of Christianity. He places emphasis on Jesus' teaching of non-resistance to evil by force and was against organized religion.
At least that's the narrative. People like to rally around a single person pushing a single idea, it's a powerful image of a heroic figure who had nothing but a vision.
Almost always, these "single" people are individuals with considerable clout and influence before they become figureheads. They usually rely on armies of subordinates and lots of other resources to do the actual work.
There was a study done that asked people on the left and right to try to imagine what the views and feeling of the other side were. People on the right were able to do a reasonable job of identifying the positions of the left. People on the left were almost completely unable to identify the goals and values of those on the right. I think that’s a big part of the problem. The left doesn’t understand what the right wants and until they do, they will not be successful in engaging the other side.
There was a study done that asked people on the right and left to try to imagine what the views and feeling of the other side were. People on the left were able to do a reasonable job of identifying the positions of the right. People on the right were almost completely unable to identify the goals and values of those on the left. I think that’s a big part of the problem. The right doesn’t understand what the left wants and until they do, they will not be successful in engaging the other side.
I agree completely. I fully expect to see an article by an affluent white woman writing from her reclaimed wine cork desk telling me to boycott Nintendo until they change the name of the Master Sword.
A (black) engineer colleague of mine told me about his team's effort to change master to main. The whole initiative was started by a rainbow colored hair (white) PM and since it was what they believed to be a highly visible and easy fix, grew to a team of 5. All non-technical PMs of course.
They ended up producing a "manifesto of inclusive software" where they listed every word they considered offensive and what it should be replaced with and made a very public announcement regarding the change.
The only response to their email was my (black) colleague asking if the branch renaming could be postponed to after a release because he didn't know what it could break in the build and release automation in case "master" is hard-coded somewhere.
This apparently started a lengthy thread between him and the 5 PMs where they explained to him that the reason he wasn't supportive of the change was because of the "systemic and cultural racism" he apparently internalized.
What happened then? Maybe in response, he said "no, I didn't internalize any racism, and here's a list of reasons why that logically isn't racist at all", and they said "Oh, never mind then".
Or maybe not. If accusing people of internalizing systemic racism didn't work, nobody would do it. We have a system where accusing a person of racism is an instant win and cannot be argued with, and as long as it is an instant win, it's going to be used, even against actual black people.
> What happened then? Maybe in response, he said "no, I didn't internalize any racism, and here's a list of reasons why that logically isn't racist at all", and they said "Oh, never mind then".
Shouldn't the black engineer's white colleagues "do their own work" instead of forcing him to do it for them?
> This apparently started a lengthy thread between him and the 5 PMs where they explained to him that the reason he wasn't supportive of the change was because of the "systemic and cultural racism" he apparently internalized.
If you feel that the master branch is a symptom of systemic and cultural racism then sure, feel free to make your case. I am interested in what you have to say and will do my best to consider what you have to say as best as I can.
But once people start making these kind of arguments it's clear to me I'm dealing with someone in simplex transmit-only mode and not receiving anything I have to say.
I really hate these kind of arguments. It's just gaslighting and handwaving away of whatever people are saying. "Your argument is invalid because you are subconsciously racist". Right, what makes you such an expert on my subconscious, hm? This is where I lose interest in talking to people.
I'm about as liberal as they come, but in the last few years I've mostly lost interest in social justice cause not because I think the cause is bad, because there are too many people involved that are just thoroughly unpleasant to deal with. It's high time the community ejects some of its more toxic elements, which will benefit everyone, but thus far they're mostly protected, defended, and even celebrated because "they're on our team". But that's not how it works. Assholes are assholes, no matter which team they're on.
A PM working in government (happened to be a white woman) once asked me how I (a black engineer, early 30s) escaped the inner city and became successful. I thought about it and answered, "I decided to stop participating in activities that got the police involved in my life."
Are you even from the "inner city"? Trying to figure out how dumb this interaction was haha.
I have a totally opposite experience, I'm white trailer trash that managed to get a math PhD from a fairly high ranking school. People just assume I grew up upper middle class.
Wow how ironic... in their attempt to stop something that isn't even racist to begin with they actually became racists. It'd be funny if this cult like thinking wasn't infecting our entire country.
Thank God the white people were there to tell the black man how to think and feel about himself. After all they're incapable of self care and rational thought... /s
in their attempt to stop something that isn't even racist to begin with they actually became racists.
No, they were racists all along. They merely over-played their hands and revealed it. But actually they reveal it in other ways if you care to look: the hair and the pronouns in bio are giveaway clues. They "colonised" our industry and now it's time they got decolonised themselves.
This comment is getting downvoted, but the point it makes is validated by my own experience as a black engineer over about 30 years. My "internalized racism" has been explained to me many times by women who share many (if not all) of the same attributes.
As near as I can tell, their need to explain my condition is triggered by independent thinking on my part.
One of the worst forms of racism is often perpetuated by the coastal elites. I'm not saying it starts with a nefarious intent like other forms, but it's rampant. I've brought it up before to some and it's like a light bulb went off, yet they don't want to believe they're a part of it so they try and rationalize.
It's where they change how they treat someone based on the color of their skin while alleging they're an ally.
They think they need to save or help them because they think they're incapable of doing things like getting ID at the DMV, voting or using the internet. They're the ones that use terms like African American and have never had real talk with some black friends, if they have any at all.
They say they're for equality but they don't treat other races or ethnicities as equals. Maybe it just makes themselves feel good, maybe they have a lot of guilt, maybe they feel like they're part of the solution.
And certainly, some people could use more help than others, but it's dangerous, unhealthy and unfair to start with the assumption that someone is incapable of something or treat them like a victim to feed their own savior complex or agenda.
People who are physically handicapped don't even want people coddling their life. Why do some people assume they need and want their help with everything?
Maybe it just makes themselves feel good, maybe they have a lot of guilt, maybe they feel like they're part of the solution.
White saviour complex, is what it is. They soon turn nasty if they don’t think you’re grateful or deferential enough, same as male feminists do with women. But like I say you can easily spot them.
> If the goal is to change minds and open hearts then where appropriate, we should endeavor to communicate in ways that will be well received by those who need to hear the message.
As another black SWE - I have to ask which hearts are we trying to open? Some are far too gone and it would be a waste of time to try to convince them to let go of their bigotry. The very same will feign engagement and argue in bad faith while being energy vampires. Why should I supplicate racists before I have my dignity as a human? Fuck "hearts and minds" - I have no way of definitively knowing those - I'll take changed behavior instead, that's all I truly care about. If I ever have kids, I can't have them live like this.
> we should endeavor to communicate in ways that will be well received by those who need to hear the message
I agree, but you need to consciously consider who these people are - if it's everyone, then the battle is already lost.
>I have to ask which hearts are we trying to open? Some are far too gone and it would be a waste of time to try to convince them to let go of their bigotry
Any that can be opened. The ones that are "too far gone" are moot by definition, so we should keep in mind those who might see things differently if we communicate in a way that reaches them rather than puts up roadblocks.
> The very same will feign engagement and argue in bad faith while being energy vampires
Yes, there are many of these people, but my argument is that actions like this empower bad faith actors.
> Why should I supplicate racists before I have my dignity as a human?
We fundamentally disagree that use of the word "master" in a technical context is racist or a denial of human dignity. Using the word "main" instead of "master" doesn't improve economic, social, or political outcomes for black people, it doesn't do anything except create fodder for the bad faith actors.
> Fuck "hearts and minds"
I think this approach hurts the cause. I don't see how our children grow up in a better world if we abandon all hope of reasoning with our fellow citizens. However, as my comment stated, my advice only make sense if the goal is to change hearts and minds, if you don't care about that then my reasoning does not apply.
> but you need to consciously consider who these people are
As you already pointed out, we can't know who they are, thus I think it is prudent to craft broad messaging in a manner that is suitable for those who can be convinced, not those who are already convinced, or those who cannot ever be convinced. I also want to highlight that my comment includes the caveat "where appropriate", that is to say, we should be strident in the face of discrimination and bigotry, but I don't agree that the status quo for git branch names are an example of such problems.
> Yes, there are many of these people, but my argument is that actions like this empower bad faith actors.
My POV is that bad actors should never be a consideration - they are never going to be helpful whether you "empower" them or not. They should be removed from the equation entirely.
> We fundamentally disagree that use of the word "master" in a technical context is racist or a denial of human dignity.
I never claimed naming a default branch "master" is racist - changing it is petty and performative, and doesn't change anything overall. That said, the people who get outraged over this, claiming "PC culture has gone mad" or "'Wokism' is destroying the world" raise a red flag for me, and I immediately suspect them of being culture warriors. I didn't see the same levels of indignation when the kilobyte and megabyte were redefined from 1024 to 1000, but technically the changes are similar (minor annoyance that might break your code/build, but can be fixed with a search-and-replace).
> I don't see how our children grow up in a better world if we abandon all hope of reasoning with our fellow citizens.
Oh, I think reasoning with our fellow citizens is a wonderful thing, but it should not be a prerequisite for a subset of the citizenry to obtain what ought to be inalienable rights - it shouldn't be a negotiation. At times, well-meaning criticism from moderates/the squishy center - who are not as invested - can slow down the movement: I think MLK's "Letter from Birmingham"[1] addresses this more eloquently than I can. Additionally, other movements who are (or feel) oppressed are not relegated to starting from a point of appealing to fellow-citizens: not the Pro-life, or the Pro-choice, or the Pro-2A contingents do this. Why is there a difference?
>Additionally, other movements who are (or feel) oppressed are not relegated to starting from a point of appealing to fellow-citizens: not the Pro-life, or the Pro-choice, or the Pro-2A contingents do this.
You'd actually be surprised. Most Pro-2A folks have given up on any hope for actually having the Supreme Court pick up a case, never mind coming to a positive judgement that makes the regulatory framework less fickle and perilous. Screw up with a gun, have a bad lawyer, and poof, everything becomes a felony. You lose voting rights, and your firearm. (Actually I think felonies are woefully overused as criminal punishments nowadays, period)
You can be turned into a felon in waiting overnight if the ATF deems it so. Few hopes at legislation are realistically attainable (silencers becoming non-NFA because of the hysteria around them, to the benefit of many enthusiast's ears) and other perfectly reasonable legislation everyone wants gets poisoned the minute another rider taking another chunk out of the 2nd Amendment gets attached. Most pro-2A groups have tried to build grass root support through friends and family to dispel the fear and mania around firearm ownership.
There are a lot of subgroups and interests all competing for limited legislative and public awareness resources; everything comes with a poignant attrition cost. Completely pointless changes for change sake like the branch name change are the worst type of wasteful expenditure of human organization. It doesn't get an actual physical result. It doesn't cut prison populations. It doesn't get kids in disadvantaged or resource poor districts a shot at better education or exposure to something new. It just lets someone uncomfortable with the world as they perceive it cathart through (in a tragedy of the common sense) being able to point at something and say, "Look, I did something!" Damned be the consequences or naysayers.
> I didn't see the same levels of indignation when the kilobyte and megabyte were redefined from 1024 to 1000, but technically the changes are similar
The changes are similar but they reasoning behind them isn't.
Personally I'm annoyed about the change to the point of refusing to use Github, as a protest. To me it strikes as being overly politically correct. The whole master/slave and white/blacklist thing is an insane stretch of wokeism. If anything I'll start using more of these "controversial" terms if it actually ticks these kinds of people off.
> My POV is that bad actors should never be a consideration - they are never going to be helpful whether you "empower" them or not. They should be removed from the equation entirely.
We disagree on strategy here. Bad faith actors have the power to damage the movement, and we should not give them opportunities to do so if it can be avoided. I want to be clear that I'm not saying we should diminish the fervor of the fight for social justice to accommodate racists, what I'm saying is that we shouldn't waste political capital on efforts that give us nothing in return; fanfare over git branch names gives us nothing, but gives them a talking point. To clarify even further, I'm not saying changing the name is wrong, I'm saying that elevating such trivialities into the wider conversation of social justice is harmful to the cause.
> I never claimed naming a default branch "master" is racist - changing it is petty, and doesn't change anything overall
So what were you referring to when you asked why we should supplicate racists before earning a chance at human dignity?
> People who get outraged over this claiming "PC gone mad" or "'Wokism' is destroying the world" raise a red flag for me and I immediately suspect them of being a culture warrior.
We are in total agreement here. My point is that an 800lb gorilla like github declaring such trivialities as progress towards social justice offers the culture warriors a brightly painted catalyst for delivery of their propaganda that they wouldn't otherwise have. If github were doing something meaningful then this would be a completely different situation because the positive changes they were enacting would outweigh any bleating of the bad faith actors, but since this isn't something useful, the sum total of the act is to harm the movement.
> Oh, I think reasoning with our fellow citizens is a wonderful thing
Your statement of "fuck hearts and minds" doesn't seem to reflect that belief, but I'm happy to take your word for it.
> it should not be a prerequisite for a subset of the citizenry to get what ought to be inalienable rights
I never made that argument. I was discussing the trivialities which were the topic of this article, not inalienable rights.
> I think MLK's "Letter from Birmingham"[1] addresses this more eloquently than I can.
An excellent read of which I am very familiar, but I hope I've made it clear that on the topic of discussion (git branch names), the inalienable rights of oppressed peoples is not the subjective of my criticism.
Additionally, we're probably having slightly different conversations - you appear specifically focused on only Github's renaming of the default branch, and I on the more general "hearts and mind" argument - I used Github's action and the criticism thereof as a launchpad to a more general problem - perhaps I failed to communicate that clearly.
>> Oh, I think reasoning with our fellow citizens is a wonderful thing
> Your statement of "fuck hearts and minds" doesn't seem to reflect that belief, but I'm happy to take your word for it.
The phrase you quoted better captures my thinking when it's not truncated halfway; the second half of the sentence you elided is the more important half.
Yes, this is a good summary of what these changes do. They allow white people to pat themselves on the back, without actually doing anything material to help break down racism.
I think it also burns a certain amount of political capital and good will. People only have so much "give a fuck" to spare, and if you force them to use it in meaningless ways, it's a waste.
Absolutely, this is another thing I feel strongly about. People have limited energy, attention, resources. Every news segment that opens with
"pc gone mad! radical leftists want to ban the word "blacklist"!"
is a news segment that doesn't open with
"wages have been stagnant for the past 50 years despite gains in productivity"
"prices of tvs and smartphones falling, prices of housing and healthcare skyrocketing"
"statistical studies show voter preferences have near-zero correlation with effected legislation, while preferences of the wealthier 0.5% are very strongly correlated"
"hey have you noticed that the EU is hilariously undemocratic"
Generating controversy in support of your cause is generally thought of as building political capital, not spending it. You want to focus energy on what people on your side will agree with, and, crucially, can have a personal impact towards.
You can see this dynamic in Republican posturing in the Biden era. Biden is a much harder topic for Republicans to attack. His Covid relief bill has broad bipartisan support and he's an old white guy just like Republicans like to see in office. So instead of wasting time and effort on trying to attack Biden or Covid relief, they spent the last few weeks attacking cancel culture and Dr. Seuss.
This move is the opposite, it lets those interested in social justice and equality participate in a political action. Any time you can energize your base around something, that's a great boon to your side.
More generally speaking, political battles are fought by people who care, not by people who don't. Actions taken that cause the uncaring to care even less are fine so long as they can get some people to care more.
For no better an illustration of this look to PETA. The only reason we still know who they are is because they've taken this as a holy dictate. We still know who they are because they're fantastically successful at creating absolute zealots.
> I think it also burns a certain amount of political capital and good will. People only have so much "give a fuck" to spare, and if you force them to use it in meaningless ways, it's a waste.
Is that what you think is happening here? People are fighting against this change out of concern that if they support it, they won't be able to care about other, more important things down the line?
Oh it's worse than just pats on the back. It's ACTUAL racism. They think they have the right to tell minorities how to think and feel. They think they know what's best and you can't have them thinking for themselves.
I witnessed a white woman exclaim she was revoking someone's Mexican card the other day because he voted for Trump. Supposedly the Mexican is the racist according to this ideology....
There is a testimony floating around from a black Portland cop, complaining that every time he wanted to talk to a black BLM protestor there was a white protestor trying to prevent the black one from speaking with the police.
Totally agree. Had they made a real change that actually mattered, all this time spent on discussing this rename, could have been put into better use. They created buzz, changed nothing.
I tend to agree with triviality. But I’m white and can’t vocalize that opinion IRL. However I do feel like people of my pigment also do these things as risk mitigation. Eg. Most of the world was caught off guard by the Dr Seuss thing. It seems quite obvious to me the family proactively took the books out of print because the fallout from being targeted by SJW or whoever would be huge. People are out there looking for things to be offended by, brands to attack, etc and if you’re a big company you don’t want to be caught in those crosshairs.
That said, I do recall getting “pat us on the back” vibes from GitHub but just wanted to throw this alternate justification out into the discussion.
Can I just briefly highlight that this wasn't "a thing" per se? This was a company privately deciding to pull some poorly selling publications from active publishing and adding a positive PR spin by calling out some questionable decisions in the art.
This was made into "an issue" by some pretty rabid media outlets rebranding it as government censorship while the decision was entirely privately made. That's a pretty terrible mis-categorization.
These sorts of controversies, from both the right and the left, sell news papers and that's the reason why media latches onto them so aggressively.
It sort of was a thing, but it was never new. Geisel spent decades in discourse with people regarding racism and sexism in his works. He earnestly made many changes over the years, for example changing the look of the Chinese character in Mulberry St. Outside the Dr. Suess books, he even sometimes flipped some of his earlier racist tropes to make progressive, anti-racist statements. But he adamantly refused to make some other changes, such using more gender neutral pronouns beyond the substitutions he already made. This latest round of changes and exclusions were the ones he adamantly refused to make. Much worse, he's now portrayed in the media as being blithely or even stubbornly ignorant of his own prejudices, when nothing could be further from the truth. Whether you agree or disagree with him, he engaged with these issues and admitted to many faults.
I don't disagree - and that's part of the reason (other than generally disliking the act of whitewashing our history) that I'm happy that this take down wasn't activist driven - but it certainly is portrayed in some media outlets as being an attack by the left.
I've seen some of his WW2 propaganda and saw a lot of the contemporary artwork from other artists while I was in school - buck-toothed squinty asians in rice hats abound - and he very rightfully walked that back and acted in a reasonable manner. I don't think this has particularly tarnished his image but I also avoid twitter and facebook zealously so I tend to be outside of most of the outrage bubbles.
I do hope that his image continues to do well since he was ahead of the curve on a number of issues near and dear to my heart.
They jumped on it. Ebay and Amazon jumped on the misinterpretation and that is squarely their mistake.
The Dr Seuss estate wasn't afraid of SJW's randomly cancelling them. And neither was Ebay or Amazon, which were instead signalling support for a society retcon that nobody - not even Dr Seuss' estate - asked for. Those latter companies are staffed by people experiencing the same cognitive dissonance in this comment thread.
For whatever hysterical reason those books are now selling for ridiculous prices.
Media made a big deal out of "canceling" Dr. Seuss and those books weirdly became an icon of free speech for some folks and now we've arrived at a place where secondary markets are being forced to take a stance on the issue.
Books get pulled from publication all the time - books even get pulled from publication for really extremist content (or are refused by publishers in the first place). This is only a circus now because some media outlets stirred it up. It is occasionally the case that some folks on the internet find something offensive and try and get it canceled with a petition - I loathe this process for a number of reasons - but this isn't what happened here, some media outlets took a nothingburger and turned it into a four course meal.
If you hike in the woods you'll pass by bee-hives all the time, that doesn't mean you always go out in heavy clothing - but if someone ahead of you on the trail kicked a hive repeatedly then you'll put on the clothing if you've got it. All the "thing" here is just reactionary to there being so much arbitrary attention directed at it in the first place.
ebay have been randomly censoring stuff for stupid reasons for a while (e.g. they (approximately, details best double checked) won't sell historical records involving slavery much to the annoyance of historians).
I'm minimally troubled by the discontinuation of what I'm fairly sure actually -were- underperforming titles while also extremely pissed with ebay.
> media outlets rebranding it as government censorship
I must have missed that. All the criticism I've seen about the action was just that -- criticism of the private action, basically criticizing the editorial decision.
I haven't seen anyone confuse it with government regulation.
Bunch of republican politicians tried to claim it was "Biden's fault" and Ted Cruz is now selling autographed copies of Green Eggs and Ham ... which continued to sell just fine and there's no reason to think will be discontinued any time in the forseeable future.
No, a straw man is taking a deliberately weak version of an argument and then attacking it.
I pointed out that Ted Cruz had made such attacks and was also trying to make money off it.
Googling for "cruz tweet seuss" will provide you with plenty of first hand information about Cruz' actions; McCarthy also beclowned himself over the issue. If you prefer to disbelieve 'a bunch' that's up to you.
what consequences do you think you would encounter IRL, compared to a non-white person vocalizing that opinion IRL?
there is another comment talking about a black engineer not prioritizing this in their team and being told by the rainbow haired PMs that they were internalizing systemic racism.
do you think you would get unceremoniously cancelled instead instead of simply silenced like the black person thats assumed to be "the poor victim with no independent agency"? are you sure that is a valid fear?
As a Black data scientist I will say that words have power. That naming things has power. That acknowledging the depth of white supremacy, its depravity, and need to utterly and completely remove it and all of its vestiges is the most important work that can be undertaken.
There used to be a Confederate statue in the town square where I live. Many Black people worked over decades to point out what the statue symbolized, how the Klan had revised history in building that statue. Some white people wanted it gone. Finally a lot of white people wanted it gone. Then these same people
began calling for reparations. A local college instituted reparations. There are calls to engage with land back movements.
I’ve lived through many backlash cycles. Locally we’re still dealing with egregious health disparities that are costing Black lives daily. There is gentrification. The city’s just lived through a night in which white supremacy took the lives of several Asian women.
But something has changed.
Words matter. We have to keep chipping away at this monster.
In tech, though, asians often outnumber whites at US FAANG companies. Foreigners are vastly overrepresented, jews are overrepresented, blacks are underrepresented, spanish are underrepresented.
In American politics/history I totally hear you. But maybe tech is a slightly different animal? 'White supremacy' is a tough sell when <40% are domestic-born christian white.
(none of the above comment is intended as a value statement on various ethnicities doing well/poorly, just an observation of how well they're doing).
I'd extend these virtue signaling "moments" to stuff like changing the names of sports teams and bases and all of the attempts to scrub "offensive" things from our lexicon.
It's not just limited to "black" but also American Indians, gay people, trans, etc.
These all strike me as Priviledged people being offended for others and trying to scream "LOOK AT ME I'M FIXING THINGS!!!" with stuff that matters to no one... and in the end, they widen the divide and make everything 100x worse with all the policies to "fix" racism/sexism/all'the'other'isms but making everything about race/sex/etc.
So divisive and counter productive uses of time that solve nothing.
But master can mean many different things other than “a white man owning black slaves in 19^th century US” – and was not created with this name in mind; whereas the sport team name was unambiguously chosen and featured a caricature of the very thing they chose their name after on their logo.
It's a 'caricature' in that choosing societies renown for being valiant warriors erases much complexity (how much nuance and complexity were you expecting from a sports mascot?). Anyway, if this were a sincere movement, it would similarly object to equivalent depictions of the Irish, Vikings, Romans, Spartans, Trojans, etc.
I see your point, but even still no one objects to the Fighting Irish or Boston Celtics logos despite being every bit the caricature. Are we doing this out of respect for Native Americans, or is it to make ourselves feel noble while we (myself included) make no progress on their material concerns?
Changing sports team names does reduce the number of people prancing around in fake headdresses and doing the "Tomahawk chop"...
I would love to spend more time on economic and tax code reform so as to make the United States more equitable. Would you like to join me? There is not a lot of benefit in arguing, "This is not the thing I think is most important for you to do, so you shouldn't do it" -- let people work on what they want to work on, and put your energy into making substantive change that you believe in.
i'm with you. it's shocking how much attention this bullshit is getting, while there are a million more imortant issues to tackle. this is misdirection at its worst.
Part of the point is to create jobs for political apparatchiks. We've trained tons of witches with degrees in whateverstudies and not much else to show for it. Ever wonder why they set up political DIE commissar's offices and demand people to get training? It's to parasitize actually productive things.
The parent post is saying that it's pointless to call this bullshit and complain about what other people are upset about. It's also saying that changing team names reduces racism as it stops people from performing racist actions that have been built into showing team support.
It's not misdirection. It's just that these are issues you personally don't care about.
"racist actions" but a vast VAST majority of Indians don't find it racist.
When everything is racist? nothing is.
That's the key problem with all of these diatribe's. Anything you disagree with is "racist actions" and thus real racist actions are lost in the sea of BS about team names and Aunt Jemima syrup.
the misdirection isn't the name change itself, which is trivial in every sense of the word, it's the bullshit discussion around it. to continue focusing on it after the fact is the misdirection, keeping us from discussing substantive issues, like actual systemic, structural barriers to prosperity and equality of opportunity.
names don't hurt. how we respond is what can hurt, how we allow words to infect us. but we have brains that can rationalize that away, make us defiant and resilient against it. we're literally talking about the trivialities of 5 year olds when we talk so incessantly about names.
what really hurts is, for instance, decades of redlining and systemic bias in politics, economics, education, nutrition, medicine, and a myriad of other daily, real issues that affect the lives of millions of americans, and billions of people worldwide.
this discussion is bullshit because we are not talking about those things. it's a misdirection.
Plenty of people are talking about those things. It's not either or.
Names do hurt. Does blackface hurt? That's essentially what having a team called the Redskins is. It's important to talk about how mass media and the mainstream will accept openly racist symbols. In the case of Native Americans it's also important to talk about how they went through a barely recognized genocide and have been systematically discriminated against in a major way.
It's important to learn about it, but being completely obsessed about the issue and view everything from its perspective is counter-productive. It's really an American thing, because many European nations went through similar experiences multiple times.
The sports team thing is really offensive though. They're literally using Native Americans as team mascots. Especially given the genocide that occurred. There's no reason to use any race of human, especially those who were struck with some of the worst systemic violence in history, as a mascot for a sports team.
I have a lot of Native American friends, they grouse about losing the Redskins team. I think the white SJWs don’t really understand the dynamic. Not claiming I do either but point being a lot of people took pride in that team for its name and representation, it wasn’t a joke. One of the side effects of this purge/righteous cleansing is that it’s also scrubbing out representation. Land-o-lakes being another example.
I think the Redskins example is not great, as I also know plenty of folks who support the renaming; there is plenty of division among Native folks around this name. Land O'Lakes, though, is a much more interesting example -- Patrick DesJarlait, the artist, was Ojibwe, and his son wrote a very interesting article about this for the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/29/my-ojibwe...
I'm honestly still amazed sometimes that the Fighting Irish mascot of Notre Dame is still a thing. It seems inevitable that it gets relegated to the scrap heap of history at some point, but I guess people don't care as much since the Irish, at least in the U.S., mostly ended up catching a break and didn't become a permanent underclass all but obliterated from existence by military might like Native Americans were.
As someone who is 1/4 Irish, I'd say it's because we just don't care. The Notre Dame mascot is completely inconsequential. It's a mascot. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It's a privilege to not care. I feel sorry for everyone from other groups that are forced to care about inconsequential things because in aggregate all these inconsequential things that people demand that you care about end up being a denial of service attack, leaving you with less bandwidth to think about things that actually matter like working hard and working smart and building wealth.
If some group that was not Irish kept trying to get me and other people of Irish descent to waste brain cycles on such trivial non-consequential things, I'd ignore them and instruct others to ignore them.
It honestly boggles my mind that our culture has optimized for amplifying the voices of such people as it's so counter-productive.
I'm also 1/32 Native American and feel the same way about those mascots too.
It's honestly all so tiresome and wasteful of brain cycles. Heck, look how many smart people have commented on this story and all because these non-issues have been elevated to the point we're we are forced to waste brain cycles on this because it became intrusive and broke our work flows. Many activists in history have been great but much of what passes for "activism" today is not just useless, but actively counter-productive.
> I'm also 1/32 Native American and feel the same way about those mascots too.
Just because you don't take issue with it, doesn't mean it's not offensive and a big deal to other people (who are often more than 1/32 Native American). The Redskins is a racist name, anyway you slice it. Try to replace red with brown or yellow and it's immediately obvious. I don't think every single case is as cut and dry as that one, but it's not fair to call these issues inconsequential.
There is no third party deciding these things. People who have experienced racism are offended when it continues to happen. They can then advocate for a change and hopefully broader awareness.
It's offensive. I'm actually pretty sad that people here are so reactionary to the change. I don't understand why people would be angry, particularly because changing the name wasn't some initiative created by a giant corporation. It seems like common decency to me.
The major injustices and crimes of history were profitable because a targeted group was dehumanised for the gain of others. The economic victimisation of black people in the US continues to be profitable.
> it trivializes the movement
As a developer, I am comfortable with the change in terminology. As a human... My phenotypes are different from yours and OP's, but I am certain that if we do not bring the critique to bear against systemic enslavement of people (regardless of "targeted" phenotypes), we have all missed the point and really changed nothing. Who is blacker or whiter or truer to the tribe... these are serviceable distractions.
Slavery is abhorrent to any enlightened human. But slavery existed and continues to exist because those who profit like it that way.
But what does this have to do with using the concept of master / slave as an apt technical analogy? How does changing technical terminology help close racial gaps in opportunity or change outdated attitudes on race? It seems to me (a white guy) that this accomplishes nothing compared to other uses of the time, energy, and $ that this wastes.
If I were at the head of the org I would take the time & $ that would be wasted on this effort and invest it into underserved black schools. (of which there are many in the US)
It's really not an apt technical analogy. The most significant aspects of the master/slave relationship (ownership) are not present in the technical version.
I think thats true for git, (altho the master branch could also refer to a master record), but there are a lot of uses of master/slave terminology in computer tech that are more apt.
Pretty much none of those have the key ownership feature that is the most significant aspect of the master/slave relationship.
Most of the relationships in that list would be more accurately described as lead/follower (followers copy or join in with the actions of a leader), boss/worker (workers work on tasks given them by a boss).
In centralized coordination protocols, the follower or worker nodes do not have autonomy. That said, the master/boss/leader nodes also do not have autonomy (in the sense that they are all bound to the protocol: none of the nodes can choose to quit and get ice cream, for example). However, in human social terms, it can seem like the central coordination node has more autonomy relative to the worker nodes, but that's an illusion.
In protocols, work provider --(activates)--> work performer. None of nodes have autonomy, so any pair of terms that overlaps with (provider, performer) are equivalent.
> any pair of terms that overlaps with (provider, performer) are equivalent.
Well, some terms are more accurate and some terms have greater baggage. If we're talking about a relationship where one node gives work and another node does the work, this is the kind of relationship we see everywhere in manager/employee relationships without unnecessary and inaccurate baggage about ownership or autonomy.
It's not even necessarily the case in a human master/slave relationship that the master gives work to the slaves, the key aspect is that the slave's work is done for the benefit of the master, but the actual assigning, coordinating and supervision of the work is not a core aspect of a masters role, and being itself work, would often be delegated to someone else.
I agree with everything you wrote except for the unstated implication that the use of the word master to refer to a git branch reflects a history of slavery. If you believe this, then I think understanding why we see this differently is the path forward to a productive discussion on this issue.
> I agree with everything you wrote except for the unstated implication
I don't think language is innocent, but language is also not statically linked to history. I believe that changes to software terms do not solve any problem that the poor are facing.
Such changes make the preservers of hierarchy comfortable. That is all.
Honest question, my initial response is that it only trivializes the movement if "see, we changed something" is used as an excuse to stop there. But if it isn't... what's the harm?
Most of this family of points seems to equate 1) being in favor of changing master to main; and 2) being in favor of stopping there.
Well for one thing it teaches people to be confused about the idea that meaning depends on context. Look at the dictionary definition of 'master' and you'll see that it doesn't exclusively represent the idea of a person who enslaves people. Consider:
* master of disguise
* grand master
* master's degree
* master tape
I would say that "master" as used in git is closest to the "master tape" definition: "an original movie, recording, or document from which copies can be made". That isn't quite what a master branch is, but "common name given to the main branch of a Merkle tree" probably isn't going to show up in your average dictionary.
It also creates conflict for no good reason between people who are comfortable with multiple meanings of words and people who view any objection to their interpretation of the English language as evidence of racism.
Well, what else has been accomplished? What policies are being passed that are helping materially black people? Sure, some cities have passed legislation to defund their police, and consequently murder rates are sky-rocketing (and probably not so much in wealthy white neighborhoods of those same cities nor in other more conservative jurisdictions). There are some colorblind reforms that something like 90% of Americans supported in one form or another; hardly anything controversial, but this is the most substantial thing that I can think of that can be credited as a consequence of the movement, but it's far too soon to figure out whether that will have an impact on any disparities. What am I missing? I'm guessing there are some negative effects that no one is bothering to measure, like the extent to which these vapid measures nudge people to the right or make them unsympathetic to the movement.
> What policies are being passed that are helping materially black people?
Mostly nothing. Corporations can largely only avoid harming various groups, and engaging in fair business practices. They're not set up, by their incentive structure, to do work that reforms society at large.
Even non-profits need to focus on a specific mission, and they're usually most successful by putting people in touch with each other.
Because, especially if you look at it through the lens of "material" help, the further an action is from the control of the individual being helped, the amount of good that can be done per unit effort drops off dramatically.
We normally view individualism as a normative claim, that "the rugged individual" ought to help himself. But you can cast it as an observation: most help in your life is only effective (again, in terms of return for the effort involved) if it comes from you personally or someone quite close to you.
Political capital has proven to be finite, it is similar to time being zero sum. Using political capital in a non-smart way is equivalent to wasting time.
I believe it trivializes the movement because it injects unimportant issues like git branch names into the realm of conversations about racism, police violence, harmful stereotypes, discrimination etc. It also gives ammunition to those who seek to discredit the movement for social justice. This isn't a situation like e.g. affirmative action, which demonstrably creates opportunities for minorities at the cost of some resentment from people who feel like affirmative action is unfair. In the case of "master" to "main", nobody gains anything, all it does is act is a flashpoint for bad faith actors.
I keep looking at it all and thinking "the cost of all the developer hours both inside and outside github to make this change is a depressing amount of money considering how many non-profits working for real change could've done with extra funding".
What's the harm? Read 1984 to see how the 'end state' might look like. As other commenter said, words have power. And who have power over words, rules.
The whole "this is pointless", "that is stupid" movement has definitely thrown up a "fuck it then" anti-signal in my mind.
If most things we can do is pointless, fuck it, everything we do is probably pointless.
I'm actively fighting against my own mindset to keep looking for things I can do that will make an effect. Most probably won't. I get it's just virtue signalling or whatever phrase of the week we're calling it but it's also inertia. Yes this one is pointless, but maybe the next step isn't.
Anyone that's ever been told what they're doing is useless will never know.
Shamefully I didn't give any consideration to anyone but myself, keeping my existing mindset everyone on the internet was a white guy like me with all the privileges I have. GitHub changing master to main might have been a joke to you, fair enough, but it opened my eyes.
I worry that by picking context that have zero or close to zero racist connotations like the master branch, now you are adding racism into the world by adding racist connotations to the master branch.
This seems pretty close to just saying, “If we can’t change the world, let us change nothing at all.”
Sure, it’s trivial. It doesn’t, in any significant way, actually do anything. But I find a lot of time when reviewing code — if there are code badly formatted or variables misspelled, I have a hard time looking at the actually problems in the code until those superficial things are fixed.
But changing master to main doesn't fix anything, nor did the author find it a problem to begin with. I think the point is to focus on real change and not fake change, because the former is what's important and the latter is a distraction.
> This seems pretty close to just saying, “If we can’t change the world, let us change nothing at all.”
I don't see it that way. In my view, this change is worse than "nothing at all" because it doesn't represent any substantive change, but it does create fodder for bad faith actors to portray the movement for social justice as trivial.
On the other hand, now that the name change is done, if there are more protests then nobody will waste time talking about whether Github should change the branch name. This time, people were talking about it even before Github did anything, so it was going to be a distraction regardless. Github doing this ought to be considered just closing the book on this discussion IMO.
Sure. The change itself means nothing to me, I don't think "master" or "main" makes any difference, it's the use of github's corporate megaphone to project this triviality onto the wider discussion about social justice that I take issue with.
No, this is saying "If we can not change the world, let's do other productive things instead of meaningless distractions to feel good about changing the world."
I think the main goal for this kind of symbolic actions is to raise awareness. Only the fact that we are now here discussing about the problem, is a big success, imho.
Should they also do, not only symbolic but also considerable actions? The hell they should.
But that doesn’t make the first point moot.
They’re actually alienating the choir, with actions like that.
I’m a white person who has performed in a professional production of The Black Nativity. I was literally part of the choir celebrating black traditions in the US.
I now work in software and think less of any racialized group using historic struggles as a tool of power, control, and oppression in the here and now.
Historic wrongs are not an excuse for present wrongs.
I am genuinely curious: the LibreOffice team changed the file blacklist to excludelist. Do you believe this was just tokenism? I personally thought it was a great thing. But I am interested in hearing your perspective.
In my view, if the goal is productive discourse, every contentious social justice scenario demands a nuanced parsing of the facts.
I'm not familiar with the LibreOffice change, but from what I can tell, it doesn't seem like this change was delivered with any fanfare or something like an official blogpost targeting the general public and presented as an effort towards inclusion and social justice. Instead, it seems to be treated by the developers in a manner that reflects exactly what it is, a trivial relabeling, perhaps in a positive direction, but one that doesn't merit injection into the wider discourse over racial justice. The developers made this change based on their personal values and in a way that doesn't interrupt the natural workflow of the users which inevitably draws scrutiny and creates contention. I'm all for developers using whatever labels align with their values, where I have a problem is the pronouncement of such trivialities as if they represent something meaningful.
Imho meaningless lip service: master branch -> main branch
Also imho the most insulting towards PoC and everyone else for that matter is to patronisingly assume people can't comprehend context, as OP's article points it out.
I believe that usage of 'master' in git was copied from bitkeeper which did reference the master/slave relationship.
Whereas blacklist in its original forms was used outside of a racial context. I think it'll be pretty hard to try to break the association between black (the color) and night, hiddenness, unknown, sin, fear, etc. All of which are pretty negative, but not originally racial.
I find it difficult to distinguish one of these changes from the other in terms of usefulness.
I also don't hold much truck with the 'insulting' and 'patronising' thing. It's perfectly possible for a white person to prefer to remove inappropriate and confusing terminology that trivialised historical injustices and/or glorified things they disagree with regardless of whether or not non-white people are offended by such usage. There seems to be an underlying view that a white person could only want to change such usage for inauthentic reasons. If we want to find things patronising, I find that patronising. Just because you're white doesn't mean you can't hold an authentic position of your own on these topics.
> I believe that usage of 'master' in git was copied from bitkeeper which did reference the master/slave relationship.
The (likely) basis for this belief, the GNOME mailing list post[0] that reignited this discussion in 2019, was retracted the next year[1].
I wrote a summary of the history[2] for Git Rev News, the git developers newsletter. In short, the usage didn't come from BitKeeper, and was intended to mean 'master copy'.
After the article was published, Aaron Kushner from BitKeeper reached out and gave me some more history on the usage of 'slave repository' in that one particular spot in BitKeeper[3]: it was a presentation for a client that was already using master/slave terminology and so the same terms were used in the presentation.
The worst I have seen is the media's failure to cover that Google - and probably Microsoft too - blacklisted historic black universities for over a decade. This a juke, a pump fake - not something substantial.
1) The burden falls disproportionately on Git maintainers and on people with large amounts of dependencies to the old word which is not a good way to distribute work (across tech workers) when making changes especially since some people will not even notice the change.
2) Not everyone uses Git each day and I am certain that people who continue to use the word "master" without knowing a thing about what Git is will be viewed as racist and morally inferior. E.g. (Master of Ceremonies, Master of Arts, etc.). Explain how a tech worker can agree that "master branch" is offensive but putting that they have a "Master of Science" on their CV is fine.
3) Somewhat arbitrarily changing words with a tenuous relation to racism seems like an extremely passive aggressive, murky, and dangerous path to go down. Not only does it lay a trap for people to be accused of being racist but if this is acceptable it is inconsistent with not removing all words associated with slavery. Even words with a distant relation to slavery.
"Not everyone uses Git each day and I am certain that people who continue to use the word "master" without knowing a thing about what Git is will be viewed as racist and morally inferior. E.g. (Master of Ceremonies, Master of Arts, etc.). Explain how a tech worker can agree that "master branch" is offensive but putting that they have a "Master of Science" on their CV is fine."
Honestly I find it terrifying that high ranking tech people can't see the cognitive dissonance they're showing.
Either they're lying in a pitiful attempt to fit in with the silicon valley leftist elites or they're actually intellectually inept. Either way it's not good.
Outliers like Peter Thiel aside do we actually know the personal politics and beliefs of people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or Marc Benioff? They all seem perfectly fine on the PR-positive side of any issue and likely skew fiscally conservatives privately on matters that concern their personal fortunes.
Sure their companies skew "progressive" with LGBTQ inclusion, some diversity hiring (YMMV and some of it appears to be purely projection), and the banning of hate speech, fake news, and calls for violence, on Twitter and the de-platforming of Parler - but is that leftist or just doing the right thing?
What their personal beliefs are is irrelevant to the discussion. Their rhetoric and actions are what define them. Right now it's aligning with far left ideology. If you believe what you wrote then you should be even more upset with what they're doing because that means when the pendulum swings back right they're gonna be smacking you in the face with tea party politics in order to garner favor of whatever right wing politician is in office.
" banning of hate speech, fake news, and calls for violence, on Twitter and the de-platforming of Parler - but is that leftist or just doing the right thing"
Hard to argue it's doing the "right thing" when Twitter lets actual dictators post to their platform and Facebook was found to be the main gathering platform for the capitol insurrection.
I find it troubling that people can find themselves so wrapped up and agitated by culture war wedge issues that they would characterize the rhetoric and actions of Jeff Bezos as aligned with "far left ideology", when Amazon is currently working to prevent workplace solidarity/unionization (a very core component of moderate leftist ideology in the context of a capitalist state).
I actually thought you meant people like the comment you're responding to, but then I realized you also appear to be arguing in bad faith.
"Master of <subject_matter>" is pretty clear in that a person has mastered a trade or an area of study! No one confuses that with the idea of "Master/Slave" or "Master Branch" which implies a hierarchy that reminds some people of slavery, particularly the slavery that was practiced in the US.
There's an obvious contextual difference, and it's not some political conspiracy from an imagined "leftist elites" that I assume you think are coming for you. Conspiracy theories are unhealthy and I personally think you should let this one go.
You know what actually sounds like a conspiracy theory? Believing that a word with no link to racism at all is racist because a company told you it was in a disgusting attempt to garner social justice points without actually doing anything helpful.
The only thing unhealthy here is inventing problems where there aren't any and then trying to force the majority population to go along with your insane ideology while trying to paint them as bigoted if they don't like it. Sounds like a recipe for creating a dystopian society.
Please tell me what good will come out of this? Because I can think of a lot of negatives.
Slave owning in the US was heavily linked to racist ideology, that's simply history.
> without actually doing anything helpful.
"main" is both shorter and more ergonomic to type
> then trying to force
None of my old repos have broke over the new suggested default
> insane ideology
Maybe they took not being racist a little too far, but changing a single word is hardly "insane" or "ideology".
> while trying to paint them as bigoted if they don't like it
I think the only people getting painted as bigots are the ones painting themselves with their over-reactions.
> dystopian society
With the way some of these complaints were worded, you'd think they changed the default new repo branch name to "stalin" or "karlmarx" or "漳州市" and started disabling non-compliant accounts, so I had to read the article, no it's actually a really boring and unintrusive default branch name of "main" for new repos.
So you have no explanation as to how the word master is linked to black slavery in the United States? What's the point of your comment again?
You realize that word existed before the US was even a country right? You also realize that the word is used in many contexts with no relation to anything dealing with skin color or slavery right?
"Maybe they took not being racist a little too far, but changing a single word is hardly "insane" or "ideology"."
You've got your head in the sand and are oblivious to what's going on at a national level if you think this just involves a tiny one word change happening at GitHub. There's a broader cult like indoctrination happening with the current administration and it's cascading all the way down to schools and the workplace.
I'm really tired of hearing this spiel about how we shouldn't get upset because this is just one silly word. Well since it's filling children's minds with critical race theory in schools and training them they're subconsciously evil if they're a certain color I find it quite upsetting.
> So you have no explanation as to how the word master is linked to black slavery in the United States?
Black slaves had something called "masters".
> if you think this just involves a tiny one word change
I literally unironically believe this, and the only skin I have in this game is that "main" is shorter and more ergnomic to type.
> There's a broader cult like indoctrination happening
Yeah, it's called "qanon" and "postmodern conservatism".
> it's filling children's minds with critical race theory in schools
I'm not an alt right extremist who believes in nonsensical white supremacist conspiracy theories, so the fact that children are getting a real education is not a problem for me.
Its the master/slave dynamic that is considered the issue...if there were Slaves of Ceremonies and Slaves of Arts as official titles, we might eventually take a second look at the naming too.
Good point, I gotta stop calling my feature branches `slave` it's a bad habit!
Real talk though, when this first blew up, I took the opportunity to change all my master branches to trunk, the oldest and best term for "that from which branches grow".
"main" is lame, it reeks of compromise and giving the least amount of thought possible to the replacement. Worse, it shares the same first two letters with "master", and that means more time spent typing out the wrong branch name, muscle memory being what it is.
I think it doesn't really matter what the name is as long as it's a common word that's easy to memorize. Trunk, master, main, default, current, etc. are all the same to me. But "main" saves me two characters in my shell prompt so it's marginally better IMO. The entire thing is mostly just a bikeshed.
“Master of Science” is simply a use of a different meaning of the word. If anyone is suggesting to not use “master” across the board, even in the sense of “being really good at something,” they can shove off.
While the “master” branch is clearly using master in the sense that it asserts control of the other branches in some way.
So IMO, explaining could be done by pointing at the dictionary.
I was going to stay out of this, but I'll add that I agree entirely with this.
Master/Slave flip-flops, on the other hand, are named for behavior closer to the connotation github is trying to avoid.
And, I'll also add, as a young White child who built and played with master/slave flip-flops, it never occurred to me to associate it with people, slavery, or racism. Maybe if I had been Black it would have been different.
> Git's usage is clearly more like "golden master" in the recording sense -- the original from which other copies are made.
Maybe it's easy to spin this way, but that's not where git's terminology comes from. It originated in a system meant to migrate away from BitKeeper, which did use the master/slave terminology. Citation: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...
Has Linus or another early Git developer commented on this? If not, what matters is how people actually use Git today, to the extent that it should matter at all relative to other more significant things.
yes[1], but it doesn't really matter because even if the intention is not to be a "master/slave" reference, people will still say it is offensive. So therefore it makes sense that banning other terms like "master of science" or "master record" would also be consistent here.
EDIT: So confusing to me why this was voted down. Please help.
I'm just speculating here -- HN doesn't even allow downvotes to direct responses, so it's not me -- a little more tie-in to the thread might help understand the context and relevance of a music video (HN tends to prefer text over video, and prose/exposition over music). Or maybe there's a bot that downvotes anything with certain words. Or maybe there are one or two people who happened to accidentally downvote because the button was lined up with their thumb when they were scrolling on their phones.
Additionally, I don't think sense 29 actually makes sense here. A "master copy" is immutable. Once somebody burns a master record, that's it — you're done. You make copies from that one because it is deemed "correct" in some sense.
But git branches are not immutable; they are able to be added to at any point. The master branch can be interpreted as collating the work done by all of the other branches: non-master branches do some work, then it gets merged back to `master`. Which means... the master branch is coordinating work done in other branches. And, in many git workflows, work on the master branch itself is discouraged, meaning almost all work is done in separate branches and then the master branch is used to accumulate that work, and is the main reference point to see "the current state of things". I don't think it's a stretch to see why the master/slave relationship seems a more fitting sense of "master" than "master copy".
> Git's terminology descends from BitKeeper, which was explicitly using master/slave
That GNOME mailing list post was retracted the next year[0].
I wrote a summary of the history[1] for Git Rev News, the git developers newsletter. In short, the usage didn't come from BitKeeper, and was intended to mean 'master copy'.
After the article was published, Aaron Kushner from BitKeeper reached out and gave me some more history on the usage of 'slave repository' in that one particular spot in BitKeeper[2]: it was a presentation for a client that was already using master/slave terminology and so the same terms were used in the presentation.
Same meaning, but different context of use is what I think you meant. The context is key in all these discussions. No one thinks 'master' means 'owner of human (black) slaves' in 'Master of Science' any more than they do for Github, yet here we are.
You're making unproven assumptions about which meaning applies to what.
Quick search of definitions of master include (paraphrased slightly for brevity):
-(n) person with people working for them
-(n) person in charge
-(adj) showing great skill
-(adj) main/principal
-(v) to acquire complete knowledge/skill in something
-(v) to overcome (as in one's emotions)
Depending on whether it had a more literal or more abstract genesis, I could see almost all of those variants apply to Master of Science.
Similarly, for master branch -- it could easily be 4 of the 6.
Now add in the fact that these meanings change over time, that they can be coined organically vs. explicitly, and that different early adopters can themselves have different connotations of the meaning in mind.
TLDR: There's nothing simple or clear about the case for removal.
No that's not how it works. You're making up definitions and applying your own meaning. This sort of thinking breaks language entirely. It's along the same lines of saying there are multiple genders and you can make up any on the spot and apply them whenever you feel like. Language doesn't work anymore if you do this.
Expecting others to know what's happening in your own head and getting offended when they don't is absolute insanity. This is why we have language standards.
Language is an entirely human creation with "standards" and definitions that have been changing constantly since humans began creating it. With the internet the english dictionary has been growing at an almost exponential rate.
Not knowing how language works and being mad that it changes LIKE IT'S ALWAYS DONE is absolute insanity. Not being able to handle change is a common problem for a lot of humans, but it doesn't mean the change is at fault, it's your ability to cope with differences as they emerge.
"Language is an entirely human creation with "standards" and definitions that have been changing constantly since humans began creating it."
Your point? Those changes happen as people in the ENTIRE society agree on them. They don't happen because a small minority or some ridiculous elitist in San Francisco pulled it out of his/her/xer ass one day and decided to dictate to everyone what a word means. If we do not agree then you're essentially creating your own language and communication becomes ineffectual.
Equally, one individual doesn't get to dictate what a word means in their own head and expect others to follow along, while accusing them of being bigoted for not doing it. The minority of offended individuals don't get the power to make these decisions.
You do realize languages change (constantly), right? This gives me the sense of someone echoing talking points picked up from spending time listening to reactionary Youtube agitators (especially the gender-focused dogwhistle)
I don't get this "implicit bias" concept. According to media and social media, if I deny that I'm a racist, then I'm just not aware of my implicit bias. Honest question, how is it this different from:
1, If you believe in Jesus, then you can walk on water. If you can't walk on water, then you don't truly believe in Jesus.
2, Chinese saying, "杀人诛心“，meaning that accusing one's motive is worse than killing that person, as the accused couldn't even defend against the accusation. Attacking the Motive is a logical fallacy, no?
3, Back in the 1960s in China, if you were born in a not-so-red family and denied that you were counter revolutionary, then you were just deeply counter revolutionary, and therefore deserved more severe punishment.
Since when people are not judged by their behavior but their thoughts that someone else assert?
Honest answer, generally people aren’t talking about judging people for their implicit biases, but asking them to be aware of them to prevent those biases from influencing their actions in ways they don’t intend. Those actions then may be judged, naturally.
Hopefully an example that’s not too prickly: I’m from the south of the US. I don’t have a southern accent (except when drunk or sleepy!). A lot of people, myself included, have an unconscious bias that people with southern accents are less intelligent than people without. However, I’ve known lots of smart people with southern accents, and lots of unintelligent people without them. I don’t know why I have this bias: it was instilled in me by the culture I grew up in, I guess. But, because I am aware of it, I can watch out for those reflexive feelings that make it more likely for me to dismiss something someone is saying just because of their accent. I can adjust my actions to align with the kind of unbiased person I’d like to be, even though I can’t control the lingering feelings the bias creates.
This is the general idea of wanting people to be aware of their implicit biases: not to judge them due to those biases, but to help them see that, due to societal or cultural or familial influence, they may not be living up to the kind of person they’d like to be. There’s a huge difference between someone who’s consciously racist and someone who has racist priors due to the culture they grew up in. Many in the latter group accidentally propagate racist systems, even though they would never want to do so if they had a conscious choice. But it’s hard for anyone to see how their subconscious affects their day-to-day opinions. The hope of teaching about implicit bias is that people can see its effect in their lives and make adjustments, hopefully reducing the systemic problems that people face in the process.
Yes, and as the grandparent comment pointed out, denying or questioning the existence of the bias is by itself treated as evidence of it. That's the vicious circle you can't win against - a non-falsifiable dogma.
Please see my sibling comment to yours. I don’t generally see this treated as a “dogma,” nor do I think it should be. It’s an important part of self-reflection.
Saying “I’m not a racist” may be treated as having failed to do that self-reflection in some camps, because usually, for most people, things are more nuanced. So a sign of having done that reflection is often an unwillingness to make such categorical statements about something as complex as our own internal motivations and feelings. I’m not sure whether or not that’s fair, but I would imagine that’s where some of that comes from.
I think this is accidental motte and bailey arguing. People are being fired/cancelled for "being racist". This is not the same "being racist" as you're now saying everyone is to some extent.
Calling two different things the same thing is always a problem, and weaponisable. Which is why people do it.
To my knowledge people generally are not saying that literally everyone has every implicit bias common in their societal groups. It’s saying that certain biases are particularly common among certain societal groups, and that it’s important to introspect your own life and consciousness to see which ones you have or don’t have. Each person has some subset of implicit biases determined by their experiences, their upbringing, and so on. The important thing about knowing and acknowledging that implicit biases are a thing is that it’s the first step towards understanding your own.
It is also important to realize that most humans are biased against admitting they’re wrong, and that it’s hard to see things you haven’t perceived before. So, it can be hard to recognize our own implicit biases without conscious and honest work. All anyone is saying is that doing that work can help to make everyone’s collective lives easier.
What's also easily weaponized is the tendency to assume that they don't have them. Observing one's own implicit bias takes work, while denying they exist is easy. Being asked to look makes you feel put-upon, and that feeling is easily turned into grievance.
So if you're on the lookout for weaponization, be sure to look around widely. None of us is immune to having our "common sense" flattered.
It's true. The constant accusations of "virtue signaling" are novel. "You don't really mean what you say; you just want people to think you believe it". It's quite annoying, but I soldier on.
So it seems like you're arguing against a point that I'm not making and a perception I don't hold, so it's hard for me to engage here.
Almost (probably everyone) has biases. That is nothing new, and I would think is uncontroversial. Allowing your biases to dictate your behavior in an uncritical way can be damaging, either for yourself or others. That I also think should be uncontroversial.
People who grew up in a given culture tend to have shared biases. Some of those will be useful, some will be harmful. This is not to say they that every member of that culture shares those biases. My guess is that what you're talking about is the tendency to assume that a particular member of some culture has a bias that is common in their culture as a whole (for example, to use a US-specific example, if I assume that any Southerner I meet is biased against socialistic ideas). This is clearly not always going to be accurate, but may be an assumption made for safety's sake when you're in a vulnerable population and you know that those biases can be damaging to you (if I'm secretly a communist living in the South, it may be better to hold that in on average to avoid problems).
I think the reason these conversations may seem "targeted" at well-off white people in the current cultural context isn't because other groups don't have biases (they do!), or that every white person holds a given bias (they don't!), but because well-off white people on average hold more power, and therefore their biases are as a consequence more likely to cause harm.
And also, sure, I'm sure there are people who go overboard with all of this, but that is true of literally any position. Letting the extremists define the discourse isn't going to help anything.
As a WASP, also from the south (the deep south, below the Gnat Line), I'm constantly reminded that I have an implicit bias however I've never seen nor heard of how to identify or measure such. It's really just that 'if you think this way then you have it', which is overwhelmingly unsatisfactory if it's indeed a problem I should solve. I should have awareness of what the conditions are measurements are so that I can address them appropriately. For instance if/when my doctor tells me to lose weight I need to know how much.
But this escapes me and no one seems to have a good answer. Until then I have to categorize it as an emotional response and handle it in the same way, which is basically just empathizing, consoling, and not necessarily fixing the root of the problem. I need to know what to measure and how to fix it: I've been through the corporate unconscious bias training a couple of times and it did none of that. Until then I'm a skeptic.
I was shocked with my own results from the gender/career bias test.
At the end of the day, the test doesn't tell you how to fix it, it shows you that these patterns of thought are deeply ingrained in how we think and the way to "fix" it is to actively go against the biases we have been trained on. There is are some good resources here as well. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html#faq14
This output of this kind of test is determined by the order in which the categories are presented. Put male on the left and humanities on the right first, then put male and science simultaneously on the left side and it will produce the opposite result: men associated with liberal arts and women with science.
Because of exactly that, the creators of the original implicit bias test have said it should not be used the way it has been. I think they've pretty much said the test is worthless.
I hadn't heard the term "gnat line." Thanks for introducing me! I also grew up south of gnat line, along the gulf coast of Mississippi.
To get to your comment, unfortunately I think that measuring our own thought processes is far from a solved problem. And I'm not sure that implicit biases are necessarily a problem that can be "solved." A huge part of being in society is subduing certain of our more damaging natural inclinations, essentially being civil: not yelling and hitting people when we're angry, being willing to be bored for long periods of time in order to get something we need, etc.
I really do think you hit the nail on the head with this:
> Until then I have to categorize it as an emotional response and handle it in the same way, which is basically just empathizing, consoling, and not necessarily fixing the root of the problem
Largely, these things are emotional responses, and just like emotional responses, they're not necessarily rational or useful. Often the only thing we can do is recognize that they're there, let them exist, and refuse to act on them.
To be clear, I'm not making any claims here about any kind of corporate training. I'm not sure that I'm personally convinced that mandatory corporate training does any good in any situation, although I'm inclined to say that I guess it's better than nothing, in that it at least (hopefully) makes clear what the official company line is on things, and makes it clear that e.g. blatant sexism is not okay in the workplace, even if it doesn't actually change the opinions of any workplace harassers or misogynists. That being said, I am also deeply skeptical of its ability to effect any real change in people.
This comment I think is implying that all biases are evolutionarily encoded, which I am certain is false. Many biases are formed by your absorption of the actions and words of the people you grow up around.
The point isn't "biases shouldn't exist." The point is, "not all biases are accurate or useful," and "some biases can be actively harmful to either yourself or others."
I used to work with chemicals frequently. Humans have a bias towards treating clear, odorless fluids as being safe. That is a deeply dangerous bias in a biochemistry lab. You've got to be aware of it and act to counteract it. In my experience, that's all anyone is asking for: that we recognize where our biases might be harmful and try to limit that harm.
Of course most biases is something we learn. Some of them can certainly be harmful if we are out of our ordinary environment, like in your example. Or if bias is based on a false assumption. Evolution simply roots out those individuals who are unable to build proper biases :)
These tests have been administered to large numbers of people and on average, almost every single person that has taken the test has scored some level of implicit bias. As a result, it's very likely (but not certain) that you ARE unaware of your implicit bias.
Of course, if you take the tests and score perfectly, you'll now be able to demonstrate empirically that you have no measurable implicit bias and will have an answer to those people who insist you do.
The reason why this is different to the walking on water statement, is that there are hundreds of thousands of data points all showing implicit bias is almost universal, whereas there are zero data points showing people can walk on water after believing in Jesus.
> There's been some evidence that the IAT is pretty robust. Most trivial matters like position of items don't much much of a difference. People who were asked to convincingly fake an IAT effect couldn't do it.
The bad news:
> A common critique of the test is that the same individual often gets two completely different scores taking the same test twice. As far as re-test reliability goes, .6 correlation is pretty good from a theoretical point of view, but more than enough to be frequently embarrassing. It must be admitted: this test, while giving consistent results for populations, is of less use for individuals wondering how much bias they personally have.
The OP seemed to be talking about implicit bias in the framework of critical race theory, hence the quote "According to media and social media, if I deny that I'm a racist, then I'm just not aware of my implicit bias". That is, denying that you're racist is the proof that you're a racist. It's not about self-awareness, but about assertion.
Otherwise, I don't think the implicit bias is what OP said. Our HR would remind us recency bias, for instance, during a perf review. That kind of implicit bias does exist and is worth reminding.
I've always wondered, have there been variations on these tests that control for camera exposure levels and lighting conditions, or try to separate color from luminosity from morphology? In reaction-delay-based tests, is the delay because of bias or because of something else about what's being presented (e.g. strange wording or visual layout) requiring additional mental processing?
Teasing out those differences could help e.g. layout information and design cameras and image pipelines to reduce the effects of bias.
The viewpoint stems from the idea that implicit biases mean racism is the default state. To do something is to be anti-racist, which requires energy. To do nothing means racism persists, which could be considered pro-racism. A big part of this definition is trying to realign it with a temporary modifier, one to be avoided, but not a permanent tag.
The difference from your examples is that an act or attitude can be racist, but that doesn’t make YOU racist. You are not defined by a single event any more than a single belief defines your broader theology.
Since we are operating in a sectarian environment based on purity tests. Your actions can become irrelevant at any time once someone prominent puts a label on you, be it “communist” or “racist”.
I am not familiar with Chinese philosophy and find your perspective very interesting.
What habit is being changed? Aren't the default names defined by the git software? If so just change the software and push, but what habit was changed? Doesn't change current repos but why exactly is that the problem? If you are trying to set a precedent, i.e. stop the bleeding, then a git update would work just fine. Is it assuming that 'master' should be the default? The name 'master' doesn't have any special significance to the software interacting with it as the branch name is just an identifier. The term 'master' in the Comp. Sci. sense is jargon meaning basically 'the source of truth' not 'one that controls the wills of others'. The only habit I see being altered is to be readily conditioned to accept without question the dictates of political interest groups and large corporations as to what terminology is acceptable. Who defined these groups as the rightful arbitrators of this jargon?
"So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech."
In order words, the next time you have the urge to think critically about what you are allowed to type and who is forcing that decision upon you take a deep breath, shallow your skepticism, and reflect upon whether you have been indoctrinated enough into the new political Zeitgeist.
Just a slight perspective,
I'm not from the US, I'm from israel. We have a black jewish population here, they yearned their return to Zion(israel) for thousands of years.
The state of israel, invested money and effort in organizing their return.
Non of their ancestors were slaves.
We have social issues, mostly because the huge differences in culture and exposure to technological and educational advances. And the fact these people are immigrants. Sure there's racism, and troubles.
But the narrative is completely different from the american narratives. Because of the US hagemony in entertainment and media, you see young jewish black (mostly from ethiopian origin) espousing the American narrative. This is extremely hurtful for their cause as it is not into touch with their reality.
So basically, I hate the american wokeness wars because of the havoc the wreck on non american societies. Not because the blacks in the US are treated fairly, but because the media frenzy is making it impossible to actually get things better.
I see the same thing in the Netherlands; the way some people talk you would almost get the impression that Floyd was killed in Amsterdam or something.
Not that we don't have problems with racism – we absolutely do – but the context and reasons are just completely different to the point where the American conversation on the topic for the most part just doesn't apply at all, but unfortunately not everyone seems to have realized this.
Err, that example would be religionist, not racist, right? The African folks in question are Jewish.
I'm not saying there aren't problems with racism in Israel, or that the state isn't actively cruel to people it views as different, just that your citation doesn't seem to imply racism per se.
> 4B. For the purposes of this Law, "Jew" means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion."
The "or" there is very important. If my grandmother were a religious Jew, and she had a secular daughter, that daughter would still be a jew (a secular jew). If that daughter then births me, that is now a generation further, where my mother was not religious, I am not religious, but both my mother and I are considered to be Jews for that law.
Due to how that is worded, one can be a secular Jew, Jewish by the bloodline of the mother (aka "race"), and one can be a religious Jew. The law applies to both, so I think it's fair to say that it's a racist law.
That's an interesting argument, I do see what you're saying. I'd counter that since someone of any race can be a Jew by this definition, it doesn't exclude on the basis of race.
The intent is also quite clearly to establish the country as a religious nation, and while I'm quite glad to live in a secular nation (the US) I don't begrudge religious nations their right to exist (eg; islamic ones).
I also find the "or" wording of the law interesting.
I do think it's racist as it grants the privilege of abandoning the Jewish religion while remaining a legally privileged class (Jew) to people with some ancestries (Jewish) but not with others.
>I'd counter that since someone of any race can be a Jew by this definition, it doesn't exclude on the basis of race.
Ironically this is some sort of wordplay that Midrash experts love to use to circumvent outdated Talmud laws. Like, yeah, maybe you are right from the strict point of narrow literal interpretation that ignores any pragmatics, but who cares about that anyway.
I am no fan of the Israeli state, but that is not a thing. THere were reports of racist doctors using Depo Pravera (sp?) on Ethiopian women without their consent, if true they were rouge.
Where does this line of reasoning end? Should we rename "master's degrees" even though there is no "slave" in this context (just like there is no slave branch in git)? I think it's important for students to take a deep breath and remember to reflect upon racism.
For context, I'm Finnish and many of my ancestors were sold as slaves as well.
Can sympathize: the reason Im in the US is because my Irish ancestors went into indentured servitude to come to the states, landed in the deep south and because of my low economic status growing up actually shared more in common with the black folks around here (went to a school system where I, 7/8 Irish, was the minority) yet I'm constantly being reminded by white folks to check my privilege. It's just hilarious from this perspective.
I'm not trying to diminish the experience of your ancestors, mine were also Irish.
But in most contexts, white privilege doesn't care about your actual ancestry. A 2nd generation black immigrant from Africa to NYC will face some of the same discrimination as a descendant from slaves. And with your white skin you will receive some of the same privileges as a wealthy descendant of the Mayflower.
It doesn't really hurt to recognize this, and it doesn't have to "erase" the pain that your ancestors went through. It's simply recognizing that there are inherent subliminal biases in our systems and society.
My white privilege must have been on vacation growing up because my parents were too poor to pay the light bill several times and eventually were foreclosed upon (this was way before 2008). And it certainly wasn't around when I had to work as a farm hand for less than minimum wage in high school to help pay the bills. A lot of what's perceived as white privilege is actually economic privilege, and most of the rest is made up.
“You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula of doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity."
Again, even people with privilege can have a really hard life. But you do in fact have the privilege of driving a car without the threat of being pulled over for how you look, or walking down the street without being asked questions, or boarding a plane without being "randomly" searched.
It's a form a privilege. It doesn't make you bad. It doesn't mean your life is easy. But it's worth recognizing.
Let's assume that you're completely right, and a white person has all those privileges that you pointed out.
Now let's compare this theoretical white person to a theoretical black person with none of these privileges. One caveat though, the white person is poor and the black person is rich.
Now the question is, does the economic privilege of the black person offset the other privileges of the white person?
In my opinion and the opinion of the person you're replying to, the answer is yes. Economic privilege generally outweighs other privileges, so focusing on these other privileges seems counterproductive if we want to increase equality.
The only thing I can assume is the whole woke/privilege thing has been devised by people out of touch with the common American experience.
If you think a poor white person can drive around West Virginia in a beat up car without being pulled over and harassed because they look like they deal meth you don’t know what the average experience is like.
This happened to me in high school. I was taking some of my buddies home from football practice and was pulled over. Me (the one white guy) and two black guys. A sheriff's deputy pulled us over. He asked us to get out of the truck and sit on the ground while he asked us questions, a lot of questions. A few minutes later another deputy showed up and asked if he could search the truck. The deputy that pulled us over was black, the other was white. They thought I was buying or selling drugs. Given the amount of drug activity in the area, and that the area was mostly black and I wasn't gave him reason to pull me over.
If someone wants to say my privilege was not living in that type of area then I guess maybe, though my situation wasn't too much better. This whole notion of having privilege is absurd.
It's actually "majority privilege." It's just called white privilege in the USA because that has historically been the majority color. Go to any country, or geographic area, and you fill find a majority race/sect/tribe/religion that gives them more privileges/rights than the rest of the people who live in smaller numbers, because there are less of them in numbers to win a vote (or whatever.) You will also find that majority holding some sort of power over the minorities in the area. Can you think of a country where this hasn't been true at some point in world history? China? Russia? Nigeria? Mexico? Cambodia? Vietnam? Greece? Rome? Rwanda?
I totally agree with you. We were talking about the US.
In some cultures, the aspect of giving every single person inalienable rights and equality isn't explicitly valued like it is in the west. I wouldn't want to impose western values on those cultures.
However, your argument boils down to whataboutism. Yes there are other countries with other forms of privilege. Yes there are civilizations in the past with other forms of privilege. In the US we tend to value equality, and in the pursuit of that we must recognize all forms of privilege that exist in our society. It doesn't matter that it exists elsewhere.
FYI I am not at all talking about the original article. I was simply responding to this tangent comment thread.
An awesome take away from the comment you replied to may be: why call it white privilege? It’s seems better to call it majority privilege. It’s more accurate, more general, less inflammatory, less targeted, less convoluted. It seems better in every way. Focusing on whiteness just serves to entrench people (as anytime you call someone’s intrinsic traits harmful, you tend to offend). Why don’t we just call it majority privilege?
> white privilege doesn't care about your actual ancestry
Only because there haven’t been any large groups of white immigrants to the US in recent history. If there were, you could expect to see the same sort of intolerance you can see in Europe, where some people really do care a lot about your ancestry, even if you’re just as white as them.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. It is disgusting. It does nothing to help with any of the real issues. It just creates this sad gestapo culture where there is a rush to jump all over someone over something trivial and meaningless. The infringer of the rule is punished, the punisher feels superior, and nothing really improves. The enemy of progress is silencing discussion and stupid "bans" on everyday words just makes people hesitant to speak less they violate the latest woke rules. (Like every word that has "man" in it instead of "person/woman/whatever".)
Using black justice as a pawn to further their own image and agenda? No. Not really. These realtors want to cash in on this bandwagon. I am disgusted, indeed.
Let me just thank you personally for the money I'm getting out of this. I went into Social Justice Warrioring for the feel-goods, but the buttload of cash is definitely a nice bonus.
More charitable reading would be that they don't want to offend potential customers. I mean, I guess that can be seen as "cashing in," but then all good customer service could be dismissed in the same fashion.
> For context, I'm Finnish and many of my ancestors were sold as slaves as well.
Just wanted to point out there's a huge difference here. Black communities in America very much live with the legacy, and remanifestation (I recommend reading The Color of Law), of slavery in their everyday lives. At one point in US history, nearly 10% of american identified as KKK members. Do you think all of them suddenly disappeared.
There's also huge legacies in our academia. Just a couple decades ago sociology was essentially the study of eugenics in our own country while anthropology was the study of eugenics in other countries. Even commonly used terms in statistics (e.g. regression to the mean) root from the study of eugenics. There's been much scholarship dedicated to clearly tracing these roots and a constant theme of antiblackness
PBS has a great history documentary called "American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade" that I'd highly recommend if you wanna start to dig at the heels of how deeply rooted this is in our culture
It's good that you find this GitHub initiative a useful reminder that racism can run very deep (including apparently harmless language), but for many people it is a reminder that:
- GitHub prefers cheap virtue signaling not only to actually caring about racism, but to technical merit and customer service: the public pays for this PR stunt with *millions* of adjustments to their repositories and working copies
- Branch names, and many other similar things, are now a battleground for freedom of expression, exposed to dangerous storms of political correctness
- GitHub has the arrogance of trying to control how people call their branches, and ultimately people's political ideology through the manipulation of language
For me and many others, the habit that is going to change (maybe slowly) is using GitHub.
> - GitHub prefers cheap virtue signaling not only to actually caring about racism, but to technical merit and customer service: the public pays for this PR stunt with millions of adjustments to their repositories and working copies
Neither git nor GitHub is forcing the branch names to change. git added the ability to specify a default branch instead of hardcoding it to 'master'. Github is taking this into consideration by allowing the users to specify their own default branch as well, and updating documentation and command examples to use 'main' as the default branch name.
> - Branch names, and many other similar things, are now a battleground for freedom of expression, exposed to dangerous storms of political correctness
No freedom of expression concerns here. You actually have more freedom now as git, GitHub, GitLab now make it easier to choose your own default/primary branch instead of hardcoding it to initialize to 'master'.
> - GitHub has the arrogance of trying to control how people call their branches, and ultimately people's political ideology through the manipulation of language
GitHub is not controlling anything. You, like always, can name your default branch 'master' if you want.
Microsoft can't stop publishing shit code full of security holes that get hacked every other day. If you want your software project to go south in a hurry take a dependency on any Microsoft product. This should be reason enough to ditch M$.
Fair enough. American companies (and people) definitely have a home bias. I guess to be constructive, I would suggest that perhaps there are parallels in your country.
I'm also French (but living in the US).
How is that not selection bias if you only ask your friends which I presume you met through school or work?
These friends have already overcome the hurdles that minorities have to go through.
Of course it's selection bias and that's why I specifically did not generalize their case, but I'm not sure what "hurdles they had to go through" if they basically said they had none?
In the end you'll find that it's the classic divide between Europe and America, seeing society as different classes versus different "races".
> I'm also French (but living in the US). How is that not selection bias if you only ask your friends which I presume you met through school or work? These friends have already overcome the hurdles that minorities have to go through.
Many statements are selection bias or apex fallacy. The author of the original article talks about $20m donations as though that's the case for the majority of white people, instead of just a rounding error. What's worse is assuming that an observation must be selection bias, when selection bias needs demonstrating.
By what measure? I’d argue that the majority of countries in the world are “less tolerant on average” than France, and the vast majority of societies in human history have been less tolerant than modern France. Thus, France is actually incredibly tolerant in the grand scheme. What’s your yardstick in leveling such accusations?
I don't have the time to give you an essay on this, but here's the very first search result on this topic - and it's a pretty good one [0]. Note that France was the first country in Europe to do that. Coincidence?
"In 2010, France passed a law prohibiting people from wearing clothing in public that covers your face. And although many blasted the law as Islamophobic, the "burqa ban" remains in place today, punishable with a fine and citizenship course."
Here's the third search result for the term "is france a tolerant society?", from Wikipedia which has a wiki dedicated to that topic [1]:
"Racism is regarded by many in French society as a significant social problem. Racism against Jews and Muslims has a long history, and acts have been reported against members of resident groups including Algerian, Berbers and Arabs. In 2016, the French National Commission on Human Rights reported that 8% of French believe that some races are superior to others."
And just to make sure my original sentiment comes across as intended: France is awesome and I loved every minute I spent there. But I wouldn't list "tolerant" as an attribute that would come to mind when trying to describe its culture to someone who's never been there.
Well ethnic studies are forbidden in France so it's hard to not relying on anecdotal data for this topic, so all I know is that I've got managers and colleagues of all colors.
Less crazy when you learn why:
"There are no public policies in France that target benefits or confer recognition on groups defined as races. For many Frenchmen, the very term race sends a shiver running down their spines, since it tends to recall the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the complicity of France’s Vichy regime in deporting Jews to concentration camps. Race is such a taboo term that a 1978 law specifically banned the collection and computerized storage of race-based data without the express consent of the interviewees or a waiver by a state committee. France therefore collects no census or other data on the race (or ethnicity) of its citizens."[0]
tl;dr: such data was used during the Nazi occupation and France helped deportation
I am not implying that France had some hidden motives in passing this legislature. But WW2 trauma is preventing them from making policy decisions that would benefit the society today. Here's just one very practical example of that: in the below WSJ article [0], it's claimed that the lack of ethnic statistics has contributed to housing and employment discrimination, among many other problems.
They need ethnic statistics to prove that residents of denser neighborhood working essential jobs (that can't be done remotely for the most part) are disproportionately affected by COVID?
I'm sure the far right in France would love to have ethnic statistics, especially for crime rates... it's the left that historically pushed back against it.
Agreed. I'm not defending the lack of ethnic statistics. Just offering the perspective from the other side.
I strongly believe you cannot improve things you do not measure.
> the lack of X statistics has contributed to problem Y
The term "contribution" implies active impact on a problem. It comes from the Latin "contribuere" which means to "bring together" or to "add". If X contributes to Y, you should be able to measure the contribution, but there's no way to measure the impact of something that never existed in the first place.
> What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way.
My guess is that it ingrains a different habit--patting ourselves on the back for 'defeating racism' via some banal change or other. Or worse, that it leads them to write off the whole movement as disingenuous for all of its focus on pointless endeavors. It's probably another drop in the bucket of things that make people actively unsympathetic and perhaps even drives them toward the open arms of the far-right. Call me cynical, but it seems unlikely that any substantial change is going to manifest from this. Just a little more self-righteousness for some people and a little more bitterness for others.
> What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way
This is a really interesting framing and I appreciate it.
As a Caucasian American, I have been perplexed by this issue. The terminology change itself didn't especially annoy me - you don't have to change your existing repositories after all - but it didn't seem to really accomplish anything useful. My instinct was that this served no purpose beyond PR ("virtue signaling") and might be mildly harmful at worst (as a distraction from important structural issues, a constant reminder to right-wing people how annoying liberal scolds can be to them) without any upside I could actually envision.
I feel like what you describe was very far from the original intent, whatever it might have been, but I appreciate that it may help in some small way I did not envision.
I agree that it served no purpose, and yet this thread appears to have found one: the virulence of the objection is so out of proportion to the magnitude of the change that it raises the question of just what is really at the root of it.
It is entirely about those "annoying liberal scolds"... and the way anything they say will be turned into an existential crisis. I feel like this is less about any actual change as a constant search for a thing to be aggrieved about, and when found, pounced on with absolutely maximum force.
I think of it as "vice signaling": performing the objections without even a moment's thought, not for the purpose of refuting it but to be seen as being the most, loudest, most obnoxious opposition.
> the virulence of the objection is so out of proportion to the magnitude of the change that it raises the question of just what is really at the root of it....I think of it as "vice signaling": performing the objections without even a moment's thought, not for the purpose of refuting it but to be seen as being the most, loudest, most obnoxious opposition.
I don't feel like we're reading the same thread. There are plenty of reasonable objections in these comments, and dismissing as you do is, to me, as intellectually shallow as the change in question.
I think the same could be said in reverse: if this change is truly so small and insignificant, why was it done in the first place? The frustration is at the paternalistic and placating nature of it - really, Github did their part by renaming version control tree titles? It reads like an Onion article, but it’s actually just a serious change by people too out of touch to realize how ridiculous it is. That’s where the frustration comes from. Nobody would care if they changed master to main to boost efficiencies, the annoyance is that they were motivated to do so in some brainlesss attempt to fight racism, but just revealed themselves to be vacuous
I have an honest question for you and others who are directly impacted by this, and would love to hear your perspective.
I work on a software team that has the usual level of diversity, an almost equal mix of East Asian, Indian, Middle-Eastern, and White developers, a few women, and not a single black developer. Here's the problem though... I've been part of the screening and interviewing process and we've only had ONE black person apply, he was an immigrant from Africa. He made it all of the way through the interview process, but did not get the job for reasons that I am unaware of, though I did give him a yes vote as he seemed competent and friendly to me.
Given that we have screened and interviewed hundreds of applicants and as far as I'm aware he was the only black developer to apply, how can we as individuals on the team make a difference to try to be more inclusive?
This has been true everywhere that I've worked. In my entire career spanning > 25 yrs I've only had the opportunity to work with one black developer. He was extremely good, but timid, very soft spoken, and too quick to self-judge, leading to him not very proactive at advertising his successes, which was unfortunate as he was doing great work, but not recognized by the majority of the team. When I later became his manager I would go out of my way to ensure that every major accomplishment of his was widely publicized, but by then the perception had already been set.
It seems to me that the root problem is further up than the hiring process -- it feels like it's something that needs to start at a younger age, encouraging more people outside of the usual circle to consider tech as a career in the first place, but maybe I'm not blind to my own short-sightedness and would love to be shown where I personally can effect change.
You need to better define the problem you are trying to solve. For example in my team in Europe there is no black member; there is no black person in the entire building and just a few in the entire city, maybe none in this kind of job, so I don't consider we are not inclusive by not having a black member in the team. You can have a problem if you are exclusive, but you cannot force inclusivity for the sake of just doing something that sounds good.
What is the goal of inclusivity? What is better for your team, having the best developers or having the most diverse developers? What is the productivity and value of diverse developers versus expert developers? Is a developer more valuable because of the skills or because of the skin color? Would you want to be treated by a competent doctor or by a black doctor? I am not saying there are no competent black doctors, but you make it sound that color is more important than competence.
Diversity brings value by bringing different perspectives to the problems we solve and the solutions we seek. We all have blind spots, and having a broader perspective can help us see more than we would otherwise, even where we’re unaware that we currently cannot see.
That is diversity in experience, culture or opinions, not skin color. You are also assuming that the different perspective is a positive contribution, even if in many cases it just brings more tension because people have very strong different opinions on bikeshedding. The biggest problem is when forced diversity comes at the expense of skills due to lack of supply, which is a very real thing.
Imagine the coal mine next to you that has the target to hire a certain percent of black people, 50% females and 5% LGBT: it would close instantly because it cannot meet the target. But just imagine the value of the different perspective a black coal miner would bring, compared to the wonderful perspective of the female miners.
Ok, so you think that black and white people are different for some social reasons. What if they are different in such way that black people are less likely to want to be programmers? What is even the issue here? Isn’t this also diversity? After all, not all white people are programmers and there is no reason to expect that the rate of software engineers among white people is “optimal” in the social sense.
black engineers have jobs. the government and defense contractors recruit at schools that have a higher percentage of black software engineers. its not that hard of a concept.
There's no amount of shuffling the deck chairs that gets out of the stark fact that black developers are a lower percentage of the developer population than black people are of the American population. I'd be surprised if the former broke 5%, but let's say 5% for the sake of argument.
I know a few black developers. They have no problem staying employed. Big surprise! They're developers, we're blessed to have a chronic shortage of labor. There isn't an untapped labor pool of chronically underemployed black developers, because they aren't incompetent at greater rates than their non-white peers.
So with extraordinary effort, a company can get up to the ~13% ratio which would represent parity. Or a black startup founder from an HBCU could draw on her peers and get a much higher percentage.
But, relentlessly, that means other companies will have even fewer than 5%. If having 13% of American-born developers be black is a worthwhile goal (and I don't see why not), hiring harder can't reach it. It just can't.
Just to put some actual numbers behind this: it looks like 3% of AP Computer Science exam takers are black [0], and 6% of computer science and engineering graduates are black [1]. But only 1% of "technical workers" at Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter are black, and only 26% of black CS grads (vs. 40% of white CS grads) go into CS jobs - looks like most of the 14% go into operations and administrative roles [1].
So clearly and unsurprisingly there is a problem at the top of the funnel (3% << 13%), but it sure seems like there's a problem lower in the funnel too. I assume those folks aren't turning down SWE job offers to take administrative jobs. To your point, obviously every engineering team can't be 13% black if only 6% [2] of people qualified to write code are black, but if big organizations are way below 6% black it seems fair to ask why.
[2] Using the share of black CS grads as a somewhat bogus approximation, this is probably an underestimate since black developers are disproportionately likely to come from non-traditional backgrounds, as the article points out
> I assume those folks aren't turning down SWE job offers to take administrative jobs
This is a reasonable assumption, though I'm interested what they classify as Office and Administration.
There could also be some confounding variables here. For example, perhaps black people are less likely to move across the country for jobs because they prefer to stay close to family (I.e. cultural differences).
Of course, the easy way out is to say that the system is biased against black people. Which might well be true, but we don't know that.
I think Asians are a very interesting example of the effect of culture. There is definitely strong cultural pressure for them to go into specific fields and be high achievers, so it's no surprise to me that they are massively overrepresented in the Computer and Tech field.
This is all to say: I agree it doesn't look great, but there could easily be hidden reasons for the large drop off in the funnel.
So what you are suggesting is to go beyond normal company business to recruit black developers? I.e. to give black developers an advantage over all others. That's a textbook definition of a racism, don't you think?
normal company business involves recruiting at universities. that person's company business does not seemingly recruit at all "nObOdy ApplIeD?!?!", many companies like theirs do recruit and chose to recruit at certain universities and act just as confused as that person's company, when there are simply more universities that can be recruited from and many of those have a higher percentage of engineers that are black.
you are desperately looking for something that wasn't suggested or said, but if you weren't (despite asking a question and responding with a conclusion you already had) the answer to your first question is "no". it would not be racist to expand recruiting to more engineering schools. and outside of that many existing recruiters have no difficulty reaching out to engineers with skills they like, this person's company does not seem to do that.
If you recruit from best universities and you decide to recruit from some universities because they have more people of a specific race, that is a racial based decision and it makes it racist. Including based on race is as racist as excluding based on race.
if you acknowledge that the “best universities” dont create better or more productive programmers for what companies in the sector actually do, and those universities’ demographics are perpetuated by socioeconomic disasters then you are simply expanding your recruiting efforts
also this person’s company doesnt do any recruiting so that not a strong argument for them
I fully agree that the best universities don't have the exclusivity on the best output, but the classification of what is considered "best" should be based on the average quality of the output.
Also recruiting in universities is an effort that does not scale, I did that for about 5 years and it was not possible to reach all the universities in my country, so I had to limit myself to the universities in the top 3-4 cities that I could reach. Yes, I left out some that may have some good candidates, but this is a limitation of resources and not an intentional exclusion "I don't go to X because I don't like them". In the old days companies were not putting announcements to hire in every newspaper in every small city across the country, but only in key places to maximize output per cost.
Expanding recruitment won't be racist by itself, no. But going beyond what company is doing now to hire more _black_ devs would be (they didn't ask where to recruit people, so they probably have enough candidates, the question was "where to recruit black devs if we don't have any black candidates").
expanding recruitment efforts to places that include more black developers is not racist by any definition. maybe you aren't reading this the same way, its places that also include more black developers
it is not racist by any definition of the word. just because they change a practice does not make it racist, even if their reasoning was as contrived as you think it is, it still would not be racist/prejudiced/exclusionary-to-other-groups when the result is simply expanding efforts to places that also include more black developers
1) no definition of that word has ever been that, so once your life long acid trip is over you can join us in this dimension
2) we're talking about expanding recruiting for all races and somehow you still misread that, choosing to focus on the reason that recruiting would be expanded as controversial
1) For me it clearly seems like a case of racial bigotry.
2) That’s a very dishonest framing of the issue. And I am not even sure why focusing on the controversial part is used as accusation of something bad ?
To me, "master" and "slave" are historic terms used throughout electrical, software, even entertainment industries.
Eliminating words from a vocabulary is very 1984-like. Those words have a deep historical meaning, allowing ourselves to just "remove them" is akin to forgetting and ignoring the dark past of slavery, rather than remembering and acknowledging it (with the hopes it will never happen again).
Saying that it helps change habits (in my opinion) is analogous to saying that preventing kids from playing violent video games will reduce mass shootings (there is evidence it does not). I disagree with your premise that this pushes us to change habits and is only a mechanism to be ashamed of our shared (and dark) history. Lest we forget.
Github isn't eliminating any words from anyone's vocabulary.
This thread has demonstrated that plenty of people are committed (har har) to calling their repository's je ne sais quoi branch `master`.
While I'm with you that I don't understand how this will move the needle on racial equity, I'm uncomfortable with how visceral of a reaction a group of technology professionals is having to what is essentially a library changing a default value.
Like, vocabulary changes all the time. Technology changes even more frequently. Why y'all so scared to use a different label?
When you write software, you should only change a default value for a good reason. This was...not that.
I agree that the outrage can sometimes seem out of proportion to the change itself, but I can also understand why people who write software in general would be offended by the silliness of the whole episode.
I read the announcement from Oct. 1 [1] and it doesn't have any explanation outside of a link to a Software Freedom Conservancy [2] (the folks now maintaining Git)
A lot of people here are assuming virtue signaling, but it could just as easily be "a majority number of our staff was behind this change". Unless GitHub has stated the why somewhere (I spent ~5m googling to no avail) we simply don't know.
Because you just created a massive amount of tech debt that needs to be addressed in the here and now without convincing people that creating this tech debt was worth creating in the first place and when there is a lot of other tech debt that actually matters that still hasn't been paid off.
Like someone else said here: "On one hand, here I am trying to get work done and on the other hand you have these people actively slowing me down. These people are my enemy"
This change only affects newly created repos, how does it create tech debt? I suppose some tooling may need to be updated, but if your tools are to brittle to support a different branch name.. sheesh
I would posit to your quotee that they're being phenomenally self-centered.
Github has been mum about the why behind this change, but I'd bet my hat it wasn't because they wanted to actively slow down't their users.
At my organization, we are being pressured to change existing repos to use "main" with the implication that we are racist if we do not. But even if we leave existing repos alone, now we all have to remember which repos use master and which ones use main. We tend to have people working across many different repos, so it's a headache waiting to happen either way.
> This change only affects newly created repos, how does it create tech debt? I suppose some tooling may need to be updated, but if your tools are to brittle to support a different branch name.. sheesh
This is overly dismissive. Build pipelines that interact with bespoke branches now need dynamism for backwards compatibility; a value that was previously static is now changeable. That doesn't really qualify as brittle to me; that any value in a codebase must be changeable is a ridiculous requirement from a codebase.
I work with build systems in my day-to-day, and I can't remember the last time I worked with something that didn't support dynamic branch names but did support git
But my experience is obviously skewed by where I work.
I'm specifically thinking of git-flow (https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/); every build system I've interacted with has been some flavor of this. The crux here is that there is a single branch that deploys occur from. Not uncommonly, this is the default branch.
But with every build system I work with (which are: Jenkins, Concourse, Github Actions, and Gitlab CI) you can make any branch you want the branch-to-build-on.
I don't mean to say that it's not totally fixable. Up until this change, it was a reasonable assumption for any org to make, that the default branch will be the same for all projects. Now, either the default branch on any new repo must be manually set to the old default, or the build system must be updated to handle non homogenous default branches.
>So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
This is an extremely privileged and dangerously ignorant point of view.
There are more people living in slavery across the world right now than ever before in human history.
Maybe we should reflect on that fact instead of simply covering up words which make us uncomfortable in a vain attempt to expiate self imposed guilt for being born with a particular shade of skin.
My reaction was to instantly think that I'm on one side trying to get things done and SJWs are on another side slowing me down.
I don't care if it's a new JS library breaking dependencies to support import instead of require or if it's idiots changing names of things. These people are my enemy.
If I already have zero tolerance for whatever virtue signalling crap is popular in the mostly white and affluent San Francisco, is because of behaviours like this one.
On the bright side, this can help more people to discover there is a world outside of the liberal bubble, hopefully contributing to a more balanced society.
I'm white, but first generation immigrant. I think the change that GitHub did is as well for the wrong reasons. It's not because it is offensive, but because it might be reminding people of US history that many people are ashamed of (it reminds me of Aushwitz, the reason the place is still open and allows tourists is so we don't forget about it and won't repeat the history). The master in git wasn't even related to slavery, its meaning comes from meaning like master copy.
I don't mind change if it is for the better, for example postgresql instead of master-slave uses master-standby which is much more accurate how the replication works. Perhaps using main by GitHub is better, but because of timing, it feels like it was made to help forget about that part of the history, which IMO is doing the opposite of what was intended.
I've seen many replies, but not this one, so I'll chime in.
I am not concerned about diversity in tech and this was never on my mind until it started getting shoved down everyone's throat by American companies and activists. Many European countries blindingly copy whatever comes out of the USA, so now it's here too.
For me it's just one more annoying thing I feel that some privileged brats that I never met and don't care to meet are forcing others to spend time on.
While there may be plenty of people of all races who were not offended by the name, when you operate at the scale of a GitHub there is going to be some percentage who are. Some of them will complain. A company like GitHub then has two main options: change the name, or defend not changing the name. Whichever one they pick is going to cause various forms of backlash from various people, but it’s pretty obvious that changing the name is more defensible and the better long-term approach.
>it’s pretty obvious that changing the name is more defensible and the better long-term approach.
Is it the better long-term approach? If you give in to a vocal minority what is stopping them from trying to change something else? Git means "an unpleasant or contemptible person". Surely that could be construed as offensive. What happens when / if a vocal minority decides Git and Github need to change their name? Should Github just change their name to prevent backlash?
Not to mention it appears to be mostly white people pushing this change, not even the alleged victims.
But, this argument rationales mob rule over reason. The name change is defensible to avoid "various forms of backlash from various people".
"Some of them will complain" -- a majority? Then yes, it makes sense to listen and adapt. Or, a loud minority who threatens? I don't believe that the change was made due to any overwhelming user feedback.
If 98% of people vote that something isn't offensive, and 2% vote that it is, and your takeaway from this is "the thing is offensive", then how can anything ever be determined to be not offensive?
> Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech.
This is a useful reminder. It's a reminder that associative thinking can invert causal relationships and turn anything into a symbol for anything else. There is no rational limit to things that can be attacked this way. Someone can demand you to change the way you talk or dress, what you read or watch, how you do your job. The changes themselves can be anything and the only limit to their extent is your willingness to say no.
And by the way, don't ever forget who is enforcing this. This is not your coworker individually asking you do something differently to accommodate them. This is coming top-down from one of largest tech corporation in the world.
Let's not exaggerate, they just changed the default for new repos, everyone is free to continue naming their branches "master" or "stable" or "trunk" or whatever they want.
You are right that nobody is being physically forced to make this change, but I think you vastly underestimate the power of propaganda and social pressure.
In today's hyper-socialized society there is not really much difference between "you are forced to make this change" and "make this change or else you will be socially outcast by all your peers".
Github is used by millions of developers all over the world. There is almost certainly at least one person in every western software company that regularly uses github. They have the power to broadcast messages into every software company in the western world, and right now this message is "make this change or you are racist".
> This is a useful reminder. It's a reminder that associative thinking can invert causal relationships and turn anything into a symbol for anything else. There is no rational limit to things that can be attacked this way.
I've never heard this stated so clearly and succinctly. Thanks for advancing the conversation.
Remember MS once told us 'Linux is Cancer'. Should we have believed them then? Now 'Microsoft loves Linux'. Which is it? I think which ever one aligns with their business interests at the time. That lens should used to view any change pushed by Redmond.
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech
Yeah, I totally need that, because there is not enough churn in tech. For instance, every release of Android since 4 has been identical in terms of UI, so I haven't had to learn any new subconscious habit in the use of a phone.
Web developers haven't had to learn new framework in over a decade; they could use this, too, not to mention C++ devs.
I was caught off guard by the change when it was implemented, and was frankly quite annoyed. My suspicions were the same as the author's, that the reasons were likely insincere. But I never made the leap you did to (try and) assess my subconscious biases. Thank you for the insight!
On an other note, 'main' is fewer letters to capture the same idea ad therefore more efficient.
It's creepily similar to the indoctrination technique of teaching people they are evil and can only be redeemed by following <belief system of choice>.
So is Original Sin. Unless you believe than mankind is naturally depraved, in which case the state of the world makes perfect sense right now and cannot be changed.
To delve into this a little bit more - if mankind is _by nature_ depraved / evil, then there is nothing more to say or do. We are fighting against our nature, trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps out of a morass which we were born into. There is no point in trying, because we are broken. We can only hope that the principle of sufficient reason (a cause must be sufficient to explain its effects) is false and that our AGI children will be able to be born free from our defects and destroy / save us.
IFF mankind is not _by nature_ depraved, then either:
* We are not currently depraved (and live in Eden [which seems ... unlikely])
* We are injured (in some way).
The doctrine of Original Sin, looked at from a purely natural perspective, is the declaration that "man is not by nature depraved, but he is suffering from an ancient injury". Which is much more hopeful than any of the other options.
By that definition of original sin, subconscious bias is just a specific kind of ancient injury. So subconscious bias isn't analogous to original sin, it is a form of original sin.
So either subconscious bias is religious and dogmatic like original sin, or subconscious bias is hopeful and not religious like original sin.
Black SWE here as well, highly disagree with this. If Microsoft/Github wanted to issue "a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech", they could've founded an non-profit dedicated to training and job placement for BIPOC and underrepresented white women, they could've kept a continuous banner on their site that linked to relevant legislation, initiatives, causes, etc.
They changed the goddamned name of the master branch.
You're gonna have to explain to me how changing that name makes much more significant headway than any initative I enumerated above or adjacently related. There's a lot of heavy lifting being done by "a useful reminder".
I mean, you or I don't need reminders, that's what the article is about. As for the rest of the tech industry, its a crapshoot to even suggest even half would be moved by changing the name of the branch nevermind possibly not caring at all about the greater issue for whatever reason.
The FTA is about continuous action that requires investment, you're applauding cheap, low-effort PR moves. This country, and you and I, deserve better than what amounts to yet another TikTok affirmation, and it's difficult to discern tangible value for actual Black people that someone somewhere thought to themselves as they typed 'git checkout main', "Ah, yes, let me reconsider the web of power-relations I'm enmeshed in".
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
There is no amount of reflection that is ever going to substitute the actual presence of Black folk in the tech workforce, and thinking we'll over come this waiting on some kind of ethical consensus that eventually leads to a beneficial outcome is not reflected by history, see Civil Rights legislation.
Suggesting you're surreptisously altering behavior via minor language changes is just "spooky action at a distance" come alive. It lends the sense that someone is "effecting" outcomes without actually having to be accountable for actual outcomes occuring.
The "postmodernists" (in quotes cause it tells you nothing, more accurate would be to call them postmarxist) developed something resembling this (predominantly American) language theory, though much broader in scope, looking at documents from the 19th, 18th, and early 20th century when there was a small elite regulating knowledge, language, and education. (the official language academies of France, Spain, early communities of biologists, crimonologists etc). Those conditions simply aren't the case today precisely owing to mass communication.
All this that is accomplished by this (IMO as a former philosophy academic) complete bastardization of so-called "postmodern" language theory is a new out/game for standing institutions to play. The FTA points out how Microsoft is changing the name of master with their right hand, but supplying facial recognition software to police to identify protesters and mistake Black folk for Gorillas with their left hand.
The sad thing is it’s not corporate generosity coming up with these initiatives, they are pushing them because it’s a PR benefit.
Changing the name of something or issuing a press release costs absolutely nothing. When you actually dig into the issue you find corporations have no problem with racist practices if changing them would be expensive or challenging. Running background checks on employees and not disclosing what they will discriminate on, acting like meritocracy is anything more than a fiction, the incredible bias towards hiring from places their friends worked at, etc. And most of big tech are falling over themselves to take contracts from oppressive governments and institutions.
I have to laugh a little when Amazon or Microsoft takes a stand against racism but does business in China, possibly one of the most racist, and human rights abusing government on Earth. Turns out the only thing these companies won’t discriminate against is cold hard cash.
First off. Thank you for your comment. As a white European I need to hear these perspectives and I don't hear them enough.
Your comment reminded me of those email signatures that say something like, "Please think of the environment before you print this." Do they actually accomplish anything or do they just annoy people?
We need to weigh the real impact of actions against their potential annoyance. Because otherwise we're turning people off to the goals we're trying to achieve.
There was recently an environmental action in my city to stop traffic with a banner during a busy Sunday when lots of people were returning to the city. The activists did it because they wanted to get people to notice and care about the environment. The motorists were of course very annoyed and many of them posted on social media about this. Does annoying a bunch of motorists work towards saving the environment or just alienate people who could have been your allies?
There's a similar dynamic happening here.
A name was changed.
The change annoyed some people. Some people were not annoyed.
Lol, "let's spread awareness of climate change by causing a bunch of cars to idle unnecessarily"
Society needs to take a stronger position against virtue signaling type behavior that has a facade of benevolence while being ineffective. Doing something ineffective for the right reasons is worse than doing nothing at all: it wastes productive energy and will to act on those reasons.
To your point though, it’s not just that some people are annoyed but that some people become aware of the absurdity of it all and attribute that to even more measured, less absurd critiques/initiatives and disassociate from even healthy aspects of a debate. Seeing the excesses drives a desire to disassociate.
A complete tangent, but when I interned at Toyota, they had a sign on the large inkjet plotter equating cost of abandoned prints per year to number of manufactured Highlanders.
I just want to quote because in my opinion your last sentence is right on & bears repeating: "The FTA points out how Microsoft is changing the name of master with their right hand, but supplying facial recognition software to police to identify protesters and mistake Black folk for Gorillas with their left hand."
On an individual level, I don't find it useful to get too worked up about name changes. Pronouns, names, whatever -- if someone's got a strong feeling I'll use what they want. You know why? (rhetorical HN you, not imbnwa in particular) Talk is cheap. Follow the money, though, the actual money, and supplying crappy facial recognition software that allows mass surveillance and leads to unsupportable arrest of innocent people is $$$. Selling a shitty "AI" program to screen resumes that uses a model that tells you a name like Jared is the best predictor for getting hired is $$$$. Perpetuating inequality through crappy AI/ML design is $$$$, and then noting that it exists and charging to "fix" it is $$$$$! As the beauty and pharma industries know, the best way to make money is to introduce a problem and then introduce a "cure" six months later.
I wonder if they won't sell their facial recognition technology to vendors that serve the police. Does this policy have teeth or is it just going to induce reseller middle men to sell it police for them?
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute there. I have mexican-indigenous blood running through my veins and coloring my skin and all I can say is this: no matter how much you've suffered, you don't get to minimize other people‘s suffering.
> Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech.
Implicit bias is made to be the boogeyman when it reality, it is probably a very a small fraction of the cause of "lack of diversity" in tech, if at all. Anyone who has attended computer science courses in college anytime would know the number of black students were little to none. It has always been a pipeline problem from the education side of things. To say that typing a word that so happens to have a relation to slavery caused a "lack of diversity" in tech is the biggest farce in this industry and it is extremely sad to see this line parroted by many in the industry. I expect to be heavily downvoted and even flagged for "wrongthink" but I think it tells a lot about how irrational and unhealthy our state of discourse is in today's world.
> remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
I find statements like these to be well meaning straight from the pulpit of a culture that finds cancellation or edits prefferable to new and better.
It's decline. Regression. It's looking at the present solely through the eyes of the past and a refusal to look an inch forward.
A word won't change the state. It's meta. The nub of the issue is that a black kid who might have an interest in computing has access to one, does he have that as a choice, and can anyone help or nudge him towards an academic pursuit in computing. That's where the work is.
> What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit
Yes, a habit, but nothing that has to do with race or racism. So, is it a habit worth, or needing of being broken? What was bad about this habit? How does using it in a non-racial context aide in perpetuating racism?
Masters degree. Master recording. Master Chief. Master at Arms. Like Git, none of these things has anything to do with a master/slave paradigm, or even have a "slave" counterpart. There is no slave in git...there is clone and branch. There is no slave in audio recordings, you make a duplicate or copy of the master. Language is complex and nuanced. Not every word used in a race context has to do with the same word being used in another context, unless we make it so. There's nothing consciously or subconsciously racist about saying you have a masters degree, assuming you do. There are many definitions for master[1]. Only one of them deals with the disgusting practice of a person being owned as property, ie slavery, and it's not even the top definition. Should we just get rid of all of the other definitions of the word entirely because one of the definitions has some very disgusting history in the US, and historically the world at large going back thousands of years?
For the record, I'm white. My ancestors were serfs, ie slaves, in Europe. Unless you're of a royal bloodline that wasn't conquered by another royal bloodline, chances are everyone has a connection to relatives that were enslaved by someone, somewhere, at some point in time[2].
Now, I can agree we should get rid of master-slavery terminology. That is blatant, imho. But "master" on its own when there is no "slave" component unless we make one up in our heads? If we follow that logic, there are a LOT of words that we should get rid of, including the word "black" to describe a color. There are a lot of racists who also use that word in a negative context to spread their racism. Where will it end? Where is the line? How much thinner should we make the dictionary so that no one is offended or subconsciously reminded of something that didn't actually have to do with the subject at hand? And after we do that, will there be newly found things that people will get offended at? Count on it.
> What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it
This is the entire point, this sentence right here.
The sentence right there is what a lot of people find inane and absurd, though, too. It’s often less a case of people not “getting” what the nominal intention is; it’s that people do get the nominal intention and think it’s an idiotic waste of time that’s being done to satisfy a pretty ignorant and narrow-minded view of language and history. It also has no limiting principle to what gets targeted except the energy of ninnies. It’s worth considering now where your line of tolerance is going to be - the point where you think, “okay, this has become too ridiculous, even for me”. Is it when I suggest removing “chain” from blockchain because it evokes slavery? Point being that many people see this issue with GitHub as having crossed the line of absurdity already.
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
Could you please give me specific examples of what biases I, a software developer, may have? I like to think that I have always treated people with respect, judging them only by the character of their work and interactions with me, as opposed to stereotypes based on characteristics outside of their control. Perhaps I am wrong, but reflecting did not help maybe because I have had found no luck finding a thorough, rational source to educate myself on these issues that doesn't just echo meaningless politically or emotionally loaded statements. I am thus genuinely interested to hear from someone like you who is directly affected by these issues.
I generally agree with your statement. I am also an African American but my first reaction to the change was very positive. On a more technical and pedantic level, having a "master" branch really doesn't make any sense without slave branches. So in this context a "main" branch eliminates any negative historical connotations and has a more precise meaning. To me, this another case of "that's how its always been" and some people react very negatively towards sudden change.
Related to this conversation: years ago Nikon removed the terminology of Master and Slave in their flash units in favor of Commander and Remote.
To the author: We have to start somewhere and it is a sign of progress (no matter how small) that finally there is some awareness around this issue and now something is being done about it
> On a more technical and pedantic level, having a "master" branch really doesn't make any sense without slave branches.
The reason master branches are called master branches is as an analogy to a music/record "master", which means "the original, the truest, the canonical".
(In an analog world where every copy necessitated deterioration, there was a need to say "this is THE version").
So git master branches meant the same thing: canonical. That's why the name "makes sense" even though there are no slave branches.
Just adding this here out of a sense of duty for historical accuracy, and not commenting on the name change itself.
It doesn't really matter which makes "more sense." You could call it the canon branch, the root branch, the trunk branch, the main branch, the master branch, whatever.
The point is that the word master, in this context, has a different etymology that the word master in say, a database. Now, that might not matter: if you care about changing the name of the branch you probably care about the way the name makes people feel, not the etymology of the word, and perhaps that's a good argument (personally I don't know and don't really care). Nonetheless, the etymology of the word is a factual statement, so I was correcting a poster who was assuming it was an analogy to a different context.
words do matter.. if they didn't, none of us on the thread would be talking about it. You can't splain away how a person from a different group feels or why. What is nice about other SCM systems like Mercurial, Fossil, CVS, SVN.. or basically anything not Git.. is that the language is clear and not offensive to anyone. It really is that simple
Coming from Mercurial which calls its default branch.. well "default" to Git which calls its default branch "master" was very jarring for me. So yeah, I definitly noticed
"master" has been in use for decades in the recording industry, the "record master" does not, and never did, have any slaves. This terminology was incorporated into software, back in the CD-ROM days, with their "gold master" from which copies would be produced.
I don't have a horse in this race, I just wanted to point out that the language is far more flexible than some people seem to think.
Christ just then verb “mastering”. I work in Hollywood at a big studio and mastering is incredibly common term for the process of ordering and creating digital masters. That is, the uncompressed “official” version of our movies that are used to for archiving and for creating other downstream versions of lesser quality.
I’m actually wondering if I should create a tongue-in-cheek movement to renaming this term across studios. It’s incredibly ingrained.
> the "record master" does not, and never did, have any slaves.
Are you sure about this? It seems the music industry is going through a parallel exercise. I'm not familiar with music industry terminology really, but it seems those who are disagree with you:
"Following that thread, [Pharrell] Williams suggested that the company “get ahead of this and do the right thing. Start with the terminology — like ‘master’ and ‘slave.’ Master being the main recording and the slave being all the copies made.”
...
Williams recalls hearing the loaded words “master” and “slave” paired in such a manner as a teen, when learning the ropes of the music business from R&B star Teddy Riley in Virginia Beach, Va. As his career took off, Williams spotted the terms woven into many of his contracts."
I cannot speak to what might've been contained in the contracts, but I am fairly confident that master/slave terminology wasn't used by the recording industry, just "master" and "mastering".
Google Ngrams/Book Search seems to validate this, too. I could find no results related to the recording industry that used master/slave terminology.
I'd personally be leery of accepting sources post-2020, due to the confidence with which people can recall false memories.
Okay, here's a book called "All You Need to Know About the Music Business" first published in 1991 by a recording industry lawyer (a guy who would have been involved in writing those contracts). It contains the passage:
"The word master has two meanings:
1. The original recording made in the studio is called a master, because it is the master (meaning controlling entity) from which all copies are made (the machines making the copies are called slaves—master/slave; get it?).
...
2. The word master also means a recording of one particular song. Thus, you might say an album has “ten masters” (meaning ten selections) on it. These individual recordings are also called cuts, because of the historical fact that each selection was “cut” into vinyl."
You originally said:
"This terminology was incorporated into software, back in the CD-ROM days, with their "gold master" from which copies would be produced."
So it appears you are referencing the first usage of the term master, which this industry insider explained in 1991 (a pre 2020 source) had a direct master/slave relationship to the copies, and the terminology was used knowingly to refer to a more conventional understanding of a master/slave relationship between humans.
This master/slave relationship between recordings seems to have been used in other contexts in the industry, showing its usage was widespread.
Here is a retailer explaining in 1998 what a "slave" reel is (in contrast to a "master" reel): "Historically refers to a reel of multitrack tape upon which there is a submix of the tracks from a “master reel” to record overdubs against. The purpose of slave reels is to more easily provide additional workspace (tracks) for creating multitrack recordings." https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/slave-reel/
Here is a post in a large community of audio enthusiasts about a recording from the 80s labeled as a "safety" for a master and slave reel. If you search on this site you can see the words master and slave used in various contexts from master/slave recordings to master/slave sync relationships: https://www.gearslutz.com/board/so-much-gear-so-little-time/...
So to summarize we have:
- Accounts by several prominent artists of encountering master/slave terminology referring to recordings, both in common parlance and in contracts.
- A popular book (10 editions, 500k copies sold) written by a prominent recording industry lawyer, who would have been involved in writing contracts, that explicitly defines master recordings with respect to slave recordings. He even gives a wink/nudge to the common understanding of a master/slave relationship in human society.
- Various technologies that through the decades were advertised as having the capability to make "slave" recordings from "master" recordings.
- A community of audio enthusiasts who have incorporated master/slave terminology into their parlance.
Given this evidence, can you please explain to me whether you are still "fairly confident that master/slave terminology wasn't used by the recording industry"? What would it take to convince you otherwise?
Fair enough. I hadn't found any of these examples. I am not playing at being willfully blind; the avenues I used to research the terms did not turn up any of these results.
What's next? Are we going to rename master's as an academic degree? Are we going to start using words other than master or grandmaster to refer to experienced martial artists? What about chess?
> Are we going to rename master's as an academic degree?
Good Idea! I'm going to start a gofundme for a petition on change.org right now.
> What about chess?
Don't get me started about all the sexism (only one female character), classism (royalty vs pawn) and racism (black vs white) as well as animal abuse (war horses) in chess...
> My immediate reaction was, "this change is by white people for white people," where "white" means anyone who isn't black.
> My next reaction was, "they may be changing the name for the wrong reasons, but the change is brilliant."
This is exactly what I would expect from a person with a deeply ingrained racial identity.
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
Well, I have reflected upon that, and I came to conclusion that it is people who base their identity on 19th century pseudo-science on kool-aid who are wrong, not me.
That's exactly how I see it too. These performative bits of nonsense are how we as a society build consensus, in this case something like "racial injustice is real, it matters, and it needs to be addressed with action".
And by all getting together and renaming our white/blacklists and master branches and slave devices, we're all agreeing that this is important.
And.... yeah, it's also a way to find the people who aren't willing to mildly inconvenience themselves in this pursuit. Yes, cranky posters like the OP are ALSO signaling with their refusal to go along. What they're telling the rest of us is that this racism stuff isn't something they want to care about.
So it’s a purity test? Many people are just wired to reject this conformist line of thinking from the very starting point. You’re saying, let’s all do this pointless activity so we can see who has an attitude problem. It reminds me so much of how children are treated in schools or churches, and I really chafe at it. I couldn’t care less about your nominal cause or sense of self-righteousness, it’s the attitude and behavior of you imagining your fellow citizens are children that strikes me as offensive and drives resistance. I don’t doubt your good intentions but this way of thinking about solutions (your tools) is rather poisonous and places the banner under which you use them in pretty bad company.
I'm not sure this benefit of the doubt is merited. A lot of people participate in these shenanigans either performatively or because it gives them license to attack and feel good about it. Anecdotally, I've encountered far more people for whom the motivation is one of these two than I have for whom it's pure good intentions. Those few with genuine good intentions are usually also engaging in other good acts that actually matter and for which they don't get social credit for.
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
Deliberately? No, of course not. But it's a good way to tell where people stand, nonetheless. And I can tell right now that you personally feel much more strongly about opposing woke excesses than you do about opposing genuine racial injustice. So the performative nonsense has done its job.
Said another way, I also feel much more strongly about opposing woke excesses than I do about opposing genuine racial injustice--expressly since I very much support opposing racial injustices and do not find the master/main debate as a genuine racial injustice.
What do you mean "Deliberately, no"? It is intentionally so, just as you had no trouble describing and then eagerly applying with exactly the kind of wrong-headed witch-hunting logic these exercises predictably inspire. Make no mistake - the problem and criticism here isn't with a cause that's bigger than you and noble.
How exactly did it break your workflow? The change only affects new repositories and doesn't prevent you from creating a master branch on those new repositories. You're even able to set any branch name as default on a user, org, or enterprise level.
I don't remember exactly how it broke the first time, but the cognitive overhead shows up in various places. E.g., start a new project, create a branch, then merge back to master... oh wait, it's main now? But then I'm back to an old project, or another person's project, so let me look up what name I need to be using, etc...
I had a bunch of scripts that would automatically clone repos and ensure that they were pointing at the correct branch; they started breaking when the branch names started changing.
Lolz! GitHub did not change any branch names - they only changed the default help text file that suggested a command you can use to initialize a new repository.. that's it...
If someones existing repo changed their own branch name then it was the decision of that repo owner.. not related to anything GitHub did - technically if you see what's happening, Github barely did anything for this change..
Agree, it's a pain.. but, then it's more of a responsibility of those repos and how they communicate to their users and your paying attention to it's changes.. I mean tomorrow they'll probably break more of your stuff by their changes not related to this change at all... Says more about their handling of their product changes than anything else..
Until recently the base branch of git repositories was fairly stable. Coming from a long history of revision control systems where the base branch was incredibly stable.
This is a thoughtful and patronising post. Since you give advice frelly, let me offer one back: every time you type the word 'slave', take a deep breath and consider the etymology of that word.
This is definitely a helpful perspective, and I'll try to adopt your suggested practice myself.
I don't know that I'd call the change "brilliant", though – for anyone not already seeking to actively reflect on their own subconscious biases, this change will probably feel less like a welcome gentle reminder and more like someone trying to control how they think (which nobody likes).
> So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.
Which sounds okay(1) if all I'm working on is a simple document. If I'm in the larger context of making a change in code because it's breaking something somewhere else, the cognitive overhead of switching gears from "technical mode" to "political mode" to "what the heck was I really doing again?" is costly.
(1) I had "great" but downgraded it to "okay" because literally no one is offended by this -- it's virtue signaling to make rich people feel like they look better.
The word master doesn't occupy this space in my head and never has. I've associated this term primarily with teachers from a very early age. There's obviously the master-slave terminology in tech, but that really doesn't map to slavery in my head. This is probably because I'm from the British Isles which has a very different history in terms of slavery.
For me, I felt this change was really about the impact this term has for people who have been impacted by slavery having to continue to use these terms, which I thought many must felt comes across as, at best, insensitive.
Hence, I felt the cost of doing this seems reasonable. I mean, if we used the term holocaust for wiping a hard drive at some point people would probably have said - "err, yeah, no that's just a bad idea", because it would be offensive.
I did change a name because of this change, but the name I changed was Github. Fuck them and their stupid virtue signalling, because no matter how you cut it, that's really all it is.
"I want to share my own reactions to the name change since this is a really interesting topic. For context, I'm an African American, so many of my ancestors were slaves."
Yes and so were the ancestors of every race on this planet at some point.
"So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech"
What exactly am I supposed to be reflecting on? I don't need useless word changes that cause issues at my job to do that. This sort of strange thinking that somehow language causes racism and not the other way around needs to stop. It lacks so much logic it's infuriating, especially for people in tech fields. Additionally, you're simplifying words to one specific meaning when in reality the word master gets used in a multitude of different contexts that don't have any relation to black slavery AT ALL.
How about we do something useful with our time instead of constantly looking for victim hood and racism where it doesn't exist? I guess I should be somewhat encouraged because the fact that people have the time to worry about which words might be offensive (or make things offensive that aren't) means they're doing pretty damn well. So well, in fact, that they don't actually have enough going on in their lives and are making problems where they don't exist. The massive con here though is that eventually if you tell enough people they're victims of a system and can't help themselves it'll eventually cause real societal harm.....
“Yes and so were the ancestors of every race on this planet at some point.”
Great point! Everyone acts like history started in the 19th century. When you take a step back and learn about history on larger spans, it’s obvious that enslavement was common all over the globe. More people should learn that the world slave originates from the ethnic name “slav”, because Slavic people from central and eastern people were frequently enslaved by Moors, who come from the north of Africa.
“The massive con here though is that eventually if you tell enough people they're victims of a system and can't help themselves it'll eventually cause real societal harm.....”
Agreed, and I’m afraid we’ve already reached that point.
The big difference was that many cases of slavery weren't done based purely on physical attributes, such as skin colour but tended to be based on nationality, opportunistic, or situational. As far as I know, racial-based slavery is actually comparatively recent, and there are a lot of effects that you don't have with slavery as practiced by e.g. the ancient Greeks or Romans.
I appreciate learning your perspective. Frankly, though, the argument you make for accepting and embracing such things to me reinforces the notion that the BLM movement feels like forced cultural revolution. Though you are not coming across with any such tone, the idea seems like "shut up, and take your medicine".
All cultural revolution is forced for those who do not benefit directly from it.
Nothing worth fighting for comes easy. Women's rights, racial rights, gay rights... It all had to be forced to happen, because it's much easier to maintain an unfair status quo than it is to convince millions of people that perhaps their world view is wrong and holding others back.
The difference between the current social justice movements and the previous civil rights movements is that they're more about changing culture than policy. Voting rights, marriage rights, desegregation, abortion rights, these are things with concrete laws that could be changed.
If anything, the protests should have been about police reform. Change qualified immunity, change police training to avoid inadvertent deaths. That's something that a lot of people could support because more than just Black people get harassed by cops.
Instead, everything from master bedrooms, to math, to western civilization itself has been called "white supremacist", "racist", and "problematic". It's diluted the ability for these movements to make real substantive progress and is creating growing animosity towards themselves.
But changing this word was easy and doesn't really benefit anyone. A corporation gets to pat themselves on the back and US police continue to brutalize people just the same. Nothing really changed
> All cultural revolution is forced for those who do not benefit directly from it.
How would you say the American Civil War fits into this picture? Most of the people fighting (and dying to fight) slavery were not slaves. Or when the British made slavery illegal in their Empire? Why choose that, in your model?
Fighting for people's rights does not put an unnecessary burden on other people. Rosa Parks wanted to allow black people to ride anywhere on the bus, not make white people stand up and give them their places instead.
I think we're in agreement? I'm saying that regardless, fights for equity are still a fight and therefore forced.
I'd also argue they do put a burden on people, though not an unnecessary one, to reevaluate their thinking and world view. Rosa Parks didn't force a white person to give up their seat for her. But she, and others, did force white people to rethink what they took for granted as the status quo.
For the people who were always able to sit in the front of the bus, having black people sitting there was a new burden, and meant they had to stand more often.
Certainly, but it was a burden in that it took away an unnecessary privilege. The point of the boycotts was ultimately not to put an extra burden on others to remind them of their privilege.
The point of the original comment was that renaming master to main served as a reminder for people. But movements in the past that you were referencing never served a goal of solely putting burdens on other people.
This is a matter of perspective. Creating awareness is usually the first step to changing things. Your take here only really works of you believe that burdening people with awareness is the end goal.
To use the standing example, it's like saying that Parks's goal was just to get arrested to burden people with the knowledge of inequality.
If you accept that racial privilege exists, and that it's causes are correctable, even in part, then raising awareness of those helps. This is doubly true if you think that stone of the causes are social cognitive biases, where awareness and mindfulness directly address the causes.
I was on the fence before I read this comment. I don't mind changing insignificant things if it makes people feel better.
Now I'm firmly in the camp that this wasn't worth it. Even having this remotely associated with the real important change that BLM is pushing for really dilutes the message. We're talking about a name and not the real injustices that some people face everyday.
I guess it's worth mentioning as well that the Holocaust is still extremely recent in terms of history and therefore quite surprising how people who put so much emphasis on language are so ignorant to this event.
Holocaust has its own impact. Swastika is pretty much a taboo in west, despite it being an ancient symbol and has major significance in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Self censorship is never healthy [1]. A default, widely accepted value for the main branch of git repo had immense value from a usability perspective. Creating a confusing system and calling it beneficial because it becomes a reminder about bias as it interrupts your workflow? That's some post modern intersectional bullshit right there.
I really don't care about the name change in this case, the OP was mistaken, master record also has roots in a master slave[tape] relationship. So please, change it, just do it upstream and leave me the fuck out of your culture war.
So you admit that you were not offended by it but would still like it to change and would also impose said change to everyone for a reason that has yet to be identified.
It's extremely disappointing to see that the primary reaction on HN to this terminology chain is to bemoan the minor inconvenience of having to type fewer letters or run a replace-all on your scripts. Oh god, the horror. It's almost like people on HN have never used a text replacement tool before.
A "master recording" is the immutable "official recording" and is the source from which all copies are made, but the "master" in this term comes from the historical use of a "mastering lathe" to create vinyl records. It's quite clear that a "master branch" in git is not like a master recording, because a master branch isn't immutable and moreover is the branch that changes get merged into.
Given that the "master" in historic VCS programs (like Bitkeeper) is explicitly based on master/slave terminology, that git deliberately picked the term to maintain continuity of context with other VCS systems, and that "master" is ultimately a inaccurate description of what a "master branch" actually is in the context of git, it absolutely should be changed to something less inflammatory, like "main" or "working" or "local."
> Given that the "master" in historic VCS programs (like Bitkeeper) is explicitly based on master/slave terminology, that git deliberately picked the term to maintain continuity of context with other VCS systems...
While some VCS programs may have used master/slave (I think maybe CVS did?), BitKeeper did not.
The (likely) basis for the belief that BitKeeper use master/slave and git followed them, the GNOME mailing list post[0] that reignited this discussion in 2019, was retracted the next year[1].
I wrote a summary of the history[2] for Git Rev News, the git developers newsletter. In short, the usage didn't come from BitKeeper, and was intended to mean 'master copy'.
After the article was published, Aaron Kushner from BitKeeper reached out and gave me some more history on the usage of 'slave repository' in that one particular spot in BitKeeper[3]: it was a presentation for a client that was already using master/slave terminology and so the same terms were used in the presentation.
I vehemently disagree. Such virtue signaling is okay when one is on empirically high moral ground. If the lesson were “stay away from snakes” or “stop, drop, and roll”, there would be no possible debate over those topics and we might all agree that a frequent refresher would be welcome.
However, there remains considerable discussion over oppression, race, and politics. For you to shoehorn in your personal viewpoint here immediately ends the discussion and implies that your side is right, when that may not be the case.
Think about if we changed the names literally to “n-word” and “white whip”. You’d be just as disgusted as I am for the opposing side to claim empirical moral high ground and to force you to accept something that you don’t find to be a settled debate.
I think you mean "objectively", not "empirically". Your word choice is problematic as it invokes the authority and propriety of empire as the most rational form of governance. While we're arguing for linguistic purity tests, let's maintain some principled consistency here.
These changes to remove subconscious bias from our language are necessary. They are microaggressions which the average user doesn't even realize exist- but which do harms to some individuals in our society. This may be a minority group within our society- even a very small fraction of a percent- but removing biases which are perceived as harmful is one way that we as an organization demonstrate that we are being actively inclusive to all, instead of falling back on habits developed to favor, or carrying the embedded biases of, one social or cultural group.
I look at it like ADA requirements for language. If you have a curb a wheelchair user can't climb, that's a harm to that individual- and so we require actions, by law, to ensure that wheelchair users are accommodated in our society. 30 years ago the similar complaints were made against ADA ramps, handicap-accessible restrooms, etc.- that they weren't really necessary because the minority who were being hurt by their absence were such a minority, and weren't really the target served population of the organization, etc. That was anti-inclusivity- and so we passed the ADA and support accessibility for all in our organizations- and nobody these days chafes at it at all, for the most part.
Removing harms from how organizations execute their business operations is part of inclusivity. It's not cargo culting, it's not engaging in a self-pleasuring but pointless behavior, it's not a meaningless act that carries no value- it's ensuring that our organization does as little harm to folks as possible as we move forward doing business in the world.
I'm not entirely sure I can disagree with you more.
> Removing harms from how organizations execute their business operations is part of inclusivity. It's not cargo culting, it's not engaging in a self-pleasuring but pointless behavior, it's not a meaningless act that carries no value- it's ensuring that our organization does as little harm to folks as possible as we move forward doing business in the world.
Serious question - What harm are you removing here?
Let me ask again - Who is being harmed, how is this helping them?
Because to me... I see a giant company (MSFT) using political theatre as advertising.
Worse, as a developer in one of the areas that's actually fairly racially diverse (South Atlanta) I sure as fuck don't see any of my black co-workers doing anything other than roll their eyes at this.
This was a change engineered by white people, to appeal to white people's current sense of morality, so that a large company can continue its practices of fucking minority and non-white folks over, and yet here you are congratulating them on wasting billions of dollars on it.
Your entire theory ascribes a mysticism to language that is not evidence based at all.
Changes to language like removing the term master are absurd and performative. You have jumped onto a movement that is operating like a religion. Telltale signs are capitalization of certain words that aren't normally capitalized, and making a big deal about certain interchangeable words.
Growing up as an evangelical Christian I was not allowed to say the word lucky and was insisted that I would say blessed instead. The people who were a minority of my church that made a big deal this did so for personal gain in the social hierarchy.
You can sit here and moan all day long about stupid theories that came out of disciplines in universities where the practitioners are universally illiterate in statistics.
At the end of the day the entire theory is rooted around essays and very very shaky implicit bias science where the test which I have taken several times are not reproducible for a single individual. Depending on the day I take an implicit bias test I am either anti-black or anti-white.
Naturally there's no implicit bias test that has other races featured because these all came from US universities who have a myopic view on race driven by politics and title 9.
Enjoy your silly religion. The rest of us are going to set about building a better world for everyone while you ride along on the technical progress and its fruits.
I would not call it mystical, but rather social. The term "master branch" was established by convention, not science. Now a group of people has proposed a different convention that they like better, and it's gained traction. Conventions often change over time, and rarely require science to justify it.
Interestingly, this new convention is superior to the old in several ways, including one you might call scientific: it has two less keystrokes! I can only assume Jef Raskin would heartily approve.
"Blessed" was the new convention the evangelical tyrants at my church "proposed" to use instead of "lucky".
They were totally cool about it, and I was left to my own free will to choose which word to use..... oh wait, no, they were aggressive and coercive, because that's what moralistic narcissists do. Shamers are gonna shame.
It's funny how few people who are actually substantive contributors are vocal about this. It's all these peripheral people with minimal accomplishments, just like at my church. The bus driver was the biggest moralistic enforcer I've ever seen.
"They": who do you mean by this? Do you mean every group of engineers who has made the change? Just GitHub? The Software Conservancy?
"Not liking it": I suppose you have evidence that these changes were generally unsatisfactory to the people making them? And not, say, you projecting your own anger upon them?
"Pressure": You seem by this to posit that conventions ought not to act by pressure at all, which is a really weird way to imagine how the world works. How could a convention, or a change in convention, _not_ generate pressure?
"Forcing": You seem determined to strip engineers of their own agency, but this is silly. Only defaults have changed. Master branches still abound, and renaming within Git itself remains a relatively trivial matter.
"Gain traction": You have not been paying attention if you think this terminology shift was a sudden change made all at once from the top down. I've been in debates about master/slave terminology in CS (and specifically Git) going back to Ferguson, maybe even longer.
I get that you like your old branch name and you don't want the hassle of changing it, but all this talk of "pressure" and "forcing" by nameless adversaries is quite unnecessary to get that point across.
It was absolutely a top-down change that was propelled by a bunch of people subjected to a moral panic while simultaneously isolated and not able to converse with others. The company I was at at the time in Colorado naturally had very few black software engineers.
Because I happen to be friends with the ones we did have since we were all on the team together I happened to know that they all thought it was stupid. Every single black engineer at my former company thought the master slave terminology was not a big deal and resented the performative nature of people like yourself who clamored to get it changed.
They found it very embarrassing, and patronizing.
Not that anyone in the leadership ranks cared what they thought. They were too busy performing for the masses clamoring to capitalize on a social media trend and the moral panic propelled by activist idiots.
Not a single one of these people would ever think for a second to invite a person to dinner who had been convicted a few years earlier of holding a pregnant woman at gunpoint after invading her home. Especially if that person was white.
Suddenly they all cared in a change that happened overnight. That's great that you were pushing for these things with Ferguson but I grew up in a mostly black community and I dealt with this my whole life rather than jumping on a bandwagon like you did.
The prescribed philosophies and practices don't help the situation they just make it worse and you would know that if you had grown up in a black community like I did. You didn't so you don't.
I know a hell of a lot more about race relations than people of any color who grew up in predominantly white suburbs. I got the s** kicked out of me in the early '90s in middle school after they did a screening of Malcolm x. I actually loved the film but several boys decided it was a great occasion to beat the s** out of a white kid in response to the racism they witnessed in the film. Those are the kinds of experiences that teach you that often times you are further dividing people rather than uniting them. None of you wokies get that.
White racism created a lot of cultural conditions in places like Ferguson. Those cultural conditions continue to perpetuate themselves in the absence of the racism that first spun them into existence. Your ideology ignores this and acts like the forces that spun those things into existence are still prominent. In a nation that elected a black president. It's nonsensical and opinion polls show this.
A bunch of activist wanted more money and more prestige at the universities that employ them and they're getting it. Congratulations your side one and the country is worse off because of it.
This post actually helped me process something that happened 20 years ago. I said to a fellow student at uni "good luck". He snapped back severely "I don't believe in in luck, I believe in God!" and I just stood slack jawed unsure what I had said to offend. Bizarre.
Yes, these people make their entire religion their identity, and react accordingly.
The recent batch of radical identitarians on the left make their ideology into a religion, make that religion into their identity, and react accordingly.
They are slightly different approaches that reach the same end: Intolerant, miserable human beings who can't help but contaminate every social interaction with intolerance.
>They are microaggressions which the average user doesn't even realize exist- but which do harms to some individuals in our society.
Just so I'm understanding this point of view correctly, every time I or any other dev types git checkout master, a micro-aggression is taking place and someone somewhere is indirectly suffering?
I just can't take that line of thinking seriously, I'm sorry.
We are eliminating gender from our colloquial terms for the same reason. Serviceperson instead of serviceman; mail carrier instead of mailman, police officer instead of policeman. This is the same thing- just eliminating a term which injuries a different minority along a different identity axis.
I think they mean that if a black person types in `git checkout master` they are inflicting microaggression against themselves... I personally think this is mental gymnastics on par with homeopathy[1].
On the other hand, I guess the "habit" thing might hold _some_ credibility, but it's not probably not going to be as effective as they think. They say it roughly takes 40 days to make a habit, so in the most optimistically woke scenario, this person will be hyper aware about the branch name for about 40 days, after that they'll stop noticing it[2].
[1]: I can also never tell if these people are trolling or genuine.
[2]: I'm not really an expert on habits, so maybe my analysis makes no sense.
Imagine that your great-great grandparents were enslaved. Your grandparents weren't allowed to go to white schools. Your dad was harrassed by the cops as a young man in the deep south. You worry that your colleagues may think you wouldn't have been seriously considered for this job if you weren't an underrepresented minority.
During onboarding you learn "git checkout master". You type those words everyday for six months, never thinking twice. Your confidence has grown over those months and you begin to feel like you belong here. But there's one coworker, Brad, who just doesn't seem to like you. Or maybe that's just his personality. But Brad just never seems to have anything nice to say. His code reviews are abrasive, though they don't rise to the level of bullying. Maybe that's just how he is.
This morning Brad picked apart a commit you were particularly proud of. Code you thought was rather clever, he tore into as overcomplicated and premature optimization. Okay, fine maybe he was right, but he didn't have to be rude about it. You feel like maybe Brad just doesn't like you. What did you ever do to him? Is it because you're black? No, you don't have any real evidence for that. "But...maybe?" a small voice whispers in the back of your mind. Unfortunately you can't look to how other black developers are treated by Brad. There aren't any.
You get some fresh air to clear your mind before sitting at your desk to make those changes Brad suggested. "git checkout master". Typing those words, you notice for the first time that "master" is a word with other connotations. Really, they had to choose that word? I mean, it would be a silly thing to complain about aloud.
Nevertheless, for months, every time you type that word part of you thinks "Really?" It doesn't upset you, exactly, but it reinforces a sense that this workplace is--hostile is too strong of a word--but not welcoming to black people. Maliciously indifferent. The kind of indifference that sees an enormous racial disparity and shrugs.
It's called a micro-aggression for a reason. It's a small thing. But small things add up. And it's an easy fix, so why not?
Micro aggression is not about the size of the action, it's about the scale (on how many people it is applied).
I'm not black, but i worked with Brad before. Years later, I realize Brad was largely right, although a bit of a dickhead with an attitude, but I learned not to be emotionally attached to my code and not think everyone has a beef with me.
We are teaching people how to be a bunch of cry babies with all this microaggression nonsense and safe spaces. People need to have a thicker skin, not everyone who disagrees with you or doesn't treat you right has something against you, they sure as hell have reasons for it, not an excuse, but reasons.
Checkout Ego Is The Enemy, a light/easy read book, but it introduces you to what I'm saying a little deeper.
Of course, everyone has minor workplace tension and conflict at times, and working through those things is just part of the job. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do what we can to make people feel welcome and at ease.
The concern is that, by promoting the mindset that these terminological disputes are real aggressions, we're making people feel less welcome even as we take more concrete action. We're building a culture that encourages people to assume they're unwelcome until proven otherwise, never trust or take at face value their coworkers' stated commitments to inclusivity, always assume the worst rather than give the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, sure. So when I argue with Brad and he doesn't like my commit, it's because I'm ... no, not black, no, not gay, not even a woman, even if my ancestors were enslaved (quite possibly) I don't know it for sure. Hell, why can't I find an easy explanation? Have to live with the white guy privilege. Of course I will never assume I'm a jerk (or maybe he is), or simply the code is not so great. So every time he tells me to type git (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/git) I feel his aggression. Maybe it's time to grow up?
>Imagine that your great-great grandparents were enslaved.
I am going to go out on a limb and say 99% of people have had their ancestors enslaved. Is having an ancestor enslaved 150 years ago different than somebody who had their ancestors enslaved 200 or 300 years ago? If you, your parents, quite possibly even your grand parents never even met the slave in your family then it is irrelevant.
My ancestors may have been slaves 1,000 years ago. Even serfdom in Europe began to fizzle out 500 years ago. My ancestors were never enslaved in the US, under the US Constitution, under a US Congress, US President, and US judicial system. If your grandfather can tell you stories about his grandfather who was once enslaved, I think that matters. I think our understanding of where we come from matters.
Many white people were literal slaves around the same time (in the 1800s and before). Look into the Barbary slave trade. Over 1 million white people were held as slaves in Africa. Even some Americans were held as slaves in the Barbary Coast.
I guess I don't think where our ancestors came from is very important. I only know where my ancestors lived about 200 years ago and it is just general areas not any specifics. I don't know anything more than that. This is quite possibly about the same amount of years as many blacks whose ancestors came over during the slave trade.
The last African American former slave died in 1972. This isn't ancient history for some people. Given that, I think yes, it is very different if someone deep in your family tree was enslaved versus your parents or grandparents.
I mean, the mere fact that you can trace your lineage back that far is indicative of the difference. Many people find their identity through their culture, and often times that perspective is gained by tracing their origins back generations. The foods you eat, the customs you share with your family, even your name.
Some people can trace their lineage back through dozens of generations. Other people can't see past a few levels up the family tree because their history was destroyed by a more recent slaver society. For some people, the traditions in their family are the traditions of their enslaved ancestors. The songs they sing were sung on the fields their ancestors were forced to work. The names in their family are the names forced upon them by their oppressors. Their family cook book contains recipes their enslaved ancestors used to make the scraps they were thrown palatable. Theirs is not an organic culture, but one that formed out of necessity due to the conditions forced on them by slavers (relatively) recently. So yes, I think it does matter that even if a person has never met a slave themselves, they can still feel the reverberations of slavery quite strongly.
I think your stats are quite suspect (in fact, made up, as you pretty much mention) and no, it's not at all irrelevant. I know my family history back to the 1600s; these folks were poor as dirt and indebted at times but they were not enslaved. (Some were part of this European 'crofting' system but that is not the same as slavery.)
More importantly, I can ask around in my family and find out family health history, how long people lived; I know where they came from and can find relatives. My African-American friends cannot all do the same. For some, their known family history only goes back to the last slave sale. They don't know where their ancestors came from in Africa. They have limited knowledge of family health history, compared to what I know. I know the language my great-great-great grandparents spoke; they don't. I can do research on historical foods from my area; they can't. With the advent of modern genetics, some can figure out some of that (look, maybe I'm Igbo, let me go to Wikipedia and look that up....) but it's quite different than being able to ask your aunt to set you up on a tour of where your ancestors lived in the 1700s and her being able to just look on her desk for those files.
Many white people were literal slaves around the same time (in the 1800s and before). Look into the Barbary slave trade. Over 1 million white people were held as slaves in Africa. Even some Americans were held as slaves in the Barbary Coast.
“Sufferings in Africa” is a fascinating memoir of some white sailors shipwrecked and enslaved in Africa. The book inspired many white leaders in the US to empathize with the abolition movement.
>Imagine that your great-great grandparents were enslaved. Your grandparents weren't allowed to go to white schools. Your dad was harrassed by the cops as a young man in the deep south. You worry that your colleagues may think you wouldn't have been seriously considered for this job if you weren't an underrepresented minority.
My country was destroyed by Nazis, milions of my country citizens died cuz of it and it was less than century ago.
I'm working fine with german companies / people just fine as I'd work with other country based companies, no bias.
Will you be equally fine, if the company talks about building 'Economic Reich'. Or if people on probation are sent to 'concentration camp' for a week long training.
Not the parent, but your characterization of the stated perspective reveals quite well that you aren’t taking it seriously! This is a complex issue, so let’s treat it that way.
The micro-aggression, as I understand it, is having to ask yourself whether the term ‘master’ _did_ originate from slavery (in the context of git, IIRC it didn’t, but master-slave replication is the stronger example). The context and plan fact is that programming, as a broad culture, to date, _has_ been excluding Black people and others. So it is not hard to imagine some folks desiring to make a symbolic change to make the culture more inclusive.
I understand your intentions are noble, but we kinda go back to one of the points the author of the post was making: Has anybody bothered to asked black developers if the terminology alienates them, or makes them feel uncomfortable?
I don't believe it was the technical terminology that caused unwelcoming conditions, but the people in the industry.
And, of course technical terminology _alone_ is not the issue! Totally agree that there is more to be done. I just find it amusing that there is so much pushback on this particular aspect (the naming of the branch). Clearly it is a concern, and it is on the whole a small thing to change. Larger systemic change is of course more ideal, but sometimes the battle starts at the symbolic level and expands from there.
So before I answer, I'm aware that there's a bit of "cognitive dissonance" going on in my head about this topic. One one hand I fully agree with you, but on the other it feels like it's deflecting/trivialising the issue and creates a false sense of accomplishment that will delay the necessary change.
> I just find it amusing that there is so much pushback on this particular aspect
I think push back comes not from attachment to "master" but from the emotions the virtue-signalling crowd causes in people who desire real change. The virtue-signallers are like the kid on a school project who did virtually nothing, and then tried to claimed all the credit once the project was done. It's a bit "hashtag-contribution," but ironically. It awakes a sense of righteousness in people (whether it's misguided or not is another topic) that think this is stupid, useless, and some probably think it's harmful because it pacifies a large group of people with thinking change happened, when it didn't. It's a bit like seeing a broken website, then changing the button colour and calling the website fixed and being done with it.
However, it's like you said, people aren't monoliths. Various people have trigger words. Some people get triggered by "moist," someone in another comment mentioned Jews have the right to be offended by the word "concentration" or the word "camp" (yes, even if it's out of context; master in the case of git is also very out of context to slavery).
I don't think changing the world for the sake of individuals is possible/scalable, but what we should do is try and accommodate them. I'm all for making people included and accommodating them, to a degree in which it doesn't make me feel uncomfortable in; I want to be given the same courtesy.
It feels like Alex from the blog post waited for the world to change, instead of being the change he wants to see. Waiting for the world to change is futile, you can only influence your environment to a degree, and if that doesn't work look for a better one that suits you better. I don't know if Alex did that or not, but it reads as if he was passive until now. I guess better late than never.
> Larger systemic change is of course more ideal, but sometimes the battle starts at the symbolic level and expands from there.
I fully agree with you on this, which is where my cognitive dissonance kicks in. I guess part of the reason is that, even though I agree symbolic changes are good, I don't feel that this was even symbolic enough. A better symbolic change in my mind would be for Github to announce a paid apprenticeship program for people without a STEM/CS background, and try to also somehow cover more black communities. I don't know how this would be executed[1], or if it even can be executed, so maybe it's not a well thought-out idea.
[1]: Maybe engage/market more proactively at schools/communities where the majority of the students/people are black?
The problem I have with this name change, and reasoning like this, is that there is no "slave" component of the master branch convention. There is no reference to slavery. My understanding is that it's taken from the way records are made, by using a "master" copy which is copied. Should that change?
Should all uses of the word "master" be changed? Is the main character of the Halo games a microaggression? Metallica's "Master of Puppets"? Is "master bedroom" a microaggression?
Like the author said, it just feels like a meaningless gesture so people can feel better about themselves without fixing any real issues.
> The problem I have with this name change, and reasoning like this, is that there is no "slave" component of the master branch convention. There is no reference to slavery.
It's apparently an indirect reference, because its taken from the master/slave usage in BitKeeper, even though there is no slave on the git context.
In any case, “main” is simply descriptive rather than either a not very apt metaphor or an out-of-context reference to another (also not very descriptive) metaphor, so it's an improvement independently of whether “master” had social problems on top of it's descriptive ones.
> It's apparently an indirect reference, because its taken from the master/slave usage in BitKeeper, even though there is no slave on the git context
The (likely) basis for the belief that BitKeeper use master/slave and git followed them, the GNOME mailing list post[0] that reignited this discussion in 2019, was retracted the next year[1].
I wrote a summary of the history[2] for Git Rev News, the git developers newsletter. In short, the usage didn't come from BitKeeper, and was intended to mean 'master copy'.
After the article was published, Aaron Kushner from BitKeeper reached out and gave me some more history on the usage of 'slave repository' in that one particular spot in BitKeeper[3]: it was a presentation for a client that was already using master/slave terminology and so the same terms were used in the presentation.
> As harmless as the word “main” seems in most Western cultures, a comment posted by Mike Schroder (original Japanese text by Takayuki Miyoshi and translation by Shinichi Nishikawa) pointed out that it was problematic in Japanese culture. “In Japan, for example, to put ‘main’ and ‘others’ as different groups has been utilized as an excuse to justify discrimination,” said Miyoshi. “Not caring about suppressing the Ainu people and their culture at all is possible because of the assumption that Yamato folk is the main and others are secondary. I now came to a point to think we should consider that to set one thing as ‘main’ creates marginals that get oppressed.”
I didnt know that, though it does not sound as bad?
I'm Japanese. I read original argument and it looks like not well plausible. Some Japanese tend to classify people and things to main「主要な」 / other「その他」 but it not mean "main" is discriminative word. It's just "main" but sometimes usage is discriminative.
Can you name a single person the term 'master branch' has hurt?
Your subconscious bias of being an oppressor is showing. You are pushing your views onto others. This is what some slave owners tried to do. Maybe you should check your privilege and stop engaging in microaggressions before accusing everybody else of doing the same.
Edit: it unfortunately looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle, or is close to it. That's the line at which we ban an account, for reasons explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... I don't want to ban you, so please stop doing this.
I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote.
It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate.
For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, watching people be vicariously offended without asking if context in question is offensive, and the obsession with signaling instead of meaningful action.
Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?
This specific instance seems like an overreaction of some in both corporate and social media culture. One poster already pointed out that this is likely more about corporate fear of getting targetted by a vocal but ultimately small 'woke' crowd (there, another label, but at least a bit more specific than just generally someone who wishes to achieve basic goals like welfare, equality, and regulation of private industry). It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
In debates like this sometimes a small number of loud, well-meaning but naive people get much more influence than they should for fear of the other being painted the bad guy, while a significant number of people who are actually affected by the underlying issues don't get heard at all.
> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology
I don't have the experience of any other group doing this. I agree that it is not inherently a political ideology.
The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal. I think it is important to say that because I know people in other parts of the country that see these as insults and would be surprised to know that people commonly self-identify as these terms.
I find that this group thinks their behavior is better and more helpful than apathy, "silence", and the idea of rampant exclusionary hate from the right. When its really not better, its different, but its not more helpful. There is absolutely a constant threat from people afraid of bird watchers in a park, people that blend into their ranks and are willing to weaponize their understanding of race, two seconds after donating to the Democratic Party.
>The people involved proudly proclaim to be left and liberal.
I don't think Microsoft do claim that, nor is that really why they did this.
Microsoft is a profit seeking entity that is trying to maximize its profit and goodwill (an intangible asset) at the same time.
Thus for them the best moves are those which:
* Have minimal cost.
* Distract people away from profitable dirty laundry which doesn't attract goodwill (e.g. concentration camp contracts).
* Buy them some goodwill among some people - especially through the mechanism of "outrage marketing" (people who by dint of attacking "the right" when they attack this will naturally defend Microsoft - a bit like how Nike used colin Kaepernick).
They did this because "change master to main" appeared in a local maxima that maximized these three conditions.
This is being reflected all around the corporate sphere because what applies to Microsoft applies to a lot of other companies.
Yeah, that definitely seems to be a big part of it. And I don’t understand. Okay so your company is the target of some activists on Twitter for a few days. End of the world? Maybe I just can’t understand what it’s like to lead a big company.
Just abut the only company to handle one of these situations in a way that seems rational to me is Trader Joe’s. Some people on Twitter decided that having a burrito labeled “Trader Jose” was a horrendous form of cultural appropriation and demanded the company change all products with this kind of word play in branding. TJ’s considered it and just basically said “no, move along” and the whole woke twitterverse moved on to some other target.
Agree completely. But you have to understand the mindset of everyone involved.
The marketing/PR people in any organisation care passionately about what other people think of the organisation - naturally, because it's their job to care about this.
Journalists are insanely influenced by what other people are saying and love nothing better than a nice piece of juicy controversy to get those ads clicked.
Stock markets are notoriously twitchy about rumours and "public perception".
Most corporate CEO's got to that position by climbing a greasy pole where what other people think of you is literally the most important factor in your climb.
So almost everybody involved in making these kinds of decision are exactly the people most vulnerable to being bullied like this.
But if you can resist - there's only a few thousand Twitterati who will bother even trying to enforce any kind of boycott, and they're probably not your customers in the first place. It's completely ineffectual if you can just ignore it.
Yes great points. Another factor that I hadn't considered until recently (can't remember who pointed this out) is that most C-suite employees / executive editors at media co's / deans at universities are probably in their 50's and are in what is arguably the most financially critical parts of their life ... as in, they have a big mortgage (or two), need to be contributing significantly to their retirement, are likely staring at at least a few VERY expensive college tuitions, etc. They're levered up both literally and figuratively. The cost of losing a job in this situation is a serious threat that likely has many taking what they feel is the safest path to keeping their job, and many times that is whatever that really loud crowd is demanding.
True. Also, office politics means that senior management at large organisations tend to be very risk-averse (the old "try not to be in the room when a decision is made" trope).
Telling the geeks in the IT basement to change the name of the "master branch" on that "git" thing that the organisation apparently uses, so that thousands of angry people (some of them journalists at large media organisations) aren't shouting at you on Twitter seems like such an easy choice to make ;)
I think when individuals or even companies roll over, it's because the mob's attack can be quite scary. It's easy to point at the people who stay their ground and say, "see, they didn't cave and did just fine."
But that's an obervation we make in hindsight, and without knowing it was like for the targets. At the time, their phone is probably ringing off the hook, media are calling, etc., and they have no idea when the attack will end or if people are getting fired, advertisers withdrawing or any of that.
I'll applaud anyone, left, right or other-vectored, who stands up to mobs, though. I'm not a fan of the phrase "cancel culture," but it gets one thing right: it is a cultural development, both the culture of outrage and the culture of appeasing the mob. The injustice of a, outraged mob declaring itself judge, jury and executioner only works if targets try to appease them. So while the culture of outrage is a hard problem because it's diffuse, anyone who refuses to accept that injustice is has an outsized effect in pushing back against the appeasement side of it.
I've been on the sharp end of a minor version of this, and you're right, it's scary. I only coped by not paying attention to it all and buckling down to deal with the things that matter. And alcohol, which helped, though it cost me in other ways.
a) modern corporate culture trying to make employees take on the company they work for as part of their personal identity
b) young, liberal people working in PR departments who would be horrified if anyone personally called them racist / sexist / homophobic etc
These people go to work, see some random account on twitter saying "<your company> is racist" and a) and b) combined makes this feel like a personal attack on them that they have to defend and social signal against.
This is the most likely explanation I have come up with, because as you said, none of this really makes sense from a logical business perspective.
The problem lies not in that you are wrong in concluding that these people are adherents of leftists ideologies (most are), but that you are falling for the pars pro toto fallacy: people who think that 'master' is an offensive word to use in a source code repository are 'left/liberal', thus all or most of 'the left/liberals' are such people.
You are saying 'this group thinks' as if all people who would identify as adhering to leftist ideologies (from the extremes to common social democracy) act like this. You are trying to stuff people into boxes: you are either team A or team B. That is polarization; something we can sorely do without.
Again, availability bias. The people screaming the loudest about this are also screaming the loudest about other Left/Liberal issues. The normal left-leaning folks don't get heard. It's pretty natural to conclude that this group represents the whole.
I'm also convinced that the screamers aren't really interested in stopping black people from being offended (let alone actually harassed/murdered). I think they're much more interested in getting recognition for fighting the fight.
I think you're right. I'm an independent and I'm guilty of doing this to right and left leaning folk, but I've done it because I believe that the people screaming will only listen to people within their ideological interests. It was my way of making them accountable for their compatriots that are loud enough for me to notice. I've also stopped doing this because it's not really effective. People don't feel like they should be responsible for outliers and I somewhat agree, but don't know how to solve the problem of vocal trouble makers.
The problem lies that there is not enough (any?) push back from this kind of garbage (and specifically in this case) from the 'left/liberals'.
There needs to be push-back if they [those left/liberals not in this camp] want to disassociate. But where is it? I don't think there is appetite for this argument.
I know many of left/liberal-types (in the Bay Area) all who either believe, or accept this as silly but somehow think it is meaningful to some people and so should be gone along with...
This goes way beyond just trying to get ahead of a potential PR disaster. I can think of nobody out there in non-nerd world that would've raised a stink about the word "master" being used in some programming context, just like they haven't raised a stink about the term MC. This is ultra-woke privileged white tech lefties who truly do feel like their fighting for social justice by doing this kind of thing.
> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?
> It does have all the looks of virtue signalling without any real justification.
If you combine both the statements, you are committing a no true Scotsman fallacy.
I don’t think so. It’s not that no true Scotsmen are idiots, it’s just that the idiots are not representative. Maybe 10% of Scotsmen are idiots. The other 90% are fine.
This is a soft form of the same argument. Whatever may be the proportion of those people, the community still has to own up to it if this portion exists.
When it comes to political ideology invoking a no true Scotsman is not always invalid.
As an example, as a leftist I can say: “A socialist revolution without social justice is not socialist”. Yes, this is a no true Scotsman fallacy, but here I am merely disavowing a subgroup of people that might share my economic believes that workers ought to take over the means of production, but fail to see that the racial injustice in our economic system is part of the problem. In my view, if you don’t see that, you are not a real leftist.
> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?
That's missing polsci 101, left/right exist, that's why they have names, not the opposite.
Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left? I don't.
Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd? I know very few. Almost all of them who speak on the topic, speak in unequivocal support of "woke" ideas and talking points.
If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it. You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd to not be counted as racists.
It's in everyone's power to start extinguishing the extremes. Until then, I'll take silence on your nearest extreme as your tacit approval of it.
> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?
Certainly. The majority really. That's in the Netherlands, but compared to the vocal internet crowd most people I know who vote on parties left of the political compass worry about climate, animal and human welfare, and inequality. Rarely will someone go all 'woke' and demand changes like this.
Haha, GP specifically assumed US in the first line of his comment and then got responses from the Netherlands and twice from UK. Yeah, it's largely an American phenomenon so far but I wouldn't be too happy about it because American culture exports these things all over the world and Hollywood is among the most woke.
While you're protesting this notion on HN, plenty of your countrymen are learning English from some of the wokest trash on Netflix.
Ha I saw that too. But there’s nothing European HN users love more than commenting with their super well-informed takes about the US, so it should have been expected.
Yeah, the US is such an exceptional country that you can only have opinions about it when you're actually American - I hope you do see that this view is rather short sighted? Especially given that the US itself has no qualms with interfering in foreign politics all over the world.
The reason we chafe at this is because those opinions usually distill and treat us as a singular group. Like one of us saying “the British believe,” for example, prefaced behind something the Welsh and English disagree on.
Not your fault, though. Our internal borders are meaningful. We lie to ourselves that they aren’t, and the rest of the world goes with that. Minnesota, Michigan, and Mississippi may as well be different countries for all they have in common.
It’s ironic that you did exactly what I mentioned is the problem while responding to a comment where I pointed out I’m aware of, and sensitive to, subtle cultural differences within Britain. I’m at least n=1 for giving a nuanced shit about people outside our borders, but that didn’t fit your reductionist narrative. I get it, but I don’t respect it.
Perhaps they chipped in because GPs phrase "Assuming the US" is not a very clear way of saying they want to talk specifically and exclusively about the US, or they thought it fair to broaden the discussion?
I don't see how your sweeping generalisation in the last paragraph adds to the considered discussion here either.
> Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left? I don't.
I'm in the UK so maybe it is different, but lately "woke" is anyone that is seen as an enemy of the far right. Including those who are on the right of the spectrum, but just not as far as those throwing the "woke" label around.
I'm in the UK so maybe it is different, but lately "woke" is anyone that is seen as an enemy of the far right.
I am also in the UK and there is lots of hand-wringing about "the extreme far right" but if you gently probe what people mean by "extreme far right" they mean "Brexit" or "not electing Jeremy Corbyn".
I expect in a few months the term "ultra extreme far right" will enter the lexicon, and we'll keep adding superlatives as the term "right-wing" becomes more and more diluted and gradually encloses the entire population except for a few Momentum die-hards.
I've certainly seen many outside the Momentum bubble being labelled 'Tory' (e.g. Lib Dems as 'yellow Tories', Blair/Starmer as 'red Tories', etc.), but you're speaking pure hyperbole.
"Extreme far right" is reserved for the likes of NationalFront/BNP/UKIP/BritainFirst/BrexitParty/Reform/whatever they're calling themselves these days (plus their goons like EDL, DFLA, People's Front of Judea, Judean People's Front, etc.)
It saddens me to see this sort of word-muddying (especially on HN), since it makes it easier to deflect this sort of crap:
Yes, for a few years the Brexit Party was the I'mNotRacistBut Party. It looks like they've now been rumbled (hence becoming unelectable), so they're rebranding as Reform, which might last for another few years.
The previous I'mNotRacistBut Party was UKIP (featuring Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as advisor for racially-charged issues, and denounced as racist 24 years ago by its own founder)
Before that the BNP was scoring a few percent in general elections.
And around and around it goes, all the way back to Mosley's blackshirts.
Nigel Farage left UKIP for that very reason. The Brexit party is fairly moderate and would be described as center-right, just shy of the conservatives.
The Brexit Party was just a face-saving rebrand for UKIP. It didn't take long for the mask to start slipping, with the party's founder resigning after retweeting racist posts from far-right figures.
Of course, Farage himself may denounce such things:
> I set the party up, she was the administrator that got it set up.
Friendly reminder that it's very easy, and very common, for racists to disavow their racism when it's expedient to do so (e.g. an extreme example https://youtu.be/zcoYKuoiUrY?t=1568 )
>I am also in the UK and there is lots of hand-wringing about "the extreme far right" but if you gently probe what people mean by "extreme far right" they mean "Brexit" or "not electing Jeremy Corbyn".
Yeah, the funny thing about the UK is hearing from a country where the center-left party bombed an election precisely because it couldn't throw away its woke wing on two big "woke" issues (Brexit and antisemitism), and hearing that "anyone who's not far-right is woke". Well no. Keir Starmer won his place as head of Labour precisely by his willingness to reject further coalition with the "wokes", when Corbyn had been unwilling to really oppose them at all.
It feels odd to portray the 2019 election as lost on "wokeism", or that Corbyn let that policy take over. By the end, Corbyn was the target of that crowd, being branded as an anti-semite for what amounts to "being too critical of Israel", and "being leader while being seen as too soft on others accused of anti-semitism".
Aside from that, the 2019 election was really a Brexit election. Labour failed to pick a side, and the Conservatives were promising to get Brexit done and were early enough in the negotiations that they could promise it would be a soft brexit or maximum brexit depending on which crowd they thought would hear their comments.
Totally agree. Everyone who's not far right is woke and everyone who isn't far left is racist, if you listen to Twitter etc. That's intentional, gotta make moderates afraid to speak up, leaving the discussion to extremists, bot farms and professional opinion havers.
But I was talking about a more agreeable definition of "woke". Many people on the left are very comfortable with this subculture, just like many people on the right are very comfortable with Trump. I very rarely hear people on the left saying anything against the woke culture, so in my mind it's very reasonable to equate or at least strongly affiliate the two.
Many people are not ok with either. We just left social media a decade ago but still somehow have to put up with its bullshit leaking out all over the internet.
What is "far right"? Is there "near right"? "middle-reach right"? 'Far right' is just a BS title used to 'adjust' the perception of people that anyone not left wing is crazy extremist nutjob.
> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd? I know very few. Almost all of them who speak on the topic, speak in unequivocal support of "woke" ideas and talking points.
This article we are commenting on is an example of this.
>" Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?"
Bill Maher is a fairly prominent liberal who has been vehemently anti-woke. This is regular fodder on his Friday night HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher as well in his regular standup comedy.
The question wasn't "Do you know any people on the left who aren't woke?" The question was "Do you know of anyone NOT on the left who is woke?" I.e., wokeness is a problem of the left.
Well everything in the US currently is extremely polarized. Very few people on either side are going to criticize groups on their side, as they are spending all their energy fighting the other side.
> Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?
There's a lot of them. But do you really expect them to do it all the time? Disavow every single misinformed but loud person? (Why don't you actively speak against Ted Bundy - are you supporting serial killers?)
For example I can argue with my mom who says she's a feminist because women are better than men. Or I can spend that time preparing a lesson for the local programming club for kids. Why would I choose the first option? Who would benefit?
Disavowing Trump is massively different - a single, elected person with power. Taking that position and bringing it to their local representatives would be worth the effort.
What is this "the left"? Bernie Sanders, by far the most left leaning of the democratic presidential candidates was hugely against the narrative that Trump voters were racists.
Noam Chomsky has an extremely long track record of being extremely consistent in his support of free speech and open debate in a way that the most obsessive first amendment types would rarely stick to.
Amongst the more left leaning people I know there was a hugely negative attitude towards the CNN/MSNBC style coverage of the past 4 years that fixated on Trump and conspiracy theories and gotcha stories.
Every side is gonna be smeared, it's much more important to look at what they're actually trying to offer people. And offering nothing but vague platitudes tends to be worse than offering lies, as Hillary's pretty vapid 2016 campaign showed. This move by github seemed to bring more attention to them working with ICE and the like than anything else that I could see.
$15 min wage was super popular in Florida, Trump won Florida by a significant margin. Had the dems actually offered this obviously popular thing and stood by it that state could've turned out very differently as it'd force Trump to take a side on something that mattered to people.
Even this article that we are commenting on seems to me to be a _leftist_ critique of liberal/moderate virtual signalling, and is calling for them to actually do things that matter for anti-racism.
>Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left?
The best I've seen is sentiments along the lines of "yeah that's overkill" which is about equivalent to what fiscal conservatives and libertarians were saying about the moralizing christian right back when those clowns ran the show.
People don't generally speak out against people who make their positions look like a reasonable middle ground. Woke crap makes basically every mainstream left position look reasonable by comparison so of course they don't want it to die. It makes them look good.
The way to improve things is to speak "truth to power", and the moral way to do it is to always "punch upwards".
I've been riling against Trump, Bannon & Co for the past 4 years. Before that I've been vocal about Obama's reign of terror, his broken promises of closing gitmo, and his drone wars. No doubt in my next 4 years I'll be hurling insults against Biden.
There is no need to add disclaimers or enumerating all things that a comment doesn't stand for. Doing so not only makes for "boring reading" but also looks like the person feels very insecure.
>Do you know a lot of "woke" people who aren't otherwise on the left?
Yes. The majority of them are performative liberals.
>Do you know a lot of "left" people who actively speak against the "woke" crowd?
Yes. There is infighting to an extent but it's really not hard to find leftist critiques of what you call woke culture.
>If "the left" doesn't want to be equated with the woke culture, they should publicly and consistently disown it.
I highly doubt bad faith actors would care about what people on the left are doing. Sure hasn't stopped you from mischaracterizing them all this while.
>You know, in the same manner as they demand that conservatives disown Trump and his crowd.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding as to who "the left" are. The majority of actual (not what passes for American left) leftists will agree that disowning "Trump and his crowd" is the same kind of performative wokeness that you accuse liberals of. Disowning and denouncing for appearances does nothing because it doesn't tackle the root cause that allowed a movement like Trump's or the larger right to come to power.
I didn't mean "disowning" as performative act but as an honest expression of preferences, including in-person and online discussions and voting choices.
The general population publicly expressing their honest moderate views and opposing the extremes is not "for appearances". It's the core of what's missing in today's public debate, dominated by far left/right activists, bot farms, and personalities/celebs.
My point is, the (American) left is justly associated with wokeness because they are its primary visible supporters. Maybe it's because those on the left who don't support it just don't speak up, in which case, my message is: please do. I'm not just going to assume your existence.
Associating the Democrat with "wokeness" is the same as assiociating Republicans with trump supporters and "Storm the Capitol" crowd.
It's an easy way to discredit your political opponent.
Also, i am sightly offended when people call the Democrats "left". I've talked to a real "leftist" (and by that i mean, sightly left on european political board), he felt forced to join the democrat to have a shot at a representative position, and some support for his flyers, but he agreed with my broth: the democrat would be barely center in europe.
And honestly, the far right and the conventionnal right have only themselves to blame for the right of the woke/cancel culture. They are the one who started to open up the overton window, they can't start crying when their politicals opponent do the same.
There are "left" parties in the US too, like Gloria La Riva's PSL.
The Democrats push for what can at best be termed social democracy, even though real social democracies in Europe would still be to their left after they fulfilled most of their campaign promises. Left right and centre are kind of reductive categorizations but social democracy is left of centre.
>as an honest expression of preferences, including in-person and online discussions and voting choices.
As I mentioned, I've seen plenty of this, but with filter bubbles being what they are, it's hard to fault someone for not coming across them enough.
What I'm saying is that it's not that they (we?) don't exist, more like you don't come across us because of xyz reasons that are getting harder and harder to pinpoint as discourse is manipulated each passing day.
I also broadly agree that nuance is missing in the "modern debate", which causes bad faith interpretations like everyone on the left being either "woke police out to cancel everything you love" or "stalinists looking to establish USSRv2" and everyone in the right being "uneducated white people who don't know what's best for them" or outright Nazis. I wanted to push back against this kind of monolithic interpretation, hence my previous comment.
> ... but as an honest expression of preferences, including in-person and online discussions and voting choices.
Isn't that really dangerous though?
eg if you're unlucky enough to become targeted by some of the more "out there" people, they can do career-and-effectively-life ending things by blowing it out of proportion, getting it in the media, etc.
Cultural left, ie, "woke" and economic left are two very, very different things. Americans have this wonderful way of completely slaughtering their political terms.
Slavery as class struggle seems a popular method of argumentation, but it's hard to pin down that logic when any discussion of it generates anger instead of explanation.
I believe the main point of the person you're replying to is that it's a relatively small, vocal minority of people on Twitter who care about this stuff, and the media snowballs it into a big ugly controversy for clicks. As far as I know, this is true also of the following examples of "the right" "cancelling" stuff:
* Colin Kaepernick and kneelgate
* calls to boycott Starbucks for celebrating an inclusive holiday season, rather than Christmas in particular
* republican voters "cancelling" Mitt Romney and other republicans for being vocally anti-Trump, even though their political principles have not changed
I can think of at least one more serious example that goes beyond just a vocal minority: The long, ongoing fight to teach children about LGBTQ issues in public schools. Teachers can be fired for simply revealing to their students that they have a same-sex partner.
Not long ago, too, was it career-ending for a Hollywood actor to come out publicly as LGBTQ. Ellen comes to mind as an example.
People on the right don't have the power to really cancel anything anymore. Some on the right may attempt to cancel stuff, but it is mostly not effective.
>Colin Kaepernick and kneelgate
Kaepernick wasn't canceled by the right. He just wasn't the best player out there and didn't get onto another team. He now is making millions from Nike and other deals all without playing the game. If this is what be canceled is like I would gladly sign up.
>calls to boycott Starbucks for celebrating an inclusive holiday season, rather than Christmas in particular
There was an attempt but nothing happened. As far as I know Starbucks' revenue didn't even drop (but I haven't really looked into it). Again a complete failure of a cancellation.
>republican voters "cancelling" Mitt Romney and other republicans for being vocally anti-Trump, even though their political principles have not changed
Romney still has his senate seat and is still on all of the committees he was original on. There is no cancelling here, unless you mean voting out a politician is canceling.
>The long, ongoing fight to teach children about LGBTQ issues in public schools.
This is a bit more complicated. Some people believe it is more than just an objective teaching that LGBTQ people exist and you should treat them as any other person but more of encouraging people to engaging in such behavior. Some people also accuse the schools of focusing on random LGBTQ people or assuming people's sexuality when they weren't married in history class instead of focusing on more important people or just the facts. I don't think I was in school when this was going on so I can't really comment on what it is like.
> Teachers can be fired for simply revealing to their students that they have a same-sex partner.
I have only seen this in private religious schools. In theses cases the teacher agreed to publicly follow the church's teachings and they failed to follow their employment contract. You shouldn't work for a church if you disagree with the church's teachings.
>Ellen comes to mind as an example.
Are you saying Ellen was canceled for being LGBTQ? I am pretty sure she is being attack for being abusive to people who work / worked for her.
They successfully got the NFL to ban kneeling, you might remember someone saying "Get that son of a bitch off the field".
Liz Cheney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy have successfully been censured by the GOP, and motions are in progress against the rest that defected from the Trump cult.
The NFL would have almost certainly done it themself since the NFL was losing viewers massively. Just not watching a show is not canceling in my view. If that is the case then almost everybody is canceling almost everything else.
>you might remember someone saying "Get that son of a bitch off the field".
Last I checked Trump can't cancel any NFL player.
>Liz Cheney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy have successfully been censured by the GOP
I agree these are [partial] cancellations, but members of the GOP being censured by the GOP is not really the same as organization you did not choose to be a part of cancelling you.
Am I? I personally haven't met a single left-leaning adult who doesn't think Twitter's "cancel culture" has gotten out of hand. However, I've never lived in the bay area, where I understand things may be different.
Can you say anything to demonstrate to me that it really is more than just a vocal minority of people?
Perhaps we have different definitions of "cancel culture"? I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it. I do think the master vs main issue is silly, though. I'm not sure where you draw draw the line between "cancel culture" and "social consequences for toxic / abusive behavior in public".
People on the right participate in cancel culture all the time. It is truly deafening to hear them complain about things they do from their pulpits at FOX, Congress, and Senate.
Anyone who watched TV in the late 90s and early 2000s should be very familiar with how right-wing[0] cancel culture works thanks to organizations like the AFA.
“cancel culture” isn't an actual thing, it's just the new term the Right has come up with for replace “political correctness” to make, almost word for word, the exact same complaints they've been making since the 1980s about the left doing...exactly the same thing the right has always done as much as it can get away with to everyone who publicly disagrees with them.
edit: I've re-read your comment, and I'm no longer sure which "side" of this you fall on, I think my point stands alone anyway, so I'll leave it:
You've not met me, but I'm a left-leaning individual who thinks the drama about "cancel culture" is mostly invented.
There's lots of people doing crappy thing on the internet generally and on twitter in particular.
In a world where you can get anonymous death threats for pretty much any reason, I've not seen any evidence that "the left" or "cancel culture" is an actual problem in this regard beyond the baseline of people being nasty when anonymous.
I have seen people, often on both sides of the same issue, point to unpleasant people on the other side and make some kind of argument that "those people" are all crazy. Some of the individual stories are horrifying but I've never found any of them convincing at the level of settling the argument (whichever argument it is invoke in). It's just used as a way to circle the wagons against the other side.
Indeed. My point is that "cancel culture" is a problem on Twitter, since Twitter intentionally amplifies the voices of the people who participate. So, "cancel culture" on Twitter is not representative of how real people on "the left" (or "the right") feel about current events.
For instance the vast majority of working professionals I know don't get themselves regularly involved in political arguments on Twitter, since they see it as unproductive.
So it is simultaneously true that:
* cancel culture is "a thing" on Twitter, in the sense that it's easy to find examples
* cancel culture "doesn't exist", in the sense that no one you are likely to encounter in real life is ok with cancelling people for tweets they made as a teenager
The argument "I haven't met a single..." is equally as strong as an unqualified "You are misinformed.", which I was responding to. Note that I asked for clarification :)
Since I have you here, would you mind elaborating a bit more about your stance on "cancel culture"? I'll also elaborate a bit more on my stance.
I think most people would agree that mobs by definition have no united agenda. It's a bunch of disorganized people with their own goals and motivations who all briefly get fired up about the same topic. Twitter mobs are a tornado of confirmation bias, where people in echo chambers spin up hot takes of current events to confirm their own worldview. The amount of meaningful debate that can be had in 280-character chunks is negligible.
When people talk about "cancel culture", my impression is not that they think there is any sort of coordinated attack on right-leaning figures by prominent left-leaning figures -- only fringe conspiracy theorists believe that George Soros is sending out weekly lists of names that should be "cancelled" this week.
It's that they believe Twitter is a place which has developed a culture of criticizing and ridiculing other users, public figures especially. I think it's undeniable that any time a public figure missteps, a vocal minority of people (e.g. angsty teenagers) on Twitter calls for the person to be fired or otherwise deplatformed, even before they have a chance to respond. Some people also receive death threats.
So, I don't think it's unreasonable to label that sort of behavior as "cancel culture". To me, it clearly exists, but there is room for debate about how prevalent it is, as well as how good vs bad it is.
I think we agree that "cancel culture" is not as prevalent as Fox / MSNBC would have their viewers believe. Twitter magnifies the opinions of their angry users to drive engagement, and then news organizations pick it up to serve one political narrative or the other.
Personally, I have seen many positive examples of public figures being called out for toxic or abusive behavior, and I'm all in favor. Louis CK was "cancelled" for extremely-scummy-but-not-necessarily-illegal behavior. Heck, #metoo is all about cancelling rapists, and that's a good thing! I also think that the JK Rowling controversy was for good cause, and led to both productive [1,2] and unproductive public discussion.
However, to me, the whole master vs main debate is silly. I don't see it as a driver of positive change.
My stance is: "Cancle culture" does not exist. The behaviour you describe existed before and there is no new development, that indicates the need of a new word. Death threats are not okay and that's totally independent of them being within or outside of something you call "cancel culture". And criticism doesn't get more or less reasonable if it is framed with "cancel culture".
I'm from germany. Here the phrase had a short burst of infamy as a comedian ("Dieter Nuhr") claimed people want to "cancel" him. By now the word is rarely used. And the discussion is better for it.
The only successful "cancelling" I witnessed was a left leaning twitter account, that was about fascism in austria. The woman behind it got death threats against her children and deleted the account. I think the use of the phrase "cancel culture" in this case is playing down the problem.
And if public figures try to silence criticism by the use of the phrase, than it's playing up the problem.
When and where - if ever - "cancel culture" is a useful term I don't know.
It is interesting you call it the "master vs main" debate. The problem is the combination of the words master and slave. You - maybe unconsciously - left the word slave out.
And there is not really a debate. I do not believe anybody was bullied to change that. It was a decision that was made independently. And now in the aftermath people shout about it as if it is utterly impossible that this could have happened without some mobbing or a big "culture" that made this a unjust decision. Because: "I know not a single adult that like that change." Well, maybe the majority likes it. The majority just does not participate in online discussions, so it's invisible. Hard to tell.
Yes, large portions of the company I work for fall into this category. 4 out of 7 in our team fit the description.
> I don't consider the fall of e.g. Louis C.K. to be an example of cancel culture, but rather a clear-cut case of someone in a position of authority abusing their power, and rightfully losing public support for it.
That is cancel culture.. its just not an example of cancel culture run amuck which is what the problem has always been, not cancel culture itself which is widely accepted by most people for the most egregious behaviors.
Voters don't cancel their representative, they select the one they think will represent their wishes. Even removing someone from the office when the voters believe they no longer represent their interests is not cancellation, it is how democracy works. You don't cancel your lawyer if he misrepresent you, you fire him.
The exact same thing can be said about what people refer to as "cancelling". It's not whether they're banned from Twitter, losing their contract or are voted out of office that constitutes the cancelling, but why they were.
Mitt Romney was not attacked for not representing conservative/republican values, but for going against a mob/cult (of personality). That is as "cancelling" as it gets, regardless if it leads to him being voted out in Utah or not.
Criticizing a politician for not representing the values people believe he holds is not canceling. If that is the case 3/4 of congress has been canceled.
Romney is persona non grata in the national GOP now, which is exactly what being cancelled is: to be ostracized. His values haven't moved anywhere from eight years ago when he was good enough to be president, so something else must have changed.
He is not ostracized in the way I would consider it. As far as I know Republicans still work with him, are willing to let him sponsor bills, etc. My understanding is he is still invited to Republican lunches as well.
I think we are working with two different understandings of cancellation. He will almost certainly lose his next election though.
>he was good enough to be president
Well not good enough since he lost to Obama. Just because you win a primary doesn't mean the majority actually supports you.
>so something else must have changed.
I think people forgot what his views were. People have nostalgia and remembered they thought he was better than Obama which turned him into a more mainstream conservative in their mind. I think there are other things at play like Romney being a Morman and also having name recognition.
To clarify, I think you're right, and that all the disagreement about cancel culture really boils down to semantic arguments about what the word "cancel" means and whether it is subjectively fair or unfair in a given situation. I would argue that voting someone out of office is a democratic way of literally cancelling them.
I think that the most widely accepted definition of "cancelling culture" is suppressing someone that has opinions different than yours. For example you can cancel a comic that has different political views. Opposing to that, when you have someone representing you, either a voted politician or hired attorney, it is not cancel culture if you disagree and want to be represented by someone else.
What if a comedian loses his audience because views of his come to light that his audience doesn't support? It's no longer profitable for him to go on tour, or for studios to offer him roles on tv, etc.. Is that cancel culture or not? I'd argue that it's cancelling, but not the "bad" kind.
If you say it's not cancel culture when a majority of people change their mind about someone, then you're saying that almost by definition cancelling is when a small minority of people have the power to deplatform someone who missteps. So, it's not accurate to say that "the left is ok with cancel culture" (for instance) since only a small group of people are going it who are not representative of the larger population.
Ask the same question: what if people don't like the local restaurant food (new chef puts too much salt) and they lost the patrons? Is that cancel culture? No. Cancel culture is when you want to close the restaurant for everyone when the owner's daughter refused to date you versus not eating there because you don't like the food, but you don't interfere with others eating there because they like the food. It's "I don't buy" vs "close them down".
Calling welfare or regulation "basic goals" is misleading: the first is not basic as there is no right to welfare, but forcing others to support welfare while regulation is not a purpose by itself, it is a means to achieve specific goals.
Seeding wrong ideas in what seems to be a neutral context is not nice™.
>you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think
To switch things around for perspective:
"There's nothing wrong with being white and you should be proud of your race."
Yep, if a black person told me this it would be patronizing, and if a white person told me this I'd assume they're racist. Swap white for black in my quote, and it's what the white community in the US is effectively telling the black community, if not in such obvious terms.
It's precisely because of systematic racism that we white people get to share our "sage advice" on how to combat racism, while being almost totally ignorant on the subject. It's proof of privilege and hideously condescending.
Perhaps, in the spirit of sharing useful insight within these kinds of discussions, as a black American you could educate me about something?
For context, I am neither black nor American, I have little time for woke virtue-signalling and fake outrage, but I do want to be properly respectful of others whose background and sensitivities aren't necessarily like my own. With that in mind, I often find socially acceptable terminology around race confusing.
For example, take the word "color". I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable, nor why one of the most prominent advocacy groups still uses the former term in its name. There is so much unconstructive commentary about this particular example that it's hard to figure out what the relevant history and genuine sensitivities are here. Can you enlighten me?
It's just symbolic, and still part of a consensus forming continuum based on advances in communication across large landmasses.
Black people in America are from many different cultures and are simply people that noticed that they had a shared experience of being excluded from institutions and even entire states.
The terminology simply comes from individuals taking initiative in the moment and saying "they treat everyone that looks like us all the same and we need umbrella terms to acknowledge our shared circumstance so that its easy to refer to ourselves". Other non-black people already had terms for us and these terms were typically also used in the pejorative. Many people consider "black" to be an affliction even today. So what you have is that some black people reject those older terms, some people try to repurpose and "take back" those older terms, some people create new terms, most terms are still in use.
These aren't scientific terms, but they do permeate into academia to convey a shared concept. So there isn't much to read into it except learning what the consensus is, and the history of why it is. But trying to merge it into the lexicon based on pattern recognition with other words will only confuse you.
Thank you, that's an interesting reply. Again perhaps this is my own lack of informed perspective, but I had always imagined that grouping all "non-white" people together under a single term was part of the problem. It seems like an act that diminishes the distinct cultures all being lumped in together, as well as the obvious racism if the whole group was then treated as somehow inferior or less worthy. But from what you wrote, it seems like at least some people in the affected communities do find these kinds of umbrella terms useful, as a form of solidarity and recognition of shared problems? But then even within those communities not everyone agrees on which terms are useful for positive reasons and which have too much negative baggage or pejorative history, and that's how we get the apparent contradictions like "colored people" being socially unacceptable, but not in the context of the NAACP, and at the same time "people of color" being socially acceptable?
yeah mostly accurate, but a lot of people would not agree with me for saying so :)
but lets look at your example source of cognitive dissonance, NAACP:
The NAACP has done historically monumental things on behalf of a group of very different people that were being excluded as if they were the same. It comes from a different era and different motivated individuals taking initiative. It predates a different individual pushing “African American” much later on. That predates such rampant subsequent immigration and population growth in the US where enough people find African American to be so ambiguous to the point of ridiculous, while there are many slave descendants that take pride in the term and make it their whole identity (or have it forced on them like many black people in other English speaking countries with no American parents, this is particularly comical to me), whereas others who may also be slave descendants adopt black American or other adjectives and identifiers. With the NAACP there is no utility in changing that acronym and no need to or drive to, like a landmark. It wouldn’t surprise me if they arbitrarily did change the name on their own, but there is no talk or consensus amongst its beneficiaries to do so (unlike other landmarks).
> the obvious racism if the whole group was then treated as somehow inferior or less worthy
Well, yes, this is how the group forms in the first place. It's made up of people who don't have an identity in common other than the one that's forced upon them of "non-white" by the white people discriminating against them.
Note that in countries which aren't white-majority you don't generally get a group of people holistically identifying as "people of colour", even if the same ethnicities would do so in the US. Instead you get different forms of racial discrimination.
Similarly LGBT+ merges a group of people with very different identities and practices, the primary thing they have in common is receiving the same kind of abuse from the same people.
> I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable
Scott Alexander explains this as a way for upper-class people to maintain their privileges: "The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying "colored people" is horrendously offensive but saying "people of color" is the only way to dismantle white supremacy."[0]
“Indeed, what is acceptable for white people to call African Americans and for black people to call themselves has evolved over the last century. The standard term has shifted from “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “African American” as people sought to redefine themselves and their place in America.
Now, in 2020, “people of color” often is used to refer to the collective group of non-white Americans. It is offensive to single blacks out as “colored.” That, in part, is because of the painful segregationist history associated with the term prior to the mid-1960s. “Colored-only” restrooms and water fountains are examples of harmful relics of the Jim Crow South that black people had to fight, and die, to remove from American culture.”
It also doesn't explain why "black" was preferred for a time, then it was verboten, and now it's preferred but you have to capitalize it. Nor does it explain why "African-American" was required for a time even though many Black people don't identify as African, and it's obviously completely inappropriate to apply to a Black person who has never left the UK, but that's what was required nonetheless.
Scott Alexander's hypothesis explains all of that. Constant change is what makes fashion fashion, and fashion is a very effective way to discriminate between the in-group and the out-group.
Jesse Jackson took initiative in the absence of other civil rights leaders and chose a term, African American. It’s really not that complicated. Just like people can acknowledge that BLM would be shitty branding and exists in the absence of other civil rights leaders, there is no committee and now its just about correcting people.
Scott Alexander is condemning woke culture in the essay you quote but the specific reason woke culture cycles through words is the euphemism treadmill.
This is an example of the "Euphemism Treadmill." Words that refer to things that some portion of society hold negative views about acquire negative connotations over time. These words are then discarded by polite society for clean new words without the baggage. E.g. latrine to water closet to toilet to bathroom to restroom, or retarded to mentally handicapped to developmentally disabled. See: https://aeon.co/essays/euphemisms-are-like-underwear-best-ch...
Reminds me of the Netflix film, White Tiger. A liberal Indian-American woman comes to India, pretends to care about how the lower castes of India are treated as slaves, but in the end, is just going through the motions and leaves a servant with pocket change. In the end, not treating them as people, but as objects to funnel their morality and values.
Malcom X said it the best. The White leftist liberal is the biggest oppressor in the room. By declaring they speak for the oppressed they've essentially silenced them.
I think speaking for the oppressed is better than actively oppressing people though. While there is always more that could be done, hanging out a BLM banner is better than...supporting suppression of black voter rights. Though I understand some people use signaling -in place- of action, which is neutral at best, it's better than active oppression.
In reality the current approach just alienates the people in power with the ability to do something meaningful.
People that werent going to do anything meaningful, but still wont. Except now they wear black and blue versions of the American flag in a specific counter protest.
While the actual person of color has to listen to your ilk proclaim rewriting the language is so progressive and for that person no matter what their life experience has been, and also wonder about how much the “silent” people resent them because they think it’s we’re going to cancel them.
Hope that people can further refine how the energy and sentiment is directed. I feel like we’re close, but people are still so out of touch.
the thing is the CCP has been indoctrinating your youngest from the 80s. pikachu surprise face when they start touting the propaganda they were taught in their younger years.
And lets be honest. Changing one word that annoyed a few dozen of people because they think of slavery, well, thats a lot of change just because a shit excuse, that will not matter in the end.
In all fairness, this sort of silly business is more representative of the "Twitter left", comprised of cogs in a perpetual rage-inducing machine, than it is of "leftists" whose main objective is to address the limitations of capitalism, at varying degrees of willingness to work within the system vs burn it down.
Of course, our media is run by billionaires so they capitalize on the identity politics to divide everyone and avoid having any real debate about economic policy, which is the only thing that really matters.
I would so much rather be debating about the best way to roll out UBI than whether to call something "main" or "master".
This is some technocrat fiction that has failed time and time again. There are towns in the US right now which actively reject help if it's not coming in the form of "more coal jobs" (which aren't coming back regardless of how much coal mining is actually on).
Economic incentives don't change people's minds, they motivate them to double-down on their biases.
Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that such people have been duped by channels like Fox News into doubling-down on a way of life that is simply not possible anymore.
What I'm saying is that if Fox and CNN (for instance) devoted the same air time to good-faith debate about the causes for, impact of, and solutions to wealth inequality and our changing socioeconomic landscape as they do reading Twitter comments live on air, we might be in a better position than we are today.
Billionaires capitalize on identity politics and political division because it gets them advertising dollars. That's it. While I agree that economic policy certainly merits more discussion, an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about "the elite" isn't any more productive than an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about white people.
Billionaires aren't all colluding, but their incentives are aligned, and they do individually use their money to advance a political agenda that regular people who don't own TV networks are powerless to push back against.
See: Rodger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Bill and David Koch
The rich aren't a single monolithic entity and it doesn't make sense to treat them as such. George Soros is an obvious example. Unless if you have concrete evidence, a blanket anti-rich narrative only serves as a vector for another rich person to inject their ideology. Plenty of people think that Donald Trump's feud with Bezos was proof that he was on the side of the working class.
The rich aren't, but the companies they run practically are, from a political standpoint.
Basically all large, multinational corporations now make their company logo rainbow for pride month, and all release the same sounding official statements about racial inequality on a regular basis, etc. etc.
It's almost impossible to find a large corporation that doesn't do this now. And their statements are so bland and generic that they are almost all identical, and completely interchangeable.
That's the symptom and not the cause. When people treat virtue signaling the same as positive change, it's natural for corporations to exploit that. It's a cheap way of building goodwill.
I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US. It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
Maybe because the country is blocked in a two-party systems? In other democratic countries, you do not have "the left" represented by one single entity. You instead have a multitude of political parties that can negotiate with each others to push for their political goals. That makes the political landscape dynamic, new parties are created, reorganized, disbanded all the time.
In the US, if you are generally more aligned with the democratic party but see some changes you disagree fundamentally with, you either suck it up or give up your ideals and switch to the complete opposite (republican party).
They are. For example Seattle has a council member from the Socialist Alternative party. There are a few Democratic congress representatives that are socialists (both in state and national level). Some socialist policies have successfully been pushed by socialist party members (e.g. the current medicare for all bill has around 100 democratic house members backing it up).
However the confinement of the current democratic system in the USA today simply doesn’t allow for third parties to gain national traction. There are mathematical models that proves this fact. For the real left to get socialist parties to the national assembly some democratic reforms needs to happen first.
I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US.
There are. The Democratic Socialists of America has grown a lot over the past few years. They even managed to get four member elected Congress this last election cycle.
It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.
I have no evidence, but I suspect McCarthyism and the following hard crackdown on leftists that followed during the cold war greatly slowed down this "natural" growth. It took a generation removed from the cold war for this growth to start up again.
Not necessarily - Bernie Sanders runs as an independent and just caucuses with the Democrats (same for Angus King, the other independent in the Senate, although he's not of the DSA). However, it doesn't look like anyone in the House is an independent, so maybe Bernie's the only one that does that.
DSA isn't no-quotes-left. It has gone full steam into identity politics if you ask me (I'm not American, but this is just based on what I've been seeing from them, correct me if I'm wrong). I don't mean that in a negative way and I'm not making any judgements of morality or anything, but no-quotes-left has a class conscience, today's left has an identity conscience (gender, ethnicity, etc). Both fight for equality (new left also for equity) but the ideology has shifted from a class struggle to a new kind of struggle that has replaced the nobility and bourgeoisie for the white cis male, and the proletariat for BIPOC, women, gender non conforming, etc.
The DSA is a mix. It has grown in leaps and bounds, but before it did that it was this kind of small social democratic organization with a kind of unique politics that came from Michael Harrington, and was more interested in being a bit of a left wing lobby inside the Democrats.
With the rise of Bernie Sanders and a new generation of people getting into socialist and left wing politics, it became quite a bit broader and larger and vibrant. And my impression is it became of a centre of gravity for other left tendencies in the US to coalesce.
There's quite a few different groupings in there these days. I don't think you can make a broad generalization like you did here.
Apologies for the broad generalization (as I said, correct me if I'm wrong, and I stand corrected here). That being said, if what you say is true, it's a pity that either the main stream media's reporting doesn't reflect that diversity or that the louder voices don't leave space for the rest of viewpoints.
IIRC up-thread I wrote complaining about "woke" leftists who are "three times as strict on culture-war issues as on economics", and I was referring precisely to today's DSA. As a supporter of the Harringtonite social-democratic class-struggle approach, what the org has become kind of disgusts me.
Agreed. I'm a far-left (libertarian) communist in America, and from what I've seen/read, the DSA is effectively the slightly-left wokish arm of the Democratic party. Think "public healthcare" with a big dose of "what are everyone's pronouns?!"
They're more concerned about trigger words and identity politics than dismantling capitalism.
It's because of the 2 party system we are stuck with.
Democratic Socialists, Social Liberals, NeoLibs, and NeoCons(because of the Republican party's shift to the right) are all stuck under one party, so the biggest group controls the entire thing.
I really appreciate this post. Somehow I think the media and its funders are trying to drive the wedge between similarly thinking people as hard as they can.
Do you think that there's a difference with using "master" for the main branch vs using "blacklist" for stuff you don't want in your system? Or are they equally non-offensive to you?
Please let "blacklist" and "whitelist" die. I'm not sure whether the terms carry racial baggage or not, but I don't need to be. I have to repeat the logic of which means which in my head every time. It's as bad as "false negative" and "false positive" -- which means what, again?
"allowlist", "blocklist", "denylist", whatever. They all mean something. I know that "blacklist" is used in a number of areas (blacklisted authors etc.), and I don't have much trouble understanding it there, but those uses also come with a whole set of connotations that don't necessarily apply to lists of URLs or whatever. It's a stretch too far for my brain to be able to hop over without thinking it through.
(For the record, I'm also all in for "false alarm" in place of false positive, and "missed bug"/"undetected flaw" for false negative in the context of static analysis where it makes sense.)
it will take more than a piecemeal approach of rewriting the English language to address prejudice
it is part of an effort of acknowledging that things white are seen as good or less bad, and things black are seen as bad and worse, and this is consistent across the language
this particular approach of extrapolating that towards skin color and ethnicity is just as misguided
but I could have seen it coming: when I’ve used the words in context before, it becomes clear people have had race on their mind the entire conversation that they try to make a poor joke about the irony of me using those words. Seemingly for their own comfort.
Not exactly what I would call privilege, in America.
I think important to distinguish between the radicals and the reasonable people. I would consider myself left but find this change ridiculous. Similar to e.g. how the American concern around blackface is pushed around the world and has madethe dutch Zwarte Piet or German equivalents 'offensive' (even as they probably relate to charcoal burners ('Köhler') [1]).
You equate the few radicals that see some issue there with all 'on the left' which is presumably 50% of any population.
Similar to veganism: the joke is that vegans are all very vocal about being vegan. But reality is that you simply don't notice all the ones that aren't vocal about it and silently love their lives or focus on other issues. Its just an issue of availability bias [2].
> Traditionally, Zwarte Piet is black because he is a Moor from Spain. However, since the late twentieth century the common explanation of Zwarte Piet's blackness has been that it is due to the soot on his body acquired during his many trips down the chimneys of the homes he visits. Those portraying Zwarte Piet usually put on blackface and colourful Renaissance attire in addition to curly wigs and bright red lipstick. In recent years, the character has become the subject of controversy.
No, I equate it as an accurate criticism of the left.
As in, it isn’t an inaccurate criticism. It would be nice if the various camps just acknowledged their criticisms based on accuracy.
Yes, a few predictably present radicals does make it an accurate criticism. It would be more difficult to predict this kind of behavior from people identifying as “the right”. They do other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the latter, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the former that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform.
As an outsider, watching Americans complain about political fatigue is fascinating, and informative. Very clearly there is a pervasive feeling that the political apparatus of America is ineffectual. But instead of seeking to become engaged, many are sucked in by media rhetoric that assigns blame to a menacing adversarial out-group.
> It's not pervasive corruption that's to blame, it's the evil culture of people not like you and their corrupt representatives!
We have this where I live, but thankfully we also enjoy a fair amount of mobility; it's less common to be entirely surrounded by those who vote the same as you, and most ridings have flipped between two or three parties over the coarse of most constituent's lifetimes. While the ethnic diversity of the ridings has generally increased over the same time.
Americans could use more political diversity; you're choosing between neocons and neoliberals, and fighting visciously against each other to do so.
Yeah the whole thing is really becoming a meta-commentary on the entire US political system. If it weren't so bizarre and dangerous, it would be really fascinating to watch (speaking as an American). On some level, many are subconsciously realizing the majority of both parties represent essentially the same geopolitical worldview that neither left nor right really agree with anymore (for different reasons). If this were a different country I'd predict a major political realignment on the horizon, but given how ingrained the respective neo-con/liberal ideologies are in the political infrastructure here ... I just don't see it as likely without something catastrophic happening to force the issue.
Mixing the politics of the day with business is bound to result in a bunch of low-effort “equal justic initiative” black and white styles block divs.
The best thing a company can do the way I see it is to _dedicate_ a cut of regular profit to a black charity. Like, on a regular basis.
Money can affect serious change in the right “hands”.
JUST MOVE MONEY TO BLACK CHARITIES OR ASSOCIATIONS. ITS CALLED DIVISION OF LABOR. Then, do your best to be inclusive intentionally. That’s the answer IMO.
Its actually not a statement about what I personally do, it gives context to why black Americans and other people of color would and have, at the surprising surprise to seemingly everyone.
The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.
As one who leans towards the left, I can reassure you that I've never told anybody what to think, nor have I been vicariously offended, and I barely communicate anything to anybody, which renders my "signaling footprint" pretty darn small. I'm doubtful that those are fair generalizations, and skeptical of critical signaling theory.
I read about the GitHub name change, then completely forgot about it until I saw this HN thread. At the time I think I asked our internal Git guru if this was going to change anything, and he said don't worry about it.
My concern is that a few gaffes from here and there are combined into some unifying characteristic of my "wing," when most people simply take little or no notice of them.
I think you're right about that. Coupled with the fact that extremes from both "wings" are, despite being quite small, very loud and have the megaphone of the news media and social media to make them seem larger than they really are.
White guy here, just wanted to chime in and say HELL YES, you nailed it bro. There's more of an emphasis in "tech" toward appearing "woke" than ACTUALLY SOLVING THE FUCKING PROBLEM. You nailed it with "you/they don't see us as equals [...]".
The most important word in the term "African Americans", to me, is, "AMERICANS". You're in this with us. You're our friends, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. We're in this TOGETHER. And this woke-ism bullshit is just that: bullshit.
Changing a primary branch name from "master" to "main" isn't solving the damn problem. Execs want to do this to earn PR points and wash their hands of the issue of a lack of representation and equality in the industry as a result. It's cheaper than actually giving a shit. But the reality is that socioeconomic barriers to entry into high paying STEM roles amongst our African AMERICAN friends/colleagues is a very real problem that needs to be addressed on both a cultural and economic level.
Ya'll are every damn bit as capable as the rest of us and I'm fucking tired of seeing you thrown under the bus in this industry, especially under the guise of "woke"-ism. It's time we start tearing down these PR stunts as the falsehoods that they are and insist on real, monetary, quantifiable and results-driven investments in black communities that are damn well deserved.
And to my colleagues in the industry that are non-black (especially white): it's time we stand up and "get their back" for our black friends, colleagues and family members. We're in this together, and it's well past time we stand up for our fellow Americans. This bullshit charade needs to stop and WE have the power to move things forward into an era of REAL representation and fairness, and as such we have a RESPONSIBILITY to do it. Enough talk - it's time to act.
That sounds great, but in practice doesn't prevent people from receiving racial abuse or discrimination because of what it says in their passport. There's definitely a faction of people who think that if you're not white you're not British, regardless of what it says in your passport. And the Shamina Begum case proves that there's some support for this: the government can simply remove your British nationality if you're Bangladeshi despite her being born in London.
I’m not arguing for the continued power grab of the home secretary here (who is abhorrent), but the UK does not have birthright citizenship like the US does, so the same set of rules do not necessarily apply.
Anyone born in New York is American, not everyone born in London is British.
The empire caused all sorts of citizenships to appear; citizens of the Empire were "British" right up until the point where they actually started moving to Britain, causing that right to be taken away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Ugand...
She joined up with ISIS not the best example to bring up. She gave it up there and then. It not like she hooked up with some bad lads and got into a bit of hijinks.
The faction of people that don't believe you are British if you aren't white has to be minority of people. Most of the people that may have brought up the subject are in their Winter years now. Pretending that Enoch Powell is still popular is a nonsense and tbh is nothing more than virtue signalling IME.
> She joined up with ISIS not the best example to bring up. She gave it up there and then.
While I do see your point (not British myself, but in Switzerland we had a few ISIS cases as well), I'd like to offer a different viewpoint as well: Our countries messed up at some point in their life - education, mental healthcare support, whatever; something went wrong when one of our citizens feels obliged to join something as heinous as ISIS. After all, we also feel like that with every other terrible criminal - murderers, rapists, etc.; our societies believe in their right to find the right path again, why not someone who joins ISIS?
> She joined up with ISIS not the best example to bring up.
She's the perfect example. If a full on British person like Nigel Farage does a heinous crime (or make it apples to apples, he joins ISIS) would they take his citizenship away?
If she was born in the US, it would be unthinkable.
> If they were born in the US, they would have just been assassinated by drone strike instead like they did with Anwar al-Awlaki.
Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.
Well they shouldn't have been let back in anyway. I also have no sympathy for a woman that said she felt nothing when she saw severed heads (of people executed by ISIS). Also there are claims that she enforced some of the Sharia laws and wasn't a passive member of the Caliphate.
She revoked her citizenship when she left.
> Yes, but the point is, is there are a legal treatment which is different for people who have been living here for generations vs those whose parents became a citizen in their lifetimes.
No there is a different legal treatment for people that join a rogue state which literally wants to destroy yours. I don't care about these people. Her supporters can cry racism all they want, It isn't racism. We don't want terrorists back in the country.
You keep avoiding the answer in the guise of "well I would have done X". The question is simple, how come she lost her citizenship but other ISIS fighters of British ethnicity didn't?
The citizenship concept is a requirement for modern life. If a person has their citizenship revoked, what are they to do?
They are illegal where they are, and they are illegal where they go. To my knowledge, there's no processes in any country for becoming a citizen without a preexisting citizenship from another country.
Back to this specific example, if she had wanted to come back and denounce ISIS; what should the UK offer her?
What about if she wanted to come back and face trial; what should the UK offer her?
In the end, just to point out the obvious, revoking citizenship is completely unneeded. If she comes back, charge her with her crimes. If she travels, extradite her. If she stays, let the leopards eat her face.
It's not an American import, or absurd to have an identity composed of both a nationality and ethnicity. Really, it's up to the individual - there are many 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants to the UK or Europe that value their cultural origins and ethnicities. Absolutely those people are British, but many, if not most will not wish to erase their heritage for the sake of 100% assimilation into the host culture.
I should have expected such a reply. Your comment is exactly what I expect from white collar professional that works an office job.
It is an American import and it is absurd. It also causes division. e.g Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross. I've seen a lot of guys in working man's pubs get quite angry and this sort of resentment is always hand waived away as "racism" when that isn't the problem at all.
Many developers don't spend time with the lower classes / those that aren't university educated which have to deal with the worse parts of immigration. They only see the positive aspects of it.
BTW the same happens with the British in the South of Spain btw. The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.
You presume a lot about me sir. I'm happy to engage in your ideas, but play the ball not the man.
I'm actually sympathetic to your views, and feel strongly that immigrants should respect and participate in the host culture as much as possible. That requires effort on both sides, of course, and the blame doesn't always lie with the host Western culture as is often unfairly characterised.
My only point was that I don't see that maintaining a link to your heritage and cultural/ethnic distinctiveness as _necessarily_ incompatible with assimilating and participating fully into the host nation and enriching it in the process. This isn't an argument for neoliberal multiculturalism by the way, which I view as mostly a policy disaster, that hurts the working classes and immigrants the most.
> Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross. I've seen a lot of guys in working man's pubs get quite angry and this sort of resentment is always hand waived away as "racism" when that isn't the problem at all.
No that's absolutely racism.
> The British reputation in Spain is complete dirt because of the disrespectful party goers and expats. It is due to them not assimilating or even bothering to respect the local culture and language.
This is also their racism.
A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.
I never mentioned the race of the labourers. Many weren't white btw. But from your comments you are assuming they are. That btw is racism.
> No that's absolutely racism.
Why? Care to explain? I never mentioned the race many weren't white btw that were making a similar complaint.
> This is also their racism.
So Spanish people who are basically white are being racist against other white people? Is that what you mean? That isn't racism.
Or British (not all British people are white) are people being racist against Spanish people? Or are you using Hitler's definition of what "white" is which means Northern European.
Either way this is non-sensical.
> A special place is reserved for those people who post comments on the Daily Mail complaining about how many immigrants there in England are when they're a British immigrant to Spain.
What are you on about? Nobody said anything about that. I said there are people in Spain that are English that don't assimilate with the local population which is Spanish.
This is rich. Britain colonized half the world, imposing it's culture on dozens of societies around the world while exploiting their labor and natural resources, but god forbid modern day migrants to the UK dare display the flag of their homeland and cherish the traditions of their parents. Meanwhile chicken tikka masala is hailed as Britain's national dish. I suspect your xenophobia is a personal foible, not a British sensibility.
> This is rich. Britain colonized half the world, imposing it's culture on dozens of societies around the world while exploiting their labor and natural resources, but god forbid modern day migrants to the UK dare display the flag of their homeland and cherish the traditions of their parents.
This old nonsense. This is the problem people like you will constantly bring up the past and won't let anyone forget about it. None of the people that were involved with that are alive today. Also BTW every country and people have invaded and colonised one another if you go far back enough in time. Are we going to start blaming the Italians for Caesar massacring the Celts and the Gauls? When do you want to stop? 50, 100, 500, 1000 years?
> I suspect your xenophobia is a personal foible, not a British sensibility
When did I claim I had a problem with people having another flag up? I didn't say that. I said the labourers in the pub tend to and it has nothing to do with xenophobia (which is you basically euphemism calling them/me racist btw).
If you re-read my comment I actually said that someone would just claim it was racism and not actually try to understand what the real issue is. You did exactly that and you didn't even direct it at the right person. You can never have a sensible discussion about these issues because mid-wits will scream racism almost as it were some Pavlovian reaction.
BTW I am actually a xeno-phile. I actually have lived all over the globe and have only recently come back to the UK.
Flop on the field all you want, no one called you racist. Your insistence that foreigners can't continue to identify with their own culture while also embracing a new one is aptly described as xenophobia. If you want to have a sensible discussion, lets start by engaging with what is actually said instead of what we wish was said.
> Many labourers (both skilled and unskilled) see it as a slight for someone who is brought up here and have lived here their entire life to display a flag other than the Union Flag of the St. Georges Cross.
That's not anti-foreign culture, but it is insulting to be born in the UK and not see it as your homeland. Or would you be okay with me raising a British flag in India and claiming I was British, if my parents happened to move there before I was born?
You actually implied it heavily by calling me xenophobic. You know full well they are synonymous. I am not stupid, so don't play silly games with me please.
> Your insistence that foreigners can't continue to identify with their own culture while also embracing a new one is aptly described as xenophobia.
Nope. I never insisted that at all. I never even mentioned foreigners. You keep on twisting what I am trying to explain and trying to pervert it into something you wish it to be.
I said that this sub dividing people in the *same nationality* by *race* is an American import to the UK (and from what some of my Belgian and French friends have told me) a import into some parts of Europe as well. It isn't typically done in the UK, France, Belgium and I suspect it is the same in many of the other European countries.
Then I said that working class labourers (not all of them white btw) don't like it when 2nd/3rd or 4th generation immigrants aren't patriotic or don't try to assimilate (like their parents did). I then said these concerns / complaints will always get hand-waived away by people as "racism" when the real problem is a feeling of disrespect. Just like you have.
It got nothing to do with xenophobia as the people I am talking about are British.
> If you want to have a sensible discussion, lets start by engaging with what is actually said instead of what we wish was said.
I do. So if you could actually respond to what I said and refrain from this behaviour (which you are now accusing me of) that would be great. Pointing the finger at me, when it is actually you is disingenuous.
Virtually every story is flamebait to somebody, so 'why bother' arguments that justify going straight to hell can't be valid.
How HN works is that commenters need to resist provocation and focus on substantive, thoughtful discussion no matter how divisive the topic is. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. This is something we're working on learning to do as a community. Most commenters in this thread are demonstrating that it is possible. Accounts that fuck with that process by casually setting fires or stoking them are particularly harmful, so please don't do that here.
In terms of whether an article is on topic, the criterion is not "might someone take it as flamebait", but "is it intellectually interesting and substantive enough to support thoughtful discussion". More explanation about that if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
The very concept of nation is quite euro-centric though.
Most of the rest of the world definitely thinks in terms of ethnic and racial groups, and has done so for thousands of years.
I am in the UK, which geographically is part of Europe. That not how we think here and that is a good thing. I don't want our politics to become racialised like it is everywhere else. All it seems to do is bring division and hatred and unfortunately it has imported from America.
If people don't want politics to be racialised, they need to get better at shutting down the blatent racism of the press, police, and major political parties.
Some of it is imported, but the UK is quite capable of its own characteristically British racism, most recently directed against Poles and Romanians.
It may be a European concept but the concept of a nation state is a good one. When it works, it unites everyone as one group. Humans have a psycholical need for a group identity. Better to unite diverse individuals behind a flag, than to form groups based on ethnicity.
Wait a second. In Germany we had work related immigrants (dominantly Turkish) in the 60s. The descendants (2/3/4 generation) of these immigrants are still classified as such (and share attributes about the black community in the US). I do not remember a proper title ... but that is just my brain right now.
The recent wars in the Balkans are the result of too many nationalities in too little land, and they didn't involve significant numbers of African immigrants (who typically had the good sense of emigrating to other parts of Europe).
The Balkans are but one recent example. European history is littered with "you might live in the same place and speak the same language but you're not like me because a couple hundred years ago your people were from X".
Europe has the same problems the US does just spread across fewer skin tones.
Or is Emmanuel Macron also wrong when he also said (and I am paraphrasing) "They are Frenchmen" when an American Talk show host said that Black people won the World cup for France?
In our secular societies you are what your nationality is and your race is irrelevant (or should be considered to be) in the eyes of the state and in the UK it is considered rude to bring up someone's race (other than identifying them).
I will accept that we aren't perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good. Bringing up areas of Europe which I obviously wasn't referring to and have been politically unstable for decades now is disingenuous and simply missing the overall point to be a smartass.
> In Europe the notion of someone being a African Frenchmen or a African English is absurd.
Yes, but
> You are your nationality.
Only if you're a nationalist. Many believe in cross-national or non-national collective identities, e.g. the identity of being a wage worker.
In other cases - it's groups oppressed by the state. The Catalan and Basque come to mind; and there are the Roma ("gypsies"), who are not territorially-defined.
In Europe, France and Romania are different countries, so you don't have "Romanian Europeans" living in France. "African American" isn't solely about skin color, but also about a shared history, migration path, acculturation, and regional population concentration. It's as much a valid "sub-nationality" of American as "Midwestern" or "Californian".
Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.
> In Europe, France and Romania are different countries, so you don't have "Romanian Europeans" living in France.
I never claimed there were Romanians Europeans living in France. I claimed that if you were happened to be Black and British you were still seen as simply British (until relatively recently). The same is generally true in other parts of Northern Europe as well, I have discussed this with Belgians, Germans and Frenchmen online and they all tell me similar things.
I am complaining that this nonsense of saying you are a White <Nationality> or a Chinese <Nationality> or Black <Nationality> idea has been imported from America. It doesn't make sense here.
> "African American" isn't solely about skin color, but also about a shared history, migration path, acculturation, and regional population concentration. It's as much a valid "sub-nationality" of American as "Midwestern" or "Californian".
I don't care what they do in the USA. That is their business. It isn't a thing here and it shouldn't be. Just because we speak English in the UK, doesn't mean we are like Americans.
> Remember, America and the EU are on the same order of magnitude in terms of total population and land area. If we didn't have terms for differentiating Americans from each-other, it would be like Europeans having no term to distinguish a Pole from a Spaniard.
"left" indeed -- I have been a pretty radical socialist since I was 16. (Well, at least on paper, I haven't been done activist work for years) ... And I don't recognize myself in this "left" that people keep talking about. I think it's hilarious to call CNN "left" or think that anybody in GitHub leadership is "left" for relabeling git branches. Plz. It's just a proposterous strange (and uniquely American) partitioning of the world.
If you define "left" as anything "not far right" then, yeah, ok, of course it's going to include a bunch of liberals who are not interested in any real structural change in the political-economic system and so are obsessed instead with changing how people speak.
So I just don't use the word anymore if I can. I'm not "left wing", I'm a socialist... Unfortunately "socialist" also seems to mean something weird to many Americans, too. (That anybody could with a straight face call Obama or Biden socialist just boggles my mind...)
If you want to understand why Biden and Obama are called socialists, I suggest you do some reading of the Anarcho-Capitalist literature (Anatomy of the State is the most obvious) or maybe listen to someone like Peter Schiff.
I don't agree with their philosophy as I believe it to be unrealistic but their criticisms and descriptions of what the state is and isn't is valid and why some call it socialist may make more sense to you. Hans Herman Hoppe (I am sure someone will quote mine him to smear him after I've mentioned him and haven't read any of this books) even called Democracy a soft form of communism.
Biden and Obama are called socialists because Americans were trained to fear communism and socialism during the Cold War. There is nothing about their political stance that is socialist. Conservatives have just learned that they can score easy points by calling anyone left of Ronald Reagan a marxist
If it is redistributing wealth, it's socialist. Taking taxpayer money from person A and paying it out as a subsidy (even if laundered through a private company) to benefit person B is socialism.
Anytime you are redistributing wealth under the threat of the government's right to licit first use of force, you're engaging in socialism.
Socialism as defined by socialists is social ownership of production.
What you're describing is socialism as defined by its libertarian intellectual opponents, and that's a pretty broad definition (any taxation followed by spending is socialism? That's pretty odd... so all military and police forces are socialist?)
So, fine, if that's what you choose to believe, but it's certainly not a policy proposal that is advocated by actual socialists. Even the soft left wing of the Democratic party found/finds the ACA objectionable.
In fact it's explicitly the kind of policy that liberals advocate in order to avoid socialist policy measures and to avoid being called socialists.
“ Socialism is a political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
You should read the rest of that wikipedia article instead of just the first line.
There are many variations discussed in the article. What you should look for are the market varieties of socialism, especially the ones where the objective is to achieve socialism by following peaceful mechanisms of achieving socialistic goals instead of achieving socialism via revolution.
The actual (socialist) American left (think AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren) calls this liberalism, and complains that it is more about posturing than actual change. So this is only a criticism of the left if you are very far to the right.
the point is that it was identified as an area of change at all, when given the reasons for doing so it is completely vacuous and existing in the absence of other change, but being used to satisfy a checkmark of change and self-congratulate.
Its actually not a statement about what I personally do, it gives context to why black Americans and other minorities would and have, at the surprising surprise to seemingly everyone.
The “right” simply does other things and a core part of that is rejecting virtue signaling even if that results in apathy that perpetuates adversity.
People are willing to choose the right, in absence of other choices, partially because it more honestly matches the last 250 years of apathy by all administrations. Where its clear there is a kind of vapid reckoning occurring in the left that simply assumes their minority constituents are all struggling victims that cant possibly be interested in any nuanced platform. And there’s just other things that Americans can be interested in like certain trade deals or certain people confirmed into government positions or something completely irrelevant. Your own snarky comment really suggests only some people have the privilege of playing the game of America. Within America, people on the left have trouble believing minorities could have any interest in that, as in the Democratic Party doesn’t factor it in at all, while their ranks are filled with posers who are willing to weaponize their understanding of race at a moment’s notice, no different than a self-proclaimed supremacist.
hi, for anyone looking for something to vicariously offended about, this is a racially insensitive comment to be offended by, colloquially (but not academically) called a "racist" comment.
this person is referring to a dichotomy in the black American slave caste, where people that worked in the fields were considered different than people that worked inside the house. the adjectives being "house negro/n**r".
It is used to invalidate the opinions of someone proclaimed as "black" that doesn't have consensus with a community that is pretending to be amorphous.
There have always been black Americans privileged enough to choose causes like any other American, while being lumped into the identity politics from all factions of the country. Even Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail (1953) references this.
I don't speak for anyone, and I am aware of black American people in my life that did bring up the "master/slave" terminology in computing as problematic and offputting and insensitive. The people in my life are of an older generation than me. The github issue, as this article points out, does not have a "slave" context only a master. To some that doesn't make a difference.
I am speaking for myself and like I said I agree with what the person in London wrote.
My response here might be poor (difficult subject, not a great writer), but I'm genuinely interested in your opinion.
"Microsoft stops selling software to American police departments" is a good response to BLM. "Microsoft changes 'master branch' to 'main branch'" is pointless deckchair-reshuffling that signifies nothing.
By applauding the change of a noun that has the most tangential possible relationship with slavery, aren't you letting them off the hook of doing anything substantive?
I'm very familiar with this as I spent 10 years in prison. The term "Uncle Tom" is not used by black men in prison. They say "house n-word" (except not n-word of course). It's about the most offensive term possible.
It basically means a "house slave" that was well-treated and is therefore sympathetic to or on the side of the white man. The anytonym is "field n-word", a slave that worked in the fields, which I probably heard more often as people sometimes identify as that term. E.g., if a guy is talking to his buddy who has a nice ("cadillac") job situation, he might say "I'm just a field n-word."
Absolutely. The paternalism that's shown toward black Americans by white Americans on the left is so obvious. They're treated like children. This patronizing stance toward blacks is like a continuation of the general pre-Civil War ethos of the Democrats. You "took care" of your slaves, too. They were your "property", after all. But of course, you didn't really want to help your slaves in any real way, lest they forget their place.
I would disagree. I think the "woke" stuff is a more active movement to solve all of the 1% of the issue, while ignoring the 99% that actually effects peoples' lives (how universities perpetuate classism, living wages for people doing 'un-skilled' work, revitalizing disadvantaged communities that perpetuate historical racial injustices, etc.).
Displays of misplaced white guilt like this - while bizarre psychologically - don't really harm or help anything.
As an independent who has both democratic party and liberalism as my part of my makeup I have to say this overcompensation from the far left is nuts. It's some kind of white man's guilt complex. I believe everyone is created equal and we have to always be diligent about keeping that at the forefront, but the terms master/slave and their ilk (in english) were around looooong before the whole white/black slave travesty happened. The same with white/black list. Until I hear some prominent black leaders sayign the community at large has an issue with it then I don't really care what some blogger or guilt stricken white people say. It's overcompensation and cancel culture all rolled into one.
As a white dude, I feel extremely proud because my ancestors abolished slavery.
Oh wait no I don't, because feeling shame or accomplishment for something your ancestors did hundreds of years ago that you had zero control over is a completely ridiculous concept.
I don't understand how that little line could be so misinterpreted so wrong. I'm not ashamed of being white, I'm ashamed of asshats running around gunning for cheap SJW points while ignoring the real issues. We can do better. Master/slave, blacklist/whitelist etc has no relation to race at all so it's a completely pointless act. But instead this is taking center stage just so people can post "feelgood" LinkedIn/Twitter posts to make them feel better about themselves, or company PR blog posts like GitHub and GitLab while doing nothing to change the actual status quo.
What gives you the right to feel ashamed on behalf of someone else's actions, just because you're of the same race as them? Shame on you, virtue-chaser.
As someone whose ancestors annihlated his other ancestors I'm not proud at all, nor do I feel guilt. It's a tragedy as old as human history. We can't forget those horrible things, but we can't bury them either, we are an imperfect species and we have to live with it. Burying words under a rug doesn't fix anything, only diligence and real egalitarianism will.
Though I initially sympathized with the name change from master to main (cause I don't care what it is called), I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause. It is a bit complicated as the name change in itself is not bad, but given the context, and that it distracts from addressing real issues it actually is.
Same thing with plastic recycling, in and of itself it is better than landfill, but as it allows us to feel good and look away from the real problem (plastic is cheap because most impacts are externalized) the recycling of plastic contributes more to the problem than to the solution. I know people who traveled around the world about once a year, own a big house and altogether have a pretty big impact that could easily be reduced, but they do recycle plastic and think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.
> I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause
Came here to express similar opinion and your articulation has succinctly and perfectly captured it so I'll just add to it.
Over the years I've come to realise that effecting real change to address the root cause is hard. It almost certainly won't be done by private corporations; the changes need to be enforced by (and at) institutions that are answerable to communities e.g., right to quality education, a humane law enforcer. Not only is change going to be hard but slow as well. However with more and more institutions getting privatised (private jails, contracted police force etc.,) whose sole motive is to earn more profits I don't see how anything is going to improve in the near future. So what ends up happening is every atrocity against oppressed community gets hijacked by these private mega-corps as they sense PR opportunity.
To take another example; Diversity & Inclusion. We do all the song and dance at the workplace to make it more diverse. But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it's excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person. The reasons are obvious, the entire education system (and society to an extent) is so rigged against oppressed community that it takes a miracle for one of their community to even make it to resume-writing stage. Instead of addressing the problem at the root cause (make it easier for them to get high quality education, lead a decent life) every corporation makes a big PR-noise around D&I while in reality the work place continues to be non-diverse. Net result is we end up having debates like "why should we reduce interview bar", "it's unfair to the deserving candidates" while completely being blind to the root cause of the problem.
> But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it's excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person.
I agree based on my personal experiences.
One of the concrete suggestions by the author of the blog post really strikes me as a step that we could implement, but we don’t: drawing from non-traditional backgrounds. And it’s because it’s an uphill battle. Much easier to do some low hanging fruit.
I’m not a minority in tech, but coming into my current job I had a semi-traditional background. Even getting first rounds was a struggle, only ameliorated by having a professional network of tech people, which is very much not something that you can expect a non-traditional candidate to have.
Seriously, my “get to phone screen” rate without network referrals was around 2-3%. With referrals was about 60%. That’s how bad it gets. So now when it’s in my direct control I go out of my way to look for non-traditional backgrounds in the pipeline and give them the benefit of the doubt during resume screening, paid for in hours I spend interviewing instead of programming
This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they're only capable of doing one thing full stop. I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
> think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.
Well, I guess they're more environmentally responsible than if they weren't recycling plastic. It's better to do something, however small, than nothing, surely? (And I doubt their environmental footprint even registers in the grand scheme of things - it's industry we need to shame, not individuals for the moment.)
[1] Who wasn't already heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery, etc., I suppose.
There is a chasm between “doing something like this distracts from more effective options for change” and “people can only do one thing at a time”, and arguing the latter when someone says the former feels disingenuous.
For example, in California, due to long term drought, urban water usage legislation was enacted. Urban water usage in California accounts for less than 10% of the state’s total usage, so a 20% reduction, at significant personal impact to urban residents, has a sub 2% impact on total use. However, it also gives the appearance that the legislature is actively engaged in addressing the problem of water conservation to under-informed voters without compelling those legislators to address agricultural and manufacturing uses (and their organized lobbying efforts).
The problem with “every little bit helps” mentalities is that they enable perverse outcomes when coupled with limited information decision making, finite resources, and multiple concerns to balance. All of this leads to the politically optimal (and thus career sustaining) option set being deeply suboptimal application of resources.
> I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
Surprisingly, human minds do seem to work that way. After doing a "good" deed, we're liable to believe that we've done our part, and owe society no further action. Even if our good deed didn't actually change anything.
> After doing a "good" deed, we're liable to believe that we've done our part, and owe society no further action.
Yet people keep on recycling and switching their lightbulbs after they do the first one (a "good" deed.) People keep protesting even after they've succeeded in one protest. etc.
People will naturally continue with their existing behaviour, but I think the GP was saying that once people have adopted a behaviour to aid cause X they sometimes stop looking for other "gooder" behaviours addressing the same issue.
> I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now".
This is exactly what people do. WAY too many people do "feel-good" charity work. They just pick something that's visible, easily partaken and then decide they're "helping" and go about their lives feeling better.
Like donating clothes to Africa, which actually harms the local economy[1][2]. As does dumping tons and tons of food without proper end to end oversight.
Or having a demonstration in a public location, bothering the end-users or workers of a business. Because it's easy and good publicity. They don't attack the people on top who actually make the decisions, because it's hard and boring work.
> imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they're only capable of doing one thing full stop
A lazy and overused argument. No one said only one thing can be done. Fact is time and attention are resources and by doing some thing you allocate less of them to other things.
To turn it into a specific example, in a large enough company, to make the master->main change you have to: announce it, update the repo, update the documentation, update the CI, update any automation around code, then everyone has to update their local copies. It takes time that costs the company real money. You can calculate that amount and ask the company to donate it to an organisation which can influence real change instead of renaming.
Furthermore, it's human's psychology that once you've done such "token good deeds", you feel good about yourself and less inclined to do some real thing, right now. Not everyone is subjected to that mentality, but I think most do.
Americans at large are heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery.
Our President still lives in a house built by enslaved peoples. Our Congress still legislates in a Capitol built by enslaved peoples.
That fact remains true, and is the prima facie evidence that all Americans have profited from our legacy of slavery, and that we aren't all that concerned with tearing down that legacy and eliminating the harms to folks that those monuments contain... instead a plaque or statue explaining the role of the enslaved peoples is enough.
Ironically, the solutions prescribed here are themselves virtue signaling: in that they do nothing to actually right the wrongs of the past.
As a practical way to help, I want to call out organizations like DonorsChoose. Find a Title I school or one with high economic need, and chances are high that a) more of the students are people of color; b) they don't have an effective or well-resourced PTA; c) their asks for resources are for basics that you'd assume would already be provided for. For those who want to make an actual difference, I'd highly encourage supporting an organization like this, and I'm pretty sure their communities would appreciate it more than tearing down the White House. https://www.donorschoose.org/donors/search.html?moderateHigh...
I didn't prescribe any solution- I'm not advocating tearing down the structures in a symbolic act to try and placate people. I'm pointing out the fact that all Americans stand today on the shoulders of an ancestry which enslaved peoples, and which we bear the onus of eliminating the traces of that power imbalance from our society, not just saying "hey, we don't mean master THAT WAY, you know?"
You don't. Nobody does. The plastic you "recycle" gets turned into lower grade plastic and so on until it gets landfilled. For plastic, the only way is down.
Steel, aluminium and glass are examples of materials that are recyclable.
I separate plastic so it can be either burnt together with my other trash, or shipped to Turkey where god knows what environmental crime is committed with it. An extremely small percentage might be melted into some low grade park bench. Absolutely zero plastic will be turned into high quality plastic pellets for industrial as a substitute for new plastic. It does not make me feel good, but not doing it makes me feel worse.
I just voted today for real change. Voting matters, plastic "recycling" doesn't*
* if you live in a place where you have meaningfully different options, not just two flavors of the same
> this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause
The root cause can't be addressed by the same people who reap the benefits of this system, because it's so deep in its core that it would require substantial change, possibly breaking the system itself.
I have the same issue and it's frustrating, but I understand. Last time I checked we don't even recycle the plastics here in the US. They get packed up and sent over seas which is even worse.
Less so since many of the target countries stopped accepting it. But the issue is that the stuff you could make by recycling these categories is of such low quality that nobody wants to buy them.
Off-topic, but I really enjoy products whose packaging I can dispose of well because it's all paper and/or metal. I buy Celestial Seasonings tea because there's no foil, and I can compost the tea bags. But there are still plenty of products that I only find in plastic, like frozen fish. I mainly shop at Wal-Mart because I'm poor. Does anyone have any tips for someone on a low budget?
I think such a change generates awareness. A lot of problems linger in the tech sector I'm not really aware of. The write up of the article author sheds light again on biased recruitment in the tech sector. Something that appears to be a fundamental problem with the education sector in the US being broken.
But it is good awarness? The major awarness people get from this cases is not about actual problems, but about very questionable wording-problems and behaviour of certain people. Not sure whether this at the end not creates more hate&blind eyes than important awarness.
The hate I've seen generated by ham-handed thought-and-speech policing is hate against the people doing the policing and hate against people standing up against the policing, not hate against the people the policing is ostensibly protecting.
So no, it's not revealing existing hate. It's actively generating new hate.
The hate against the people "doing the policing" and the hate against the "people standing up to the policy" were already there. Hate doesn't spring parthenogenically from the void, it has to be seeded and nurtured and cultivated and be vomited out only when the time is right.
Voicing a disagreement does not require or beget hate.
I really don't think so. Most obviously because those two groups did not even exist as entities most people were conscious of until recently.
> Hate doesn't spring parthenogenically from the void
Of course not. But it sure can be seeded and nurtured, as you note, by actions people take. And far too many people have been taking various actions that look to me as if they are designed, intentionally or not, to seed and nurture hate. And fear, for that matter. Which are not unrelated things: hate and fear are deeply intertwined and beget each other.
> Voicing a disagreement does not require or beget hate.
That is most certainly true. At the same time, a disagreement _can_ be voiced in a way that begets hate, and all too often is (e.g. via attacking the person, not the idea). And suppressing disagreement can absolutely beget hate. I feel like both are on the rise, unfortunately.
If someone decided they don't care about bias in the tech sector because the default git branch name was changed, they weren't going to and didn't care to start with.
This feels like a strawman - the issue isn't people deciding they don't care about bias because of this change, but rather that if tech companies are bending over so much as to make such an insignificant change to avoid seeming biased against minorities then how could bias in the tech industry exist at all?
I'm confused by this question, aren't you essentially asking, "how can a problem exist if some people are presently taking actions that try to mitigate that problem?"
For smaller scripts, this is trivially resolved. For larger scripts, this is a bug, and the script should be updated with a more flexible solution that doesn't rely on hardcoded branch names.
> “Meritocracy!”, I hear you cry. “They pick from the most talented students. The ones that worked the hardest to get into the most elite schools. The black students should have just worked harder”
Crazy idea: if companies that do virtue signaling on inclusivity were paying their taxes, decent schools could be funded and we would not have so many of those issues.
But instead, those companies are actively lobbying to avoid any taxes, and as a result, poor kids will never have any chance of getting a decent education:
I am baffled by the naivety of people in our IT industry who swallow the hypocrite "inclusivity" discourse of those big tech giants. They don't care about inclusivity, they only care about money folks.
It's always when government screams around elections that they will increase taxes for the rich, the middle class and small to medium business cry.
I am yet to see the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Google pay their fair share. Meanwhile small and medium businesses have hard time to compete because of the increasing burden bestowed upon them.
The big corporations work hard to gatekeep their wealth garden, so no outsider could ever join them.
I will vote for any government that will promise to partition those companies, make them pay the tax they ought to pay had they not used accounting tricks and finally to ban selling personal data for advertising purposes.
I don't think companies paying their taxes - in the USA at least - would help much on the education side of things, because much of the USA has a stunningly bad system of using property taxes to pay for schools.
So schools in rich areas get more money than schools in poor areas.
Charging companies taxes and simultaneously reforming how schools are funded could work?
I imagine changing the funding mechanism would be extremely politically unpopular with homeowners who's property values are attached to the quality of their local schools.
> because much of the USA has a stunningly bad system of using property taxes to pay for schools.
This might have been true once upon a time, but pushes in State and Federal funding over the last couple of decades have mostly filled in the gaps. Take a careful look at district funding per-pupil in your state and you might be surprised. While there certainly are differences, they are nowhere near as large as they were in the past.
Not really off-topic, IMO. The state department of education has it for state-level statistics in CO and NC. CO even publishes a browser in map form. Local school districts publish their own local budgets in these states, too.
That doesn't directly answer your question, but that's where I think you should start.
Are there records of any US public schools that were underperforming, were given notably more funding, and saw a corresponding increase in test scores or other objective metrics?
EDIT: I guess I'm looking for the success stories. "Here's an inner-city school and the outcomes were bad. Then we increased funding and now their outcomes are comparable to good schools."
I live outside of Detroit, so I'm very familiar with the example of how the absolute bottom-tier Detroit Public Schools spend more per student than some of the richest (and highest performing) school districts in the suburbs.
It's common sense that a school with more money can hire more and better teachers as well as remove barriers to learning like food insecurity and lack of textbooks/computers.
The burden of proof falls on the counterintuitive claim that the same school would have the same sustained effectiveness regardless of funding.
Nobody claimed that all schools (or schools in general) will have the same outcomes regardless of funding.
It's quite possible parent engagement and cultural differences are stronger drivers for positive outcomes, and that those things lead to higher funding for schools. But that doesn't imply higher funding causes positive outcomes. They're just correlated.
Many of our nation's underperforming schools are located in urban areas with no shortage of funds available and under the control of the political party supporting this idea. Yet the issue remains unsolved.
Is there any level of funding that would lead proponents to acknowledge funding may not be the primary issue?
There is another problem regardless of how good education you get chances are you'll become a wage slave. The harder you work, the increasingly more tax you have to pay, so making effort does not pay these days. Then you have things like illegal drug market teasing the youth, as the margins are high and tax free. I thing just making the schools better will not have much effect, because young people have no motivation to do better as they'll have mediocre lives regardless of how much effort they put in education as the system is designed for the poor to stay poor.
I can tell you first hand that "the youth" aren't thinking about margins and taxes when they are deciding between taking a job and joining the illegal drug market. They're thinking about how long it takes to earn a dollar.
Yes, they don't think about it directly, but this is what is responsible for how long they need to work to make a dollar. I thought that is obvious... Essentially in the legal market, the more you work, the less you get thanks to progressive tax.
The taxation scheme makes virtually 0 difference. No one working as a software engineer is thinking, man this progressive tax is too high, time to quit facebook and sell crack. People working min wage are paying way less tax under a progressive taxation scheme. I really don't understand this thinking.
The USA spends more per capita than anyone else and we get worse results.
More money isn't going to fix it.
We need to break up the teacher's unions and put competition into the education marketplace by supporting students not schools.
If we gave every student a stipend that their parent's could use to pick the school they wanted, then our education system would have competition and actually get better.
As a Canadian who's spent some time in various parts of the States, I would say the biggest change that needs to be made is a greater cultural value being placed on good education. In simpler terms, I believe disadvantaged youth will do better at school when those youth start _wanting_ to go to school.
The most successful ethnic group in the United States are Nigerian-Americans because in Nigerian society, education is valued above all else. 61% of Nigerian-Americans over 25 hold a Masters degree - a remarkable number!
To give a personal example-- the public school I graduated from has a racial busing program from a school district that spends $24k per student to a school district that spends $15k per student.
Many US cities have tried to throw money at this problem with little to no success. I don't claim to know the answer, but we should at least stop pretending we have it already.
I'm not prepared to write an entire article on the subject and I'm not sure it would be wise for me to publicly criticize my wife's employer. But I can at least elaborate on how I feel the funding is being mismanaged.
The biggest problem I see is a bloated administration. As is the case with most large organizations, power gravitates towards the top. The admin at the top get overwhelmed with responsibility and end up hiring more admin beneath them to handle things, but the power just gravitates back towards the top and the cycle continues until you have a highly-bureaucratic, admin-heavy organization. The salaries for all those admin has to come from somewhere.
Meanwhile, teachers are treated as warm bodies to fill positions. Their performance is evaluated by admin who have little-to-no actual education experience, so grade inflation and brown-nosing are the most effective ways to keep a teaching position. This ensures the school keeps wasting money on bad teachers while the bloated admin retains support from the rest of the organization.
Many teachers get shuffled around from school-to-school, and in some cases subject-to-subject, so they are constantly adjusting instead of refining their craft. Admin's solution to this is to take the burden of course development away from teachers by purchasing bundles of course materials/frameworks from third parties and pushing (sometimes requiring) teachers to teach according to them. So much of the material ends up being useless that teachers end up having to spend just as much time/effort anyways adjusting the material and sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Going into a little more specifics, my wife works with special needs children at a high school level. This is getting especially frustrating because admin and other non-education staff lazily put any kids who misbehave or just don't do their work on special development plans. These plans involve a lot of costly bureaucracy and are very difficult to get rid of once created. Meanwhile, my wife has to put less and less of her attention on kids who legitimately need the extra help as an increasing portion of the student body gets put on these plans.
Naturally, many of the kids don't like getting put on special development plans and separated from their peers. Admin's solution is to abandon self-contained classes for kids with special needs in favor of co-taught classes where two or more teachers manage an oversized class of mixed-needs students. This results in classes which are less effective for both groups of students while costing more as teachers now have to spend extra time and effort on coordination.
These are just examples that are fresh in my mind based on recently discussions with my wife. Unfortunately, a lot of this isn't made evident by budgets.
> These are just examples that are fresh in my mind based on recently discussions with my wife. Unfortunately, a lot of this isn't made evident by budgets.
I urge you to look at your district's budget in detail. Many of them do in fact break out administrative staff costs separately from teaching staff costs. Decades of frustration on the part of the electorate has forced them to in some cases. You might have to dig for it, but its in there. I don't doubt your wife's experience with an overbearing administration, but one person's lived experience does not count for your whole district, let alone the entire nation. You have to examine the data.
My wife's district's budget includes "Instruction" as one opaque budget item which accounts for 47.9% of the 2020 budget (up from 46.3% in 2017). Admin accounts for 9.6% (up from 8.3%). There is also a vague "Non-Instructional Expenditures" category which accounts for 5.1% (up from 4.6%). Almost everything else is operation/maintenance, transportation, construction, and debt service.
Less than half of the district's budget goes to "instruction" and who knows how much of that budget item really ends up being spent usefully. The "instruction" budget item did increase as a portion of the budget, but budget items specifically labeled as "admin" increased disproportionately by nearly 5x as much. "Non-Instructional Expenditures" also increased disproportionately by nearly 3x as much.
Comparing to your district, yours spends much more on instruction and much less proportionally on construction and debt services. Your district's budget is also much more granular, splitting out categories like utilities, printing, safety, and IT, plus a breakdown of your instruction budget.
I'd link to my wife's district's budget but like I said, I don't think it's wise to name my wife's employer as I'm complaining about them publicly.
This happens doubly so for some Universities. If you take a look at some of the more expensive ones w/ small endowments most of them are broke because of huge bureaucracies.
I wonder if there's a principal in here somewhere,
something like an optimal amount of middle management.
I think the "per capita" bit is misleading. Because it lumps in certain area with other areas.
Certain school districts are way underfunded compared to others. Part of that problem is that a lot of school districts are funded through property taxes. Which has a way of reinforcing the cycle of poverty.
Your voucher system would simply exacerbate the problem. You know what happens when you allow people to be selective about their schools? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
In your case, it would just be a move to private schools and if you don't think those people wouldn't be able to vote out all taxes that go to schools now, then you are naive.
And breaking up the teachers' unions? Yeah. That's a race to the bottom. Already schools in those underfunded districts do their best to discourage long-tenured teachers as their pay is directly related to years of service. Make it easier for schools to churn teachers and that's exactly what you'd see. Not a selection for the "best", but for the cheapest.
Education is a service with no direct material benefit. Investing in it does not pay off any particular person or group in any noticeably tangible way. However, having a well-educated population benefits everyone and everything.
Education is one area where we probably need less privatization rather than more.
And...? Race of citizens doesn't matter. The city schools, since they face the most competition (due to proximity) would improve the most quickly.
>In your case, it would just be a move to private schools
Exactly. New models would crop up. Overnight, a new multi-billion dollar industry would be created. Startups would spring up everywhere to get certified and capture that new value.
>And breaking up the teachers' unions? ... That's a race to the bottom. ...
That's because there is no competition. In a non-competitive marketplace, there is no forcing function for quality.
>Education is a service with no direct material benefit.
Education is a service with the greatest material benefit. It is the foundational service. It allows all other goods and services to be generated.
>Education is one area where we probably need less privatization rather than more.
This does not follow from your previous assertions. Homogenizing education has clearly failed. It is a race to the bottom.
The education system has been captured by the political class via teachers unions. That is why they want to churn out homogenized thinkers who are only smart enough to vote for their aligned political faction.
I’d just like to point out that if you want to radically change the education system the burden of proof should probably be on you. Being skeptical about introducing some alternative ways for funding (e.g. a voucher system) is the natural thing to do, and pointing out possible flaws is actually helpful. Yes it cannot be proven without testing, but it cannot be disproven either. Even with testing it is hard, as the test might be biased, or does not generalize to other neighborhoods.
I think parent was simply answering logic with logic, and dismissing parent’s logic because it has no empirical backing while promoting your own logic which doesn’t have one either, is a bit disingenuous.
But your assumption is that it would be better, also without any testing. It's the very definition of a wicked problem.
> And...? Race of citizens doesn't matter. The city schools, since they face the most competition (due to proximity) would improve the most quickly.
And... that's what happens when people are "allowed to choose their schools". People will find ways to segregate. Unless you want a perpetual chase of the students in the poorer schools to the richer schools? Which is weird. And white flights aren't some hypothetical thing that might happen. It happens. It happened. We know why it happens. We've seen it as a response to things. We shouldn't do those things again and expect a new result.
>Exactly. New models would crop up. Overnight, a new multi-billion dollar industry would be created. Startups would spring up everywhere to get certified and capture that new value.
Private schools exist now. And it's not really "new" value. It'll just redirect the tax money to private enterprises. And those disadvantaged will continue to be. It will further entrench the disenfranchisement of millions of children. And it'll enrich some private citizen.
> That's because there is no competition. In a non-competitive marketplace, there is no forcing function for quality.
Has the education system failed you? I said that breaking up the union would be a race to the bottom. You then infer that the union itself is the race to the bottom. I don't see how you can make that inference from what I said. The "forcing function" wouldn't be one for quality, it would be one for cost.
> Education is a service with the greatest material benefit.
First, I said direct material benefit. Tell me. What does education directly produce in the way of material goods? I'll answer that, nothing. Because education, like you said, is foundational. It is indirect, much like infrastructure and dozens of other things no one wants to pay for. Because the reason no one wants to pay for it is that there is no direct benefit. And I don't care how much people say they care about foundational things or indirect sources, where they prioritize their efforts say otherwise.
Education is not "homogenized". Not by a long shot. Having goals is not the same as the process of achieving those goals.
> That is why they want to churn out homogenized thinkers who are only smart enough to vote for their aligned political faction.
That is a weird way to say that you don't know any teachers at all. Or at the very least, don't listen to them.
Therefore we shouldn't address the fact that corporations aren't paying their taxes? We could also put more money into the pockets of parents by easing their tax burden...
Whilst I agree that they should pay their taxes, let's not get confused here: no matter how much the budget is increased, education will not be properly funded because it's not a political priority. Most countries with better education systems don't really invest _that much_ more than the USA, but it's the attitude towards education that counts.
Looking at absolute funding is a bit simplistic in this instance. The problem OP is pointing towards is that some schools are disproportionately bad. In an unequal society where distribution is racially biased, an education system might be superbly funded, while still leaving several district underfunded, yielding the racial bias OP was taking about.
You seem to imply that every tech worker is pro-tax breaks (they are not).
In fact, it's perfectly possible to disagree with your company's policy on taxes, and agree with their policy on inclusivity! In fact, these tech workers have almost no control over the taxes their company pays or doesn't pay!
I think many people here would agree with me: I'd be happy if tax laws were changes to make big companies pay more! I would never expect anyone to quit their jobs because they disagreed with how their company filed their tax return. That's just a kind of insane way to think about the world. A worker only has one bargaining chip: they can quit. That's an unreasonable ask.
> companies that do virtue signaling on inclusivity were paying their taxes, decent schools could be funded and we would not have so many of those issues.
So the biggest issue I have with this is that the US government is really good a pissing away money on useless stuff. Take a look at the latest round of "stimulus" and the breakdown of where everything is going.
Maybe this was done for optics and as a good-faith effort. Maybe efforts to increase inclusivity can happen alongside paying your taxes. Maybe all black people don't agree with the author.
Please leave them on reddit, and discuss things with nuance here.
> Not sure, I never said that. I said "virtue signaling" is a thought-terminating cliché, like "fake news."
Evidently you think the phrase, rather than its actual meaning, is the issue. OK.
> it's (using the term 'virtue signaling') only function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, in other words "end the debate with a cliché... not a point.
I personally don't think stating you believe a position is taken due to optics ends the debate. Likewise pointing out that information is being manipulated by those that seek to report it. The short term for these is 'virtue signaling' and 'fake news'. I'm not sure if you have ever lived in the US but in the current political climate it likely does the exact opposite of stopping arguments proceeding further.
The concept of 'thought terminating cliches' - that these concerns somehow aren't valid points - seems itself to terminate thought.
Please lets actually consider arguments here, rather than dismissing them because they're considered popular.
> Virtue signalling is a pejorative neologism for when one expresses a morally disingenuous viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling
Accusing someone('s company) of being "morally disingenuous" (i.e. a lier) will likely end rational discussion, regardless of whether it's true or not.
Of course it's a neologism - the behavior is new! Most individuals in the nineties did not have the ability to collectivise and instantly broadcast their desires to corporations with an audience of followers - hence brands generally did not partake in social causes.
> So while the tech community was rushing around, trying to do their best impression of a black square post on Insta I remember thinking, “oh for fucks sake, they’ve completely missed the point”. Why? They forgot to talk to people who are actually members of the black community.
In practice, big techs don't care about POC, they care about mobs.
"Inclusive" words is just what make mobs happy and it's cheaper to do than being accused of discrimination for real reason: POC representation in big tech.
Changing a default branch name is cheaper than try to fix the real world.
That's the point, and that, unfortunately, the reason why the situation will never change: Because we act only on the exposed representation; movies, text on web site, etc.
It is the currently accepted term on the Euphemism Treadmill. In my lifetime alone I have seen it go through colored people (perhaps the original source of your discomfort? and the "CP" in "NAACP"), Negro, black, Afro-American (which was brief but it doesn't mean I didn't have to rename a lot of anchor texts when the academic departments changed names to ...), African-American, then back to black, people of color, now finally capital B Black, with "people of color" apparently now a broader term of usage.
That's a pretty un-generous interpretation. This whole thread revolves around the idea that changing a label is a hollow gesture. The author of the parent comment seems to be making the same point about terms like "Afro-American" and "People of Color".
Great question about the term "people of color". Reminds me of when Apple posted on their home page, "Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. For equitable education. For a more just justice system. And for Black and Brown businesses.". The part that particularly rubs me the wrong way is the term "Brown" people. And it’s uppercase. Who wants to be called a "Brown" person? I’ve never heard anyone called that before in my life. It’s incredibly degrading and reductionary. If I am Mexican or Indian, the last thing I want to be labeled is "Brown". Thanks for reducing me down to a single divisive term. What is perplexing is that somehow this term is ok and so is "black" and "white". But saying "yellow" or "red" is offensive. This inconsistency is absurd. Those that are pushing this language somehow think they are morally superior to those of the past. But in reality, they have stepped right into their way of thinking — seeing people by "color" and categorizing society based on it.
It's a strange thing, I've been having to do training sessions explaining that instead of saying "blind people" you have to say "people who are blind" because the former apparently projects more about their identity when it's important to underline that this attribute does not define them
Basically there's a movement to shift from inheritance to entity component, wanting to implement people with has-a descriptions instead of is-a descriptions. This enables data oriented optimizations so that society executes more efficiently & can be more easily extended as new requirements are submitted by the mob
Or ya know, not making someone’s disability the leading term you use to describe someone. That what’s most important is their personhood and they’re not defined by some single dominant aspect. And that their disability isn’t part of their identity but is just a fact about them.
Language doesn’t do multiple inheritance well so has-a descriptions are easier to work recognizing that people are multifaceted.
I'm sure it depends on the person and the disability, but I'm diabetic and would much rather be referred to as that rather than "a person with diabetes". That's just exhausting.
Diabetes itself is awful. Whether or not it's the leading descriptor makes no difference with that, and I'd rather just use the non awkward terminology ("I'm diabetic" rather than "I'm a person with diabetes".) It would feel almost patronizing if everyone started referring to me that way.
Furthermore, for all that people apparently care about the accumulated effects of microaggressions... Suppose that, every time someone refers to your group—I'll use blindness for an example—they think "blind people—oh wait, I'd get in trouble for saying that, um, I mean, people who are blind". Might this develop a Pavlovian association of "blind people" = "uh-oh, might get in trouble"? Which, in turn, might lead to subtle resentment, mistreatment, and/or avoidance of blind people? It seems that, to rationally recommend one moniker over the other, one has to consider all the costs and benefits, and I don't think I've seen advocates of "person who is X" address this one.
Eh, I think it's common enough for people to say they feel like they're walking on eggshells because of all the sensitivity stuff, and I think I've seen a few people say that they now feel uneasy around minorities because they're afraid to encounter one who's been taught to have a chip on their shoulder and might throw a fit at the smallest microaggression. It's not a hard connection to draw.
The social justice crowd is unlikely to address it because, with their norms of discussion, mentioning it will likely attract mockery and redirection: "Oh no, we must protect the feelings of the poor white people! How oppressed they are! I'm sure it's just as bad as having ancestors who were enslaved and lynched!" The term "white fragility" might be used; in feminist circles, it might be "what about the menz!?". There's an instance in this thread (flagged) of someone mocking someone who complained about inconveniences. I generally term this "Look at these oppressed people; your complaint is invalid".
These argumentative norms seem to prevent the social justice crowd, as a group, from making decisions of the form "Let's make a minor effort to avoid needlessly offending the people that we're nominally trying to win over".
Depends if the actual reason you are talking about them is that characteristic, right? So talking about black people precisely on race topics seems necessary, whereas if you are talking about a particular neighborhood, it seems unnecessary and racist.
Don't worry I'm in full agreement, OOP is a terrible paradigm ever since it left Alan Kay's original inception which was closer to the has-a message passing paradigm that survives today. Rust's is a pleasure to use with traits instead of classes. Go's interface model is nice too, like a static duck typing. I've always preferred lots of interfaces in C# to abstract classes
> Is “person of color” an okay thing to say in US?
I'm not English native so that could be the wrong term, not trying to offend anyone. In this context, I mean "discriminated persons/peoples".
IIRC, I saw this on the rules of r/publicfreakout (stating that videos representing "POC" would be moderated). For me "POC" means "Proof Of Concept", so I asked and discover it was about "Person Of Color" and so I use this on English spoken Internet.
But I agree, it's a weird term and I never use this in my native language. Each country have different way to talk about racism and discrimination because each country have it's own racism and discrimination problems.
Nowadays, POC is more widely used in French than naming a community directly by its skin color.
"It is a black neighborhood" -> "It is a POC neighborhood"
Are you sure? It cannot be very widespread. I've been living about 10 years in Paris and never heard "quartier de personnes de couleur" (POC neighborhood). Not a single time! Yet "quartier chinois" or "quartier arabe" are very common. But maybe my social circle is not very representative...
Yes. Just think of it as a formalism - it's the currently culturally accepted term if that's the group you're trying to reference.
Lots of languages have a fuzzy formal/casual split where usage is both context-based and a matter of respect, though I think the US is more unique in (1) the degree of energy focused towards coming up with formal names for demographic groups and (2) making them out of words that are also used casually.
It’s been a self label for some time. Given the fact that there is a lot of horizontal aggression built into The System, getting everyone to pull in more or less the same direction is progress in its own right.
The terminology seems to be shifting to BIPOC, to include Indigenous peoples. I haven’t heard an a explanation for why Black is also split out.
POC means people of color, aka non-white, yes? There's a lot of Indian and east Asian representation in the tech workforce. You should be more specific about what you mean.
Big tech better make sure that they don't fly too close to the sun. The sun being socialist takeover of the U.S. (i.e. true progressives, whose links to socialism are undeniable, taking over the democratic party). Because most of them would not came out of that transformation unscathed.
> Out of curiosity I asked my manager, who is like 20 yrs older than me, if he had ever been stopped and searched, he said not once in his life.
I had a similar conversation when a black colleague was late for work, having been stopped and searched by the police in London.
The other 10 (white) developers were all shocked, but he said it as casually as someone might report they'd missed the train, or had a puncture on a bicycle. He was stopped regularly, nothing to be done about it.
No one else had ever been stopped.
(A few months later, one of these white developers and I were walking away from the office when the other guy was stopped by the police. They searched his backpack on suspicion of theft. They told us the description was "white youth, short black hair, red football shirt, riding a blue mountain bike with a black backpack", which exactly matched my colleague.)
The government figures say, from April 2019 to March 2020:
> there were 6 stop and searches for every 1,000 White people, compared with 54 for every 1,000 Black people
I've seen similar happen in London - black people stopped and seeming to be harassed by police for no obvious reason.
But the main anecdote for me is when I was crossing the Swiss-French border near Geneva in a car with my girlfriend.
She is black; I am white.
She was told to get out of the car and required to present various paperwork, then they checked up on the paperwork, holding her for maybe 10-20 minutes, making phone calls.
A man with an impressively large gun stood nearby.
She had a decent job at the UN in Geneva nearby, a perfectly good identity card, and it's not at all unusual for black people to cross that border in a car.
I thought they might check my paperwork too, but they were not interested and didn't ask me for anything, not even to get out of the car. It seems I was free to pass, except of course I waited for my temporarily detained girlfriend.
I've also heard a similar style of tale from Switzerland, from a friend who has lived there for 30 years.
She went to report her son's bicycle being stolen. She is white, but when the police heard her name (it is an Eastern European name), they instantly became less polite, making remarks such as "it's probably one of your country mates that did this, you know?". She got a little bit of comeuppance when she handed them her ID - her Canadian passport - and they suddenly became very polite again.
While the color of your skin makes you a much bigger target for harassment, xenophobia even for people who's skin is white is a pretty similar thought process for those who perpetrate it, and extremely widespread.
This. 99% of policing is just fishing with a pretext. Even when they're out to run a speed trap and collect revenue they still err toward stopping the outlier cars.
If you don't blend in you get a ton more attention. That can mean an out of state plate, a skin tone that doesn't match the area, a vehicle that doesn't match the area or you're checking stereotype boxes for criminal activity.
I mean, an interesting question that gets underreported is: what is the rate at which searches of black people find evidence, vs white people, per search? Police just want crimes (ironically); if one visually identifiable population group gives them more crimes, they'll preferentially search that one. Hell, it's even worse - if you see a crowd, and you know that, for instance, to pull numbers out of my ass, black people are 10% more likely to be carrying drugs than white people, it's in your rational (if racist) interest as a police officer to always preferentially search black people over white people - just like how if a coin comes up heads 60% of the time, you guess heads every time, not 60%.
The solution is drug law reform and changing the incentives of the police away from maximizing case count.
That doesn't add up though. If you guess that black people are more likely to have guns and you search them far more often, more evidence will turn up, even if they are/were as likely to have a gun than any other group.
If you never search white people for drugs, guess what? You never find drugs on white people.
Yes that's correct. However, in that case, while your total number of black drug crimes will be high, your "drug crimes per interaction" rate will still tell the true story.
(Assuming no straight up fraud/planting drugs on the part of the police, which is also very possible.)
The "drug crimes per interaction" rate doesn't work for this case either, if the number of interactions is just too low. And if you look at real numbers, in the US, for example, we're talking a difference in the order of two magnitudes.
So if any person has a 10% chance to carry an illegal drug and you search 100 black dudes and 1 white dude, chances are your drug crimes per interaction will be 0 with the white dude and about 10% with the black dudes.
Now add to that, that the white dude is much more likely to get off with a warning that's not committed to protocol and there we are.
As a black guy in London, I've not been stopped and searched in over a decade, so I do think that profiling tends to happen more the younger you are (and fit a particular profile).
At the university where I worked, a colleague mentioned that he had been stopped by the campus police four times in his time there (which was longer than my time). He was surprised to learn that I had been stopped thrice over a shorter period, and I am so white I can be seen from great distances. We regularly had to come in at night for patches and upgrades then and it was just a fact of life.
Even in my neighborhood, if I go out walking at night, I get stopped by the police, approximately once every two years. This is with a grey sweatpants, a white T-shirt, and a long white shirt, hardly burglary attire.
I wonder how much of it is a function of being male and, if large, apparently threatening-looking.
I'm 43 and white and have been stopped and searched once - late at night when it was raining and I had my hood up and was walking fast to get back to my friend's place - apparently I was "acting suspicious". I'm pretty sure that if my hood had been down it would never have happened..
Christ, I agree with this article so much it hurts.
I am convinced future people will find this whole saga quite an interesting anecdote of how, for a period of time, _appearing_ to be "anti-racist" was far more important than doing anything positive.
As an aside I find it highly amusing watching the proponents of such changes eat themselves (see Twitch: womxn debacle).
I hate to be "that guy" that does this, but 1984 is a good view on this, albeit an extreme one. For those who aren't aware: in the book the government control the language used by its people, by reducing the number of words in their dictionary.
Instead of "alright, great, amazing", there's "good, plus good, double plus good". Because these people have less language to express themselves with, they are less likely to protest the atrocities that their government is doing.
This new control-as-a-language is called Newspeak[0].
I think language has a key role in how a society develops. I generally agree with the sentiment that moving to using "people with has-a descriptions instead of is-a descriptions", to quote another user in this thread[1], is a great idea. It allows us to view people who are blind as just that, a person who happens to be blind. Using the same language for all human people, and then adding "has-a descriptions" (or properties, if you wanted to use a programming term) puts us all on the same playing field, while acknowledging that some people do have differences.
If everyone just treated everyone else with common decency, the world would be a much better place.
Although I agree, I think language does impact perception. I'm not sure if the master/slave, blacklist/whitelist terms play any role, but I'm happy that we generally stopped calling everything gay as an insult. That changed in my short lifetime.
I also noticed that gender neutral nouns and pronouns are more common in writing (for French and German). Again, that's a good thing.
The craziest example I have is the term "useless mouths" in Nazi Germany. Imagine if your group had that label. I'm certainly glad it's not in use anymore.
I agree those examples represent positive changes. But what is the direction of causation? Did people become less homophobic because "gay" stopped being used as an insult, or the other way round? Did nazism end because people stopped saying "useless mouths", or the other way round?
I think the simple answer is: it's both. Changes in attitude cause language changes, and vice versa. But the balance of these forces isn't necessarily equal, and it may tip from one side to the other at different times in history. I would speculate that, in a society with a sustainable pattern of moral 'growth', more importance is placed on improving our ideas (through open discussion, taking in a wide range of perspectives, including those we find disagreeable) and allowing most language changes to flow organically from that. If the focus shifts too far towards trying to directly influence what people say (at the level of words/phrases), we risk stunting moral progress by encoding the status quo as dogma. Which, unless we are sure we already have the answers to all future moral questions, would be bad.
> Did people become less homophobic because "gay" stopped being used as an insult.
I can only speak from my own personal experience but yes! Absolutely 1000% yes. That is exactly the point and the intended goal of reclaiming the term.
The parent chose the usage of gay as an example of one direction of the push and pull of "language influences norms" and "norms influence language" but that dynamic only really applies when language develops naturally. When people start purposely influencing language then that goes out the window. Reclaiming the gay, f*g, queer, etc. was and is an active effort by the LGBT community and allies to directly influence norms through language.
I think the discrepancy mostly comes down to context and judgement. It's too tempting to forget to apply context and judgement because doing so requires substantially more research and mental effort.
Language and culture are intertwined like electricity and magnetism. Clear causality is only approximate because it always goes both ways, and solutions have to tackle both fronts.
Hell, language defines a lot of norms. Whether or not something is “a thing” boils down to whether there’s a word for it. The difference between homosexuality being seen as a mental disorder and part of everyday life is how we talk about it.
Well, certainly there is language that is completely inappropriate, imagine what the default branch name _could_ be called if we really were attempting to be non-inclusive.
It's very, very clear what language that applies to, however.
I think fighting against racism and sexism is a good fight, and absolutely worth fighting for.
With that said - those are quite low-hanging fruits, if someone wants to engage in virtue signaling. And many companies do.
I also think that classism is an equally big problem in certain "elite" sectors. The diversity there is good, but most of the people - diverse in race or gender - still hail from the same socio-economic groups.
> those are quite low-hanging fruits, if someone wants to engage in virtue signaling
That's basically what fueled a specific part of tumblr for a long time. People one-upping each other about what is unjust and what everyone should be outraged about. I'm not sure as a whole it had a positive impact on the world.
Background: I'm white, my grandfather who is sadly no longer with us, was captured as a slave in the early 1940s forced to work on the Burma Railway, also known as "Death Railway". Content warning: if you Google Image Burma Railway, you're going to see things other than just the railway.
In all my years of pushing to and pulling from master branches, I have not once made an internal association between that action and slavery. Until now.
Offence is subjective of course and having never made this stretch of a link between a master branch and slavery, it is in no way and has never been personally offensive to me. People are different and I accept that others do take offence to this kind of language. But it is a stretch. It is a word that when taken out of context has other meanings.
If a company such as GitHub are saying that this is wrong and must be changed, my question is why now? Why not 2 years ago or 5 years ago? Is it something that wasn't considered offensive and now is? There is so much outrage about this particular subject which doesn't actually solve any real problems. There are of course real issues that we need to get on top of. Contemporary slavery for example. Slavery is still massively at large in many places of the world including and especially the U.S.A. Just because it's gone underground it does not mean that it doesn't exist. We need to do something about it.
This name change only seems to be creating more separation between us all when the world needs us to come together as one to solve the real problems, of which there are many.
I'm Slavic, i.e. the ethic group of people that is the likely etymological origin of the word slave.
I'm not offended by the concept of slavery, or by the words master or slave. Indeed, I think it's important to keep this important concept in mind, so that we can solve the related problem of enslaved humans. In addition, I don't see a problem with these words being used in non-human concept - slavery is only a problem if slaves are human. Personally, I want to be the master to my (non-concious) computer slaves (well, better than the reverse, at least...).
Exactly. Don't have human slave, but slavery of computers is actually something desirable. Until AI become emotional and that's not a thing we should be doing anymore. :)
Disclaimer: I'm a white engineer who is now a VP. I also have a black daughter. I can't speak for the black experience(s) because I'm not black, but I'm also acutely invested in seeing things get better in terms of race relations and opportunities for all people.
A few thoughts:
1. Words matter. They aren't the most important thing per se, but they shouldn't be ignored. Over time, all these little changes do add up.
2. What is the most important thing? Authentic relationships. As I've gotten to know more people of color over the last decade, relationships are what grounds my perspectives and shapes my thinking. Truly understanding someone, and having yourself understood, is critical to overcoming the long-term race problems in America (and beyond).
3. Alongside relationships, doing the hard work of educating yourself is critical. White people in America tend to only see the dominate white culture as the _only_ culture. You need to educate yourself to understand this isn't true. But this is where relationships come in: "Black" culture (or Asian culture, or Latinx culture) is not monolithic, so the relationships create the commentary to understand the broader trends. Both the right and left in America tend to not do this part well.
A final thought: it starts in the schools. Those of us with authority and decision making power need to be investing in spending time mentoring the next generation of engineers.
Why isn't the discussion that it's also quite racist to associate the word "slave" with Blacks/Africans? People don't seem to know any history when they say that. It's not only Africans that got enslaved, peoples of all ethnicities did.
It's just virtue signaling at the end of the day. It's ridiculous watch everyone fight over this while missing the root cause.
1. There's the state of slavery today, which is actually pretty horrible worldwide.
2. There's the issue of race relations in the USA, and the historical context of those relations. In the American context, I think it's fair to focus on that context. At least, I think it's counterproductive to try and redefine the term because it deemphasizes that context.
I'm sorry, but you've got it completely backwards. If you're doing a word association and the first thing you think of for 'black' or 'African American' is 'slave', then yeah that's racist. But slavery in America (and we are talking about America here, Github is based in the US, not ancient Rome) was 100% connected with and built on top of notions of racial superiority. Addressing issues of racism today does require us to ignore or downplay racism in history.
"It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States." — Thomas Sowell
Of course it's also a fallacy to lump the entire phenomenon of slavery under one umbrella. Islam does not allow enslaving people just by attacking them and taking them hostage as what the US did with Africa. Furthermore, the system is fundamentally different under Islam, so much so that the Mamluk Sultanate came to be, something unprecedented in human history.
this is a stupid argument, the African slave trade and it's ramifications are so throughly discussed in America because it is the main type of slavery that occurred in the US
That seems like a completely valid point: Can we still use the terms master/slave when actually discussing the atrocious history of slavery in America? Why are these words considered hateful? They are useful words that describe a concept very clearly.
Interesting thoughts, but it doesn't address the content of the article. The article is saying renaming master to main in Github won't help race relations one bit and he's annoyed that it's probably white people who come up with these things rather than (his example) putting money into retraining for ethnic minorities who change careers.
All your points are true and using positive language around race does matter. Just the desire to remove the word master (which also means principle) from use will not help a single black person or ethnic minority and is simply designed to look good without any real progress being made.
This kind of reaction by Americans are amazing to me as a Mexican. It's like... Americans jump to all these hoops and loops to show how NON RACIST and NON DISCRIMINATORY they are but then keep discriminating and being racist in small everyday things.
I had the opportunity of living in the UK and Germany for several years. Sure, there's racist people there (particularly in Eastern Germany where I lived!). But in general I liked the feeling of not being racist just by... not being racist. When race just doesn't matter, is when you really have killed racism.
So yeah, keep removing statues, renaming stuff and do anything else that makes you sleep at night. But at the end of the day if you want to stop discriminating, just... stop discriminating.
> The article is saying renaming master to main in Github won't help race relations one bit and he's annoyed that it's probably white people who come up with these things.
I think he's right that it was probably white people who came up with it.
My first point is that words do matter. We can debate how much the specific word "master" matters, but my point was that words do matter.
My other point about investing also supports his main thesis.
I guess what the article was suggesting was that context determines whether words matter and it's ridiculous to determine that words matter for someone else without including them in the conversation.
"Words matter" is also the reason the other side of the debate fights so vociferously. Perhaps this is the fault of our educational system, but many cases for renaming would lose much of their steam if the involved and onlookers knew more about homonyms, etymology, and what the actual common usage of these words were in classic literature. Language prescriptivists can't get past their perception of renaming as indulging a slippery game of schizophrenic word-association.
My extremely liberal grandmother who was a NYC English teacher and penpal of many authors despised email, Twitter, pop culture, and Trump for what she thought was the degradation of English. Earlier as an optimistic techie, I thought she was being ridiculous but I recently started seeing her point now that society lines up on both sides of daily culture war arguments over miscommunicated non-existent strawmen and red herrings.
On the other hand, language is not prescriptive. If people start to see words differently, for whatever reason, and thus change their usage - that is nothing new in the history of language and is how languages have evolved since the dawn of time. I can see the utilitarian trade-off of simply realizing this is just that and if it helps more people's psyche than it hurts then maybe we should just go with it (as long as that benefit is proved statistically in the population at large, and isn't just an ivory tower assumption).
I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word but I can see nothing wrong in "master". Not a single moment in my life I thought about slavery when hearing/seeing the word "master". Should we also rename master degrees perhaps?
Once you agree that one word is apt for removal then you agree with the agenda that the article author roundly rejects.
By going down the road of agreeing to some words to be removed you're then imposing a presumption of guilt on anyone who refuses to remove said words. If I maintain some software that uses the word slave or blacklist and I don't accede to making the changes to remove it, or agree to approve a PR that does the same, then it's presumed I am stubborn or worse still, racist. Despite the usage of the word being completely innocent.
Of course, context is everything, which only proves the point. You cannot systematically ban certain words.
Same here, until this debate surfaced I never thought about slavery when I saw these terms.
What made me think more about slavery was the materials that go into computers like cobalt and sulfur. Someone has to go down into the sulfur mine and get that for us. That's an actual master/slave relationship that is going on right now to power all our fantastic infrastructure.
But so much industry has depended on sulfur for so many years that this debate is much deeper and more complex. The ugly truth is that someone far away has to be enslaved for us to live comfortably.
Bring that debate to the front instead and we might find a technical solution to it.
But it's always cheaper to find a desperate person than to maintain a robot that is being attacked by gas and sulfur daily.
And now I am imagining some video where they go down into sulfur mine and tell one of the miners "We bring great news for you! Github changed the default name of master code branches to something else! Gitlab too! It was kind of a little bit annoying a little but they're doing it anyway!"
Yeah and just think, then we could also tell those people about how a wrongly accused man in not their country was released after charitable efforts to clear his name, in the process overturning a negligent evidence handling process which will make things much better going forwards!
And...it still wouldn't matter to those people at all because it wouldn't change their specific situation!
But the parent argument is valid, you just somehow missed it despite it being descibed and illustrated.
github's action isn't absurd because it doesn't change any random person's situation. It's absurd because of the specific people whose specific situations are not improved.
>I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word
I disagree, however I'm not a native English speaker. It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working. We can't ban master/slave as a word or we will loose understanding of what it means. Another poster already mentioned that there are actual human slaves in existence today. I once heard in our time there are more human slaves than ever (mostly due to there being more people overall). It is sad that large companies like Microsoft(Github) choose to waste energy on such pointless activities instead of actually doing something about modern slavery.
Microsoft is still in unique position of being able to pressure hardware makers. Why don't they pressure them into at least trying to improve conditions of actual slaves that mine cobalt and other rare materials at the bottom of their supply chain?
Slave means neither of those things. A slave, in technical terms, means a "dumb" worker (meaning it doesn't make its own decisions about how it operates within the greater system) that is controlled by another module in the system (often called a "master").
And no, "worker" isn't descriptive because it doesn't specify the nature of autonomy within the system - oftentimes, a worker might autonomously pick tasks off a queue and perform work offline or something. A slave is directly, actively and imperatively given commands by another entity in the system.
Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait.
"Slave" is the only word that accurately infers the technical operating aspects of such an actor within system's design.
Stop messing with our vocabulary please. We need it to do real work. Bring on the downvotes, because I know the performative woke crowd loves to ignore these facts.
Yes, and a slave database is probably better called a replica. Because that's more descriptive of what it is.
> Secondary means backup or parity module.
Or it could mean the second device on a bus, IDE master/slave for example seems to me to be better as primary/secondary (or even, first/second.)
> Further, it is also implied that a slave has a lifetime that spans within the lifetime of the master. Workers, replicas, or secondaries do not share this trait.
I dunno, that sounds to me like overloading a word unnecessarily.
> Stop messing with our vocabulary please.
No. Choosing more descriptive words is only a better thing. Stop trying to weirdly limit vocabulary, please.
Slave is the more descriptive word. These aren't my definitions. They have been around for ages. You're the one changing descriptions for your own amusement.
I would have likely upvoted you without the request for downvotes, but sure I guess I'll oblige. Even if it won't convince you to change, maybe I can warn other people you're using such an annoying rhetorical device.
Because the topic is annoying rhetoric. It doesn't do anything to solve the problem of racism or prejudice or poverty or socioeconomic imbalance or guard us against a police state or whatever it is people seek to "fix" with these inane changes.
I'm also very tired of being a labelled a Nazi, hence the tone.
That’s my impression too. “Slave” should be replaced with some other more neutral term, but “master” shouldn’t be a problem. There are multiple uses of it in different contexts, but the shared implication is of a definitive source:
Master copy; Remastered (music); Master of Arts/Sciences; Mastery
Etc. None of that implies a master-slave relationship.
The English word “master” comes from the Latin “magister,” which is freighted with thousands of years of meanings and history. The meaning of slaveowner was not one of those meanings until probably the seventeenth or eighteenth century. In Latin, “magister,” never meant the master of slaves (a “herus” most properly, or a “dominus,” an owner of anything with legal title to that thing). Instead, the “magister” was a leader of a group: the “magister equitum” was a cavalry commander, and a “ludi magister” a schoolmaster or classroom teacher. It is from the latter that we have “master” in the sense of an MA (magister artium) degree, which, like the PhD, was originally a teaching license. The use of the English “master” to refer to slavery is comparatively recent and might well not predate the eighteenth century.
I'd be really interested to hear from any black people here - does the idea of having a device or piece of software being called a 'slave' really actually offend anybody?
I'd never subconsciously linked the term with human slaves, only ever really thinking of it as an abstract concept, until people started complaining about it... Part of it may be coming from a different cultural context, not being from the US though...
In Dutch (both in .nl and .be), the English term 'master bedroom' was fashionable for a few years, until the stigma of that term carried over from the Anglosphere and it's now being replaced (in the woke areas of the country) with 'ouderslaapkamer', which is literally translated 'parent bedroom'. Although now that term itself is 'controversial' (not mainstream controversial, more in small hardcore circles, so I'm not sure if this will actually become an issue) because (to the best of my understanding of this objection) 'parent bedroom' implies that the 2-parents-with-children family form is normative (you can't make this up if you tried to), which it shouldn't be.
Not sure what my point is, maybe that using 'master' for 'main' is no longer outright commonly accepted usage?
About 'parent bedroom', a lot of houses are occupied by house-sharers these days. Some sharers get the 'parent bedroom', others get the non-parent bedroom but they are all the same age. It makes some sense to change the description.
That's a utilitarian argument (I think?) that I could get behind (not that anyone asks for my opinion on what rooms should be called). From that POV I guess it would be best to just call any room that isn't a kitchen or bathroom just 'room' and let buyers decide. But then again, most people don't have much imagination and like to be shown how space can or is intended to be used, much like how a neatly decorated house sells easier than an empty or cluttered one.
But the objections I read about last summer (tried looking but I can't find it any more) were moral, that the term is also 'oppressive' (not sure if that's the actual term they used, that was the gist of it), basically the same arguments that are made for removing 'master' from Git, language frames our thinking etc.
In the UK, lots of real estate descriptions side-step the problem completely and use terms like 'Bedroom 1' for the largest bedroom and 'Bedroom 2' etc for the 2nd largest.
I'd never heard of any stigma around the word 'master' until today... It's still as commonly used to refer to master bedrooms in Australia as it ever was...
In Ye Olde Dayes it referred to someone who had control or authority over a place, object, craft, etc -- a teacher would be a master for example. It's a common word across European languages, and certainly predated the atlantic slave trade.
Probably descended from the Latin word "magister", which (despite Rome having plenty of slaves) didn't neccersarilly refer to a slaveowner -- indeed many Roman slaves were Ludi Magister -- educated slaves that were teachers at Roman schools
Etymology of "master bedroom" seems to come from "Master's bedroom" in boarding schools, where it was the bedroom that the school master occupied (with Master having descended from Roman times)
It should be noted that of all of the ways master is used in this thread, master bedroom is pretty high up there in bad history and connotation. The etymology derives from the 'master of the house', a term which historically served to diminish the agency of wives, servants, and slaves. I don't know about master/main, but I could definitely get behind renaming master bedrooms.
> I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word
Can you clarify this? If one machine/repo/system acts only on the orders of another, wouldn't "master" and "slave" be clear, descriptive choices of words?
I don't think it's ridiculous, no. (But I think wincing at some of your examples would be.)
Really I'm not the best person to judge though. I'm happy to be guided by people who experience racism and groups tackling the legacy of slavery. Because those things seem important whereas my terminology preferences for asymmetric nodes in a distributed system, when there are plenty of sensible alternatives, seem less so.
Let's say you had a database based application and a feature to remove a subset of records. You wouldn't call that feature any variant of "ethnic clensing", "genocide" or "Holocaust", no matter how descriptive those terms were for your specific function.
Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln't be used as a description.
There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"
These aren't metaphors, though. For example, a "parent process" uses the term "parent" that's defined as "a source or origin of a smaller or less important part," not "a father or mother," or one of the other half-dozen definitions
One of the definitions of "slave" is "A device (such as a secondary flash or hard drive) that is subject to the control of another". Is that not a metaphor either?
There is no need for the metaphor to be perfect. It should make clear what each device/process/whatever does without confusing people. The exact details aren't that important, understanding the roles is.
On my computer I can open a folder twice without closing it. I can't open a physical folder twice without closing.
With a race condition, no one cares if both processes started at the same time. That's not an important part of the analogy.
Even your point about killing doesn't really fit with the metaphor. Historically, whipping would be the most common punishment.
I do agree with your idea that the metaphor has to be clear. Modbus replace master/slave with client/server, which tends to confuse people used to the old analogy. It's not ideal, but neither is referring back to that time we could trade people.
Demon, also spelled daemon, Classical Greek daimon, in Greek religion, a supernatural power. In Homer the term is used almost interchangeably with theos for a god. The distinction there is that theos emphasizes the personality of the god, and demon his activity.
The important thing to know here is that it is not how you interpret the words that matter. Social justice isn’t asking how github or existing developers feel because it isn’t a change that takes their feelings into account.
I’m playing devil’s advocate. I don’t have strong feelings on this specific change, but I can see my line of thinking surprisingly absent in this entire thread.
Note how master is not even the main term used to describe people who had slaves. The term typically used is owner, as in "so and so was a slaveowner."
A Marxist would chuckle at the notion that Microsoft would be removing the word "owner" for being offensive.
"I guess mummy and daddy paying $20 mil for a new library to get me a seat at an ‘elite’ school is still meritocracy eh?"
As someone who never even finished college, I think this is a pretty cheap shot. My former boss on Wall Street went to MIT and only got there because his father was a migrant strawberry picker who worked his ass off to get his kid a good education. My last boss was African American, and went to Harvard and MIT - also probably the best damned general manager I've ever worked for. Everyone has their own story, and most of the people I've met who have Ivy degrees are no different from anyone else I've worked with except they were more driven (or guided) as kids and put the time in that it took to get where they wanted to go. I don't begrudge them that for a second.
Maybe not all of those people who are enrolled have donated and then got in, but wealth is directly correlated with getting into these schools, not pure skill. At this point getting into a university is just about memorization and going through the rehearsed motions. There are too many good applicants. The only differentiating factor is money at this point and wealth is required to learn how to do the motions to get in. Everything else is just a dice role.
I also think its important to think about the age of the people you are talking about. If they were older, then it was generally easier to get into almost all universities assuming you had the money (which is a HUGE if). The acceptance rates at all these schools was significantly higher. Not to diminish their accomplishments (because they are tremendous accomplishments), but in the past it was in some ways more "fair" from a financial perspective (though probably unfair in all the other ways that things can be unfair).
You can't discount the idea that wealthy people generally have shared values that are more conducive to successful careers for their children. Therefore it shouldn't be surprising that wealthy students are more likely to get accepted into prestigious universities irrespective of how much money they have.
Having said that, there is no reason why a poor family can't also impart the same values to their children. It's just more difficult because they have to learn those values on their own, rather than being taught from a young age.
So, I was a part of a borderline poor family and somehow made it out into what is essentially an ivy but on the west coast (probably was a pity admission). Poor family's can have these values, however its simply the logistics and stressors. How do you take your kid(s) to a class outside of school hours to teach them how to memorize the answers to a test when you have multiple jobs, public transit sucks or non existent if you live in a place like florida (so your kid can't take themselves), and your kid is also probably ill equipped for that environment because your child's school is more of a day care and not a place to learn because we have given up on schools in the US. If you are a person of color, then its even worse because even getting into an OK school district can be extremely difficult due to Nimbyism which is a proxy for racism (and classism) basically.
Its not values. Poor people and especially poor people of color are setup to fail and its shear force of will that gets you out. I also don't want to discount the effort that middle class+ kids put in. They put a lot too and I don't want to say they aren't deserving. But the playing field isn't level.
I've been surprised that there is a new generation of developers who never heard that master/slave is offensive/irritating to some people. I first ran into this in 1996 when I joined a team building a product that had replication. We changed all the uses of master/slave to supplier/consumer. I had just relocated from the UK, where (at least by my perceptions) race is less of a core societal issue. I remember asking what this was about, someone said there were people who didn't like the use of master and slave, I thought "ok that's interesting" and moved on to fixing bugs.
Fast forward more than 20 years and I find people complaining about github branch names. This seems odd because it's like whoever came up with the default branch name (Linus?) didn't receive the memo I got in 1996.
Anyway, I see this pattern every so often : something that offends group A, where group B is asking "what's the big deal?". I've seen it with dogs in the workplace, with "blackface" and with use of the "n-word", and on and on.
To be honest it mystifies me (the "what's the big deal" part). Why not just take folks at their word? a) they say they're offended, b) whatever change they are asking for is minimal and low-cost, why not react with "I didn't know that, but ok no problem"?
It's interesting you bring up Linus Torvalds in this discussion because he, around the same time as the Github changes, signed off[0] on an update to the terminology used in the Linux kernel. To me it's not a decision I expected, but watching some older talks where it's been brought up to him he seems to be indifferent to the controversy and just wants to focus on the tech.
> Last summer an(other) unarmed black man was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [...] So, what was tech’s big song and dance? Let’s remove offensive terminology from our collective lexicon. There were several casualties, white/blacklist are examples of words deemed to be too offensive to use.
In my memory this started way before the recent BLM protests - around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced.
> around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced.
The things about the CoCs that really annoyed me:
1. People would literally go around projects and send pull requests just to change the code of conduct to improve the wording even tho no one had made any complaints or anything. Anytime a CoC get added you would see more people mess around with the CoC than the code. It was like people just wanted to look like they were improving things while not actually doing anything.
2. The only blog posts I've seen about CoCs at conferences and stuff have sounded nuts. One was for SunshinePHP[0] where one of the infractions was someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better. They wrote that they told the offender to go to his room to prevent him from being assaulted. But mentions nothing happening about a guy threatening violence for flirting. I would understand if they were threatening violence in response to violence but flirting, nah. Then there was the whole fast.ai[1] thing where the infraction was basically someone was offended on the behalf of someone else who wasn't offended.
>someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better
I don't know what you think flirting is but that ain't it. Your man was being a creep and while I'd agree violence isn't the answer, I'm not at all surprised if he was threatened. (I also wouldn't be surprised if he was just told to back off initially but then pushed the issue because that is what creeps do.)
And if for some reason this still isn't obvious to the reader, here's a top tip for how to avoid getting into a fight: maybe don't insult people.
> I don't know what you think flirting is but that ain't it.
Let's be serious it depends on the context of the conversation. She could have been flirting with him and then when he flirted she said "but I have a boyfriend" and he could had said that and she could have agreed. That is flirting. It could have been what we suspect some guy hitting on a woman and she said "I have a boyfriend" and he said that. I used the word flirting because that is what the source used.
The guy was probably a creep and I am not surprised either but if you're going to have a code of conduct for everyones safety then say someone had to go to their room for their safety tells me your code of conduct isn't for safety but for apperance.
CoC is such a strange document. All I’ve seen it do is sit in a repo as a flag post. When I see a license document it gets me thinking about what intentions the project is released with, but when I see a CoC document all I do is mentally filter it out and go about my day..
One would think it could leave some sense about the maintainer(s) being decent in some way. Instead I’m just left with a feeling of coercion if anything.
It just shouldn’t be necessary to “present” yourself as a decent person as the author of some code.
Some document in a project folder online doesn’t make you or me better people. It seems to me more of a futile (and stupid) gesture if anything.
We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Putting a document in our projects telling others that we are doesn’t really change that.
A standardized way of telling others you are a certain way, doesn’t make you so. It relieves us of putting in the effort if anything.
I know this is controversial, but I still love SQLite's old code of conduct (now 'code of ethics'[1]). Its based on some old religious text. If you skip the religious bits, the rest is extremely wholesome. I much prefer it over most projects' CoCs - I've never seen much benefit in spending a lot of words to say "please be civil".
Reading CoCs they are usually full of language that you would expect people would have already learned in Kindergarden. Unfortunately there are too many grown-ups around that seem to not have internalized these things, so while I don't like the patronizing myself, I see some value in writing down a set of "if you wanna collaborate here, please respect these rules".
And while you are right, the code itself doesn't care, there are lot's of interactions around producing that code that are between humans, where behaviour is important.
>Unfortunately there are too many grown-ups around that seem to not have internalized these things
This is true, but they wont read the CoC. And even if they do, they won't follow it. If someone can't practice basic decency, a txt file won't change them. Its an entirely futile effort at best and more likely a virtue signal than actually trying to improve things.
The only thing that works is strict moderation. You don't need a CoC for that.
I agree that a CoC by itself doesn't do anything. But if you want to do strict moderation, you need to put in place some rules that you can use to guide moderation and to make it transparent what the rules ares whch govern this moderation.
Otherwise you end up with arbitrarily enforced rules, created ad-hoc by whoever is doing the enforcing, without a way to know what they are or a way to appeal if you feel wrongly moderated.
Good. Otherwise people will pretend to be a laywer and talk about how _technically_ the rules don't say specifically what they did. Its a waste of time.
But really, in all my time on github and gitlab I have never seen an actual contributor violate common sense and common decency. The only shitty things I have seen have been anon users piling in on issue threads which have gone viral and in that case you just limit the repo to contributors only.
I'm curious how you plan to run a community without formalizing the rules that are expected to be followed somewhere. Restaurants generally have a sign outlining dress and language expectations, why is it so controversial to document community behavior expectations?
There are a number of internet communities which essentially have this in the opposite form - as in "getting insulted is expected, no we are not going to do anything about it".
This was the de facto Linux mailing list way for a bit, and was somewhat documented in a lot of "how to interact and what to expect on LKML" guides.
Is "don't be a dick" not enough? For a long while there was a group of militant people hell bent on having everyone keep a CoC in their repos and ironically being the more intrusive and rude force themselves. I don't think any such document I've read has had any more substance or achieved much beyond the initial kerfuffle
If everyone is going to act in good faith the whole time, sure, it's fine. But as soon as you get one person acting in bad faith, it all falls apart - see the current Republican Party, for example.
Definitely not. My impression though, is that the people who care about their conduct might read the document, and others will just gloss over it anyway. The energy is better spent elsewhere .
I am reminded of the quote from Malcolm X:
"The only way the problem can be solved -- first, the white man and the black man have to be able to sit down at the same table. The white man has to feel free to speak his mind without hurting the feelings of that Negro, and the so-called Negro has to feel free to speak his mind without hurting the feelings of the white man. Then they can bring the issues that are under the rug out on top of the table and take an intelligent approach to get the problem solved."
I've always seen this sad twitter-oriented political correctness dance as being upper middle class white people catering to the complaints of other upper middle class white people who think they know what a working class black person would want. It's a silly middle class status dance of displaying conspicuous virtue while not actually having to lift a finger, just like how Facebook used to be full of people posting cause petitions. Ie, the latest iteration of slacktivism.
One day, IKEA chooses to change their kitchen countertop depth from 28 inch to 29 inch. Supposedly 28 is a nazi number, since 2 and 8 can become B and H, which could mean Blood and Honor, i.e. a nazi reference. Thus, IKEA, issues a press release where they emphasize their inclusive policies and awareness. Since they don't want to cause further trama for their Jewish customers, they're making this change. You happen to know a good number of Jewish friends and ask them what they think. They all think this is crazy, and have never thought about a number being offensive in that way. However, there is one Jew on the internet who has had now published a blog post about being relieved. A lot of non-Jewish carpenters, shop-assistants and handymen debate online on Handymen News and conclude that maybe this doesn't prevent nazi violence today but "it's the least we can do". Why would somebody hold 28 inch so deerly? Unless they're a little bit nazi of course. Also, they agree that any non-Jew really doesn't have a right to speak on the matter, since they can't fully understand what it's like to be a Jew. With IKEA's change, more and more furniture companies follow suit and with the attention, pretty much every company starts to decide to remodel their kitchens, since they obviously don't want to be perceived as promoting nazi ideas. People keep saying that nobody would judge you if you keep your 28 inch kitchen countertop, but you suspect that's gonna be less and less true, as both homes and offices get renovated around you. Also, a lot of people claim that the 29 inch depth is just better, so what's there to complain about? And, if you're building a new kitchen, how hard is it to just mount a 29 inch rather than the 28 one. Turns out there's an adapter for the old shelves too. So what's there to complain about? You feel a little annoyed, but replace your countertop with a 29 inch version and move on.
As I've said when this was discussed a while ago, the problem is not with the word "master", it would be with the word "slave". "Master" has many uses that have nothing to do with slavery, as evidenced in words like "master's degree", "master" vs. "apprentice", "mastery", etc.
Once "master" is used in combination with "slave", it refers back to slavery and leans on it, there is no doubt about it. That's the case for MIDI, for example. But in the Github case it is not related to that at all, and the change is wholly unnecessary. That doesn't make it wrong, as a sign, to change your master branch to "main" branch, of course. There is a lot of arguing in bad faith in this area. As if showing a bit of good will and following a simple name change guideline would seriously harm any of those complainers. But I agree that this change can is not really justified linguistically.
Personally I don’t even think master/slave is bad. Do black people look at the word “slave” and think “Oh, that’s about me”? Does a white person see it and think “This must be about black people”? I just cannot see the value. It just feels like brainless censorship.
And more importantly, like the post saliently points out, it gives the illusion of affecting change while in reality doing nothing for the people it’s supposed to be done for.
Hire more POC. Mentor and tutor POC in engineering. Don’t police innocuous words.
I'm not sure telling everyone to associate a race with "master/slave relationship" is the best idea. Black people aren't the only ones to have been enslaved.
The association varies based on geography. American history is inextricably tied to the slavery of black people, so it's fair that the master/slave relationship is overwhelmingly associated with them in America
What do you mean? Slavery in America was inextricably tied to racism just as the Holocaust was inextricably tied to Antisemitism or the Civil War was inextricably tied to slavery. None of those aspects should be ignored or downplayed. History can be ugly and uncomfortable, but we should try to learn from it rather than ignore it.
> Once "master" is used in combination with "slave", it refers back to slavery and leans on it, there is no doubt about it.
This is not how language works. E.g. if you recall the debate about this, some people dug up an email from, I guess, Linus that mentioned master and slave repositories and some reasoning around that repositories are identical to branches yadda-yadda. (Or maybe the email was actually referring to the terminology used in another DVCS they were taking idea from.)
So they have proven that say some 15 years ago the thing was originally named so because of the master/slave concept (the technical concept). However, nothing proves better than the need to dig this up that meanings indeed do change. Especially when you use a name that has multiple meanings, like master. They named it master because of master/slave but the majority probably never knew this (I've never heard anyone talking about a slave branch) so just assumed master is master as in master copy, source of truth, etc.
This is how language works. After all, this is how the word master acquired the meaning of "owner of slaves" which it did not have originally. So yes, it was named master because it was related to the concept that we (used to?) describe with the expression that does refer to slavery but we definitely changed the context over time.
Regarding the name change, you can see several ways how it does harm. One of them was described in the post: by diverting the discourse and using up the effort that could have been spent on handling the real issues. Whether we are talking about people who did want to do something positive and now they feel they did (this is what the post is about) as well as the people who could have been recruited for taking meaningful actions but got pissed off/tired of this stupidity.
I honestly think that both this master branch thing and black/whitelist was 100% stupid because, as said in the blog post context . I'm not sure about the master/slave, but I'm 100% willing to accept that it can be offensive (and I'm treating it as such), though it would be interesting to hear the opinion of those affected, like the post author. (I just miss the nuisances here as I'm not from the US. Before hearing all the debate around this, I would have simply said that slavery was a wide-spread phenomenon during human history and it refers to that concept. That doesn't mean we don't think it's a terrible thing to do to a human being or that we don't empathise will all of those who had to endure it during their life.)
In Russia we have a joke that would roughly translate to this:
Lesson in the primary school. Teacher says: "Kids, today we will be learning letter 'A'. Who can tell me some words that start with this letter?" Kids: "Apple! Address! Adventure!" One boy, Vova, says quietly: "Ass." "How rude, Vova!", the teacher exclaims, "There is no such word in English!". Vova, quietly: "How strange... Ass is there, but the word is not?"
Interesting that "нецензурная лексика" translates as "obscene language", whereas the literal translation would be "censored lexical expressions"; Interesting that in Russia censorship is always something imposed from above, whereas now in the US it's more a thing of social norms (where it is a bit harder to argue about where these norms came from).
I just want to add a link to this[0] post here as a counterpoint for why changing language _can_ matter.
The author seems to imply that the name change is all about being non-offensive to some people. Since the author doesn't find the language offensive, they conclude that name change is only political correctness or virtue signalling and a hollow gesture. I do not agree with that. Language and words are very powerful in how we perceive the world. A changing vocabulary is part of cultural change.
> Since the author doesn't find the language offensive
You're missing the point, the author concludes that the companies decide that the language is offensive without asking the people who are supposedly the offended party.
Are you sure about that though? They didn't publish anything about their internal decision making. It is an assumption that they didn't talk to any person of color. The idea of using so called neutral terms is not new: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3243656.stm
See my other comment, the author says the change didn't involve the black developer community. I have no knowledge either way, just emphasizing their point.
Sure. I'm just calling their point into question because I see a lot of people of color that are actively engaged in the evolution of language in the context of slavery. The Rijksmuseum in The Nederlands has changed most occurrences of 'slave' to 'enslaved person' and trying to find out the actual name of the person depicted, among other things. The commission that was responsible for this change was headed by a person of color[0]. This isn't a movement that we are only seeing in Silicon Valley.
As far as I know, most of the changes happening at large companies regarding this have been driven internally primarily by people of color - at MSFT, which owns GitHub, some of these changes were being driven by Employee Resource Groups (affinity groups) which are made up of those who would be affected by the language, for example
Everything humans do is part of cultural change, because what humans do is change things.
The post is about prioritisation. Moving the needle in a way that matters, not merely doing something so we can pat ourselves on the back for doing it.
Just because you can change something it doesn't mean you should or ought to. Opportunity cost....
No, it's not saying that at all. You are missing all the nuance.
It's saying that the change which has a small effect is never worth while (and... pay attention now. This is the other part of the post you missed: context)....
*IN RELATION TO* the larger effect which costs the same in time/effort/capital/energy/emotions/stress/give-a-fuck.
Ok, so what is that larger effect that costs the same, then?
The idea that you need to do something that is better before you can do something that is less, even if the cost is the same seems to imply that there is only a limited amount of energy that is expendable on these topics.
As seen from the bucketloads of comments and posts about this OLD issue (the python link is from 2018) it seems there's enough energy going around.
The idea that something can't be good, just because it is not the highest item on a list is nonproductive.
Nobody is saying that X isn't good.
Everybody is saying that X is good, but Y is much better.
So if you want to make a productive choice then go for Y, not X!
At the very least, if you are going to choose X anyway stop trying to persuade everybody else to choose X with you, when they are already focusing on Y. That's just attention-seeking behaviour.
You are extremely uncharitable. There's no point of engaging you further.
From the article, I don't believe this is "the opinion of a white guy":
Being a highly paid software engineer, like most of you reading this, did not stop a bully van flying up the curb I was walking on and 7 City of London police officers pinning me against a wall with guns in my face. They wouldn’t believe it was possible for someone like me to work in central London till one of them searched me and found my work ID. All this because I fit a description. What was this description? I don’t know, black male between 4’11 and 7’4 probably.
I read this whole article, super disappointed. Its nothing but a bunch of assertions about something being offensive without even a small effort to show why it is. This just perpetuates the idea that this is just virtue signaling and has no effects.
I'm a black american and I think it's more racist to attribute the word "master" to master/slave dynamic. Especially when I've always thought of something like "master" in the context of GitHub to refer to a "master" copy. This change is ineffective.
The people pushing the agenda see racism everywhere. The attribution probably has never occurred to most people in tech, because they are not obsessed with other people's color or beliefs.
Eliminating the usage of words with offensive connotations from the English language is double plus good.
edit:
Downvotes and the wording of some responses make me concerned that some folks may be unaware of the reference. Doubleplusgood is a newspeak word used in the book 1984. Newspeak is a language that is used to eliminate the ability for people to express unapproved thoughts because there are no words with which to express the concepts to others.
Slaves exist today. What else would you call it when the economic system makes people desperate enough to walk into a sulphur hole barefoot to carry chunks of sulfur out that will be used in all sorts of industry, including the making of circuit boards for switches and computers that power the infrastructure we're using right now?
I get the feeling sometimes that language is unstable in the absence of outside forcing.
Stupid, moron, retard. People start using them as a pejorative and so a new neutral term is required.
Lavatory, toilet, water closet, bathroom. People don't like talking about poo so they keep using euphemisms to describe the room where it happens. This one is a favourite of mine as some people find 'toilet' distasteful despite it being the furtherest from the actual action taking place.
Very, literally. Not sure where this one is headed, but if it's happened at least twice, it'll shift again some time.
Are we doomed to keep shifting language to keep up taboos and keep the meaning of words which naturally will shift?
The argument of the author is that he feels like tech is ONLY doing the name changes and is congratulating themselves about being inclusive afterwards.
I agree with this observation. For reasons that the author has articulated far better than I would in this comment, so please read the whole thing.
There are parts of this article I agree with, and parts I disagree with, but this part just screaaaaams "I cannot possibly picture that any part of the world is in any way different from the US":
> “Meritocracy!”, I hear you cry. “They pick from the most talented students. The ones that worked the hardest to get into the most elite schools. The black students should have just worked harder”. I guess mummy and daddy paying $20 mil for a new library to get me a seat at an ‘elite’ school is still meritocracy eh?
It also seems like a complete digression from racial justice.
Also, it’s surprising considering the author mentions having aggro with police in London. it’s certainly unfortunate that the Metropolitan police decided to racially profile him. However, statistically, more people die in police custody in the land of the free than in Britain, so this terrible incident doesn’t represent the quality of policing in the UK.
Tertiary education in the U.K. can be expensive (unless you are Scottish), but university admissions are open to everyone without having to donate millions for a library
Then that is a really weird passage. HBCUs are a purely American thing. Legacy admissions are a purely American thing. Paying to get your kids into a university is a purely American thing.
Also, the author uses the American spelling "curb". If they do live in London, they are presumably a migrant from the US.
Oh, interesting. Do you know where they're from? It sounds to me like it must be a place that's very Americanized, for sure.
Edit: Nevermind, I misread the paragraph about London as being just a story about something happening in London, rather than abeing about something that happened to the author in London.
The great irony with these terminology changes is that those most tripped up will be learners with access to fewer up to date resources and autodidacts who lack access to the usual educational opportunities afforded to those pursuing a career in tech.
Isn't the sort of person most likely to be tripped up by this the sort of person it is nominally supposed to help? Isn't it much more likely that it proves a stumbling block to the black teenager teaching herself to code from resources a few years old than to the white undergraduate whose new edition textbook will include the change and who has a professor and peers to explain it just in case?
If you want marginalized outsiders to have an easier path into programming isn't a change that makes that just a little bit trickier in order to make those with established tech careers feel better about themselves the wrong sort of change?
Black people make up 3% of the UK population according to a quick Google search. If there are 7 black people in his company of ~250, that's almost 3%. This is just one data point but it's the one he's using in his post and getting upset over the lack of black representation, when it's proportionate with the overall ratio of ethnicities in the wider population.
The 44% figure comes from the Greater London Authority, but should be clarified a bit. There is a BBC article[0] about this which states "... 44% of the city's people are now of black or ethnic minority origins".
I don't know if London demographics are the point of comparison, e.g. if you looked at FAANG's demographics you would not compare them to the Bay Area as their hiring pool is much wider than people who grew up locally.
I view language policing as a type of misguided adherence to a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which basically states that people can't think what there is no word for in their language. This is utter nonsense; people have likes and dislikes and biases and will always find new ways to express these views.
There was a long period in linguistics research where linguists thought they could understand language best by discovering the etymologies of every word; this drove a lot of the work of recovering Proto-Indo-European. They thought that if they knew where a word came from that they would then know the absolute truth regarding the meaning of the word. Things changed at the beginning of the 20th century, and this approach is now considered pseudo-scientific; linguistics is data-based now, with meanings of words determined by their usage and context.
"Master" is a pretty neutral word, with about a dozen meanings if you check Meriam-Webster. Even if the top meaning listed were "one having authority over another" (and it's not), this is still too vague to simply declare that it's associated with slavery and needs to be avoided. There's nothing about a Git repository that's directly reminiscent of American slavery, so it's quite arbitrary to declare the word "master" inappropriate in this context. It could be quite a different story if the spelling were "massah", which would directly evoke the image of slavery.
In general, though, even for actual offensive words I think the banning approach is counter-productive. Melioration, the loss of a negative connotation, is a perfectly natural process, and by outright banning a word you prolong the process or even strengthen the negativity of it. Let negative word meanings fade out of our consciousness as the negative feelings that gave birth to them disappear.
I'm Asian, wasn't born in America and didn't grew up in America as well. I don't have a horse in this race. I don't feel annoyed to change that term. I'm only annoyed if someone guilt trip me if I don't change the name out of ignorance (i.e, I don't follow politics, no time for social media). I don't think I have any bias against women or minority in tech. Changing main or master or slave doesn't ring a bell or evoke an emotion in me. If my boss wants it master or main or slave or white or black, I'll do it.
I'm very very surprised about this whole identity politics thing. First time I came to the US and I conversed with this Asian women friend, who told me that she wanted to go to business school, and I asked her "why business school?" and suddenly another Asian women (friend of her) cut me and said "Oh why not, because she is a woman?" and I was like "wow, where did that come from? what does that even mean?" and since that day I know that US racial issue is fucked up big time.
I just keep my mouth shut talking to anyone in a minority status, born in the west, that I don't know well. I've seen it go wrong several times so I'm just 100% business. I'll get hate for admitting this, but what am I supposed to do? No one wants to think critically or challenge their beliefs on the matter, so if I'm not willing to 100% toe the line if I do make a mistake then either I have to debase myself in an Orwellian "there are two fingers" moment, or I get in trouble. I'm not willing to do either.
In my mostly 99% Asian circle of friends, we have a few white people, and I can't help but be super uncomfortable every time the topic of racism being brought up, because I was thinking "dang, how would these white friends in our circle feel, they must've felt uncomfortable in these kinds of conversations". Yeah, heads you lose tails I win kinda situation.
In my circle of Asians, we have our own trouble as well. My wife is Japanese, and I grew up influenced heavily by Japanese culture (I'm Indonesian Chinese), but majority of my circle is 99% Koreans and Chinese. So yeah every time WWII or Japan/Korea/China thing gets brought up I also just stay silent and will just ask my wife to go home early or pretend we have some business to do. Definitely something will go wrong. We are in our 20s - 30s, and WWII are our grandparents generations battle. We are aware of Japan's WWII problem, but we aren't gonna pretend we know what to do.
It fits the bill. Asians are treated as white in tech. There's never any conversation around Asian-Americans. It's awkward because we're not quite Asian, but not quite treated as fully American either. Many programs have checkboxes to identify as minority groups (black, LBGTQ+, women, LatinX, which is great), but not Asians, who are statistically one of the biggest minorities at ~5%.
Despite my family being refugees, much of which died getting here. Despite eastern culture being almost the polar opposite of western culture. I wish that counted for something more.
Not asking for any special treatment because I feel Asian-Americans just put their head down and do the work. But it's stark how silent the conversation around Asian-Americans is, except for when we talk about Crazy Rich Asians.
> It fits the bill. Asians are treated as white in tech.
Or are they treated as asians? This whole thing is complicated, but including asian people as 'white' when it is colloqially used to mean 'caucasian european' for the most part, is just disigenuous and moving the goalposts.
Never in tech have I seen conversation about Asian Americans been brought up. When I say, they're treated as white, it's more like they're treated "not a POC", which only leaves a designation of white. Except Asians don't get put in leadership positions as easily as white counterparts (bamboo ceiling). I've seen many times (online at least) where people have explicitly said Asians don't count as POC, despite facing a large brunt of racism.
It is a time where we are getting violently targeted. And while people are jumping at the bit to speak up for every other group, we’re forced to uncharacteristically muster it up ourselves. I imagine if I was any other minority group talking about my experiences, it'd be taken more seriously.
What if I made a similar argument except I replaced "asian" with "french"? How would you prove there's a difference between that argument and your argument?
It is a tautology in a sense, but the point is that the case isn't "asian people are treated like white people in tech". The case is "white and asian people are treated like X in tech".
Okay, sure. I’m just drawing an equivalence to how Asians are treated to how whites are treated, rather than how I think they should be treated, as POCs. That’s my point, a point of comparison and contrast.
I've seen discrimination against Asians. Sometimes a current of disrespect or resentment exists. I also notice a distinct different between how an Asian, or non-white in general, is treated when they are in a superior position vs an inferior position.
You never feel uncomfortable when you are the only non-white? I too am non-white and see myself as white, due largely to the way my mother raised us.
My Father is white and my mother is hispanic, but I've been asked if I am Asian or Pacific Islander many times. I've also noticed a distinct difference in how people treat me when they see me, vs virtual or phone.
I meant to draw attention to how many non-whites are forced to immerse themselves in mostly white groups and can feel ostracized in the US.
Doesn't matter. If you take a particular viewpoint, there's a whole strata of American society that will call you white/black based on politics alone. Or you'll be called a race traitor, etc... e.g. "Asians are considered white because they have privilege."
The only problem with your statement is you didn't include women, the disabled, gays, any trans person, or any other newly conjured victimized group in your 100% business attitude. It is simply too politically incorrect to deal with people in these groups as critically thinking beings even if they are so best to just avoid any conversation that isn't absolutely necessary. The best bet is to pretend to be a hapless robot and make the interaction end as soon as possible, much in the way minority groups attempt to minimize their interactions with the police. It is a useful survival mechanism in a no win scenario. Stray into victimization territory and you'll either be asked to self-flagulate or be accussed of an '-ism'. I waiting for the word 'conversation' to be redefined by the intersectionalists much like 'racism'.
It sucks, too. I am super progressive but rather critical of solutions. Which is to say, i agree with an assessment of almost all problems and want to discuss solving them. BUT, discuss, is the key there. I'm interested in peoples views. On what actually can solve the problems. Racism for example i believe as a series of mitigation strategies and a core principle of education and standard of living.
Yet, i don't discuss this stuff with anyone interesting. Just my core group, and my core group has had this conversation to death.. nothing to be gained anymore.
So i don't grow on these subjects. I don't feel more progressive. I don't feel like i understand the problems better, or the solutions, and certainly don't know which areas i'm motivated to help in.
Because i want to discuss, to critically analyze the problem space and try to question and verify solutions, i'm terrified of being labeled an -ist.
This isn't a "woe is me" post. Rather, this is my explanation that in my eyes i am _less progressive_ as a result of this culture. I _act/help less_ in this culture. This culture shuts me - a self identified very progressive liberal - down.
Purists of any ideological bent have a tendency to alienate potental friends and excite their adversaries due to their overwhelming emphasis on argument by authority and appeals to shame. They are divisive by definition and generally lose their struggle because of it. Your comment is an excellent reflection of how the purists cut off their noes to spite their face.
>> First time I came to the US and I conversed with this Asian women friend, who told me that she wanted to go to business school, and I asked her "why business school?" and suddenly another Asian women (friend of her) cut me and said "Oh why not, because she is a woman?" and I was like "wow, where did that come from? what does that even mean?" and since that day I know that US racial issue is fucked up big time.
It is, but I'd encourage you to examine that a bit more from the perspective of the person weighing in. Yes, you meant nothing by the question, and you would have asked it regardless of the other person's gender, but what is interesting is -someone got defensive-. Why? She's hypersensitive; is it more likely she got that way apropos of nothing, that she has just bought into some victim culture that is determined to create claims of systems issues wholecloth to rail against, or because she -has- run into misogyny enough times that she assumes the worst?
Again, it's not reflective of you, but take an empathetic view to where people like that are coming from, as it's not a vacuum.
Oh yeah for sure, but this conversation already derailed, so no further dialog was necessary. I was coming from a point of view "small talk on a dinner table during hangout" and she came from a view of "You are sexist and I am mad at you" so, better to let the conversation die down and continue another time.
> she came from a view of "You are sexist and I am mad at you"
Is it fair to you? No, it isn't.
However you need to realize that _that question_ has been used, probably verbatim, in bad ways against her or her peers... therefore she has pattern-matched this into a sexist question too.
This is not an irreversible state. 99% of these communication breakdowns can be solved with a polite correction: "no, didn't cross my mind. I am sincerely curious about what drives that career decision, if I may ask".
I won't get entangled into a straw-man battle-royale, so if the person cannot recognize they made a mistake and correct course: sure thing I'll retreat.
That hasn't happened to me just yet, but I know it could. Fair? No, but it is what it is.
I am aware we are dissecting a quickly summed-up situation here, so my argument might not apply to the actual encounter you experienced. But if it does, I think you and lots of others are skipping on conversations that you actually wanted to have due to a very small and temporary defect on the dialogue.
Because the alternative is she's hypersensitive without any reason. You can, of course, -decide- that the person is just unreasonable, rather than try and figure out what might have caused her to respond the way she did, and be empathic towards it, but it doesn't seem like it'll get you far in life.
Well, the alternative is that a lot of people around her are misogynistic for no reason, so your empathy for her means you're assuming a lot of other people are unreasonable assholes. How far does this get you in life?
I'm a bit sad to see that awkwardness is seen as worse than resolving the conflict. I don't know the situation but I like to think that I would find it worth it to have a difficult conversation rather than keep everyone smiling.
But then I also am not part of any minority group. I'm a white male in a western country who is good at what he does, which would let me incur a lot of awkwardness before someone thinks that the problem is me. That might be different in your situation, or simply in that context, I don't know. Regardless, it makes me sad that there was a need to bury the topic.
Honestly, you're absolutely correct in encouraging an empathetic perspective but I would counter that your dismissing the very common reality of the victimhood mentality being a root cause to a lot of these types of outbursts is a bit short sighted. While the underlying reason this mentality exists is certainly, as you described, born from decades of misogyny, there is an entire population that has not necessarily experienced it to nearly the degree that warrants the level of hypersensitivity they exhibit.
I am not saying misogyny doesn't continue to exist, but it is now very often misattributed in scenarios that technically fit the criteria (man didn't hire woman, etc) but are in fact the result of other factors (woman wasn't a good hire). It's a slippery slope and the reason we have such outrage in response to equality movements in general. Kneejerk reactions to non-misogynistic interactions are counter productive and serve to undermine the validity of the complaints against misogyny by giving naysayers a reason to dismiss them.
I grew up as part of the overwhelming majority in a place with a small but distinct minority. I tried to befriend the minority and was often harshly pushed out. I came to think they were oversensitive because of some victim culture.
Then I spent some years in a culture where I stuck out by skin color, hair color, language skills, height, shoe size--pretty much every way possible. People were not mean to me or racist towards me. But every waking moment I knew I was different. And I knew I would never have the right hair or skin or height or accent to fit in. I would always be an outsider.
For the first time, I understood in some small way that minority from my youth who seemed to have a chip on their shoulder. I can't say that I have had their experience, but I have had an experience that opened my eyes to realize what it means to always know you are an outsider.
I wish they didn't react so negatively. But I think I know better now than to condemn their hostility outright. My experience was some short years as an adult. And I wasn't treated as inferior. How would it be to grow up under that and to expect it for your entire life?
>> there is an entire population that has not necessarily experienced it to nearly the degree that warrants the level of hypersensitivity they exhibit
Does it need to though? A black person may never have been a victim of police brutality, but if they have experienced a couple of questionable stops, is hypersensitivity really "victim mentality", and not -completely understandable-?
Most racism, misogyny, etc, nowadays -isn't- overt. Almost no one is going to say "I didn't hire you because you're a woman", because they know doing so is going to get them socially ostracized at best, legally culpable at worst.
Of course kneejerk reactions are counter productive, because it's easy for people who -weren't- coming from a racist, misogynist, etc, position to get defensive. That doesn't mean they aren't understandable, warranted, and that someone on the receiving end of that claim doesn't need to seek empathy in how they respond. That's allyship; understanding that a cry against injustice, even directed at you, isn't something you need to get defensive about, but to instead see for what it is. Trying to blame them for having a victim mentality is to dismiss the basis they even made the claim in the first place, thereby making us part of the problem.
Is this a term for something real, or just a contentless way to denigrate people who claim to have been victimized? Is there some diagnostic criteria other than "that person annoys me"?
It's real. The most privileged people I know (and later cut out of my life entirely) are the first to play the victim card. We're talking the type of people who would choose to show up to work late every day and then complain that they were fired because they were [insert trait]. Or people that refused to study and then demanded they get extra support and financial aid because they came from a 'difficult' background.
Some definitely white people claim to be minorities because some percentage of people will use every card in the deck to get ahead. The tragedy is that these people sour the conversation and make people distrust those who bring up the actual issues they face.
I’m reminded of an incident at a local school. The principal, a black woman, became increasingly incompetent. The teachers, many of them POC themselves, were now collectively doing her job for her. They tried to get her removed.
The NAACP got involved. There was outrage and shame to spare. The principal wrapped herself in righteous indignation, despite herself being in the position of power.
Months later, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Oops.
I’m sure this person definitely experienced racism and sexism in her life and career. There were undoubtedly many incidents when she was slighted by white people. It’s America, after all. But in this particular case, she was not the victim. The teachers were the victims. The students were the victims. Yet she still acted the victim. Hence, “victimhood mentality”. “Contentless” can cut both ways.
The insidious thing about these types of incidents is how it discredits the rest of the racial justice movement. We need to hold our outrage to a higher standard.
It's real, but it's rarely ever just one or the other. There's no situationally objective criteria for whether someone has victimhood mentality or is actually a victim.
When you get into the territory of microaggressions and subconscious bias, which are real problems but aren't necessarily clearly benign or bad on a case by case basis, the lines can get very blurry depending on who the observer is. Generally you should give the benefit of the doubt, because part of the nature of the social problems we talk about come from blaming the weak for being weak.
Does that logic work for why I cross the street when I see a black person coming my way?
Why? I'm hypersensitive; is it more likely I got that way apropos of nothing, that I just bought into some racist culture that is determined to create claims of issues wholecloth against blacks to rail against, or because I -have- been mugged by a black person enough times that I assume the worst?
Would you take an empathetic view to where I'm coming from?
A black man, or just any man wearing street clothes?
Any man wearing street clothes, or just any man wearing street clothes on an otherwise empty street?
Because if you do that in broad daylight, on a well populated street, because a black woman in business clothes appears to be a possible threat, but you don't do it for the white man in street clothes on an empty street at night, then it sounds like maybe you have a pretty racist heuristic.
Otherwise, yeah, I'm pretty empathic; race may indeed be an additional input, especially given your history, but if it's just one more heuristic that makes you slightly more likely to cross the street, and you also -recognize- that it's a generalization you're making, and that it's unfair to the individual even though it's based on personal experience...yes, I'm empathic towards where you find yourself. Certainly, as a man, if the input of "a man approaching" on its own caused you to be more likely to cross the street, I don't view it as some sort of misandry, and would not take it personally.
(And yes, I know this is an attempt at a rhetorical counter argument, but I'm purposely treating it as a real position to make clear I don't view it as a particularly compelling argument)
What if you had been mugged by a white person? Would you then carry the same fears moving forward? I have to assume you are not black, and thus, to you, black is "the other". You are making the assumption that because one person was dangerous, everyone else with that skin tone is dangerous. I'm sorry, but that is textbook racism
EDIT: After a second look I realize this is probably what the parent post is trying to get at :-)
It's a bias. Let's assume that all muggers wear red pants (or you have been mugged mostly by people in red pants). So when you see somebody in red pants you cross a street. It's surely not a textbook racism, since no race is involved. Also how do you know that anybody wearing red pants is a mugger? The tragedy of blacks is that they can't change skin color, unlike pants. This bias will exist until crime percentages will at least equalize between blacks and whites (do they?). You can call it a racism if you want but it doesn't change anything. I have worked with many blacks, I had zero problems with any of them, I don't consider them worse than me in any way, but I will cross that street. Sorry. There is a difference between a concrete person and statistics.
Now for jumping to the defensive the moment a man asks you a benign question, because you assume he is sexist because of his gender - isn't that sexism?
It's not an American thing, this happens everywhere. I moved to London from the US a few years ago, and when I first moved here, interacting with unfamiliar cultures, I made these kind of mistakes all the time.
I thought some people might find it amusing the kind of mistakes I made. Here are a couple.
I asked my Pakistani heritage boss when he immigrated, innocently. Note I'm an immigrant to the US myself and now the UK, so I thought it was not a bad question to ask. He's British born though, and considered himself a British citizen foremost. And given the rampant racism in the UK against those of Pakistani origin (many white Brits don't consider anyone Pakistani to be "proper British"), well you could see how he might be offended at my question. Fortunately he just laughed at my rudeness.
Another time, I made a bad joke to a French colleague of mine who I'd been working with for a couple weeks. I think he said I didn't seem like a normal American, and I responded saying I didn't think he looked French, not wearing a striped shirt and a beret. Oh man, that really dug my grave right there. Saying he didn't look French was probably the greatest insult I could ever have said. He is of Turkish heritage, and Turkish people have been persecuted and treated poorly for a long time in France, including lots of racism based on "they don't look French". He was angry with me for a very long time over that. I apologized to him profusely, saying I was just an idiot American, and I think he forgave me eventually.
I imagine so for monorepos with plenty of developers working on it. But wouldn't that be solved easily with "git rebase -i <the_branch_that_change_the_name>" and maybe some other CI/CD pipeline.
It would be a pain, but they're not changing any existing repos so it's up to the team to coordinate if they want to adopt such a change themselves (and GitHub have enhanced some of their tooling around branch renames to make it easier to do as well).
> "Oh why not, because she is a woman?" and I was like "wow, where did that come from? what does that even mean?" and since that day I know that US racial issue is fucked up big time.
Not race in particular. Just identity politics. In this case, it seems one of the woman friend in my circle thought I was being sexist to her friend. We were Asians, but I didn't grow up in the US, but these 2 women do. The immediate reaction to that question must had evoked something deep within her, that I attribute to her upbringing here in the US.
You are right, but I would add another item. She forcefully inserted herself in the conversation you had with your friend, and did it in a way that changed the conversation to the worse, with the tone becoming adversarial, and the direction of the thought rather different from what the original participants of the conversation intended. When it happens to a friendly group of people (as was the case here) it is okay, the confusion can be resolved peacefully and the conversation can move whichever way the three of you choose, being friends and all. But sometimes it happens in a larger scale, and then the conversation can be destroyed. I really wish people had been more conducive to maintaining a dialogue, we need to maintain a decent level of discourse in the society (and, more particularly, in our industry).
My last job did a bunch of faux diversity tactics starting around the same time this happened at google. Part of it was starting "support" groups for different groupings, for example one for Asian employees or another for LGBTQ. This is good.
However, I had to work weirdly hard to also have one for us Jewish employees. Weirdly hard when you consider all that had to be done was make a slack channel.
Anyway, I suggested a group for Jews, and when I finally got someone to make the channel (begrudgingly), they asked what I wanted to name it. The other channels had names like "InspirAsian" so I wanted to be clever. I came up with "the tribe", as the term "member of the tribe" refers to someone being Jewish. The channel was made, the other 10 Jewish devs were happy.
A day later I got a worried slack message from another employee. He was worried the name "The Tribe" would be offensive to Black employees, I guess because African societies are supposed to be called tribes? How about the 13 Tribes of Israel, Steve?
I think it's a great example of the kind of fake progressivism discussed in the article. The org didn't care about making a group for us because we are white, the overly concerned employee getting preemptively offended over his own ignorance. It's all so telling about how little people really care about inclusion.
It's all about ticking boxes and patting themselves on the back. I had similar situation, but very little people wanted to participate as they didn't want to be pigeonholed. They wanted to be treated like everyone else.
I’ve seen many Microsoft employees internally comment on how they don’t like the term “master branch”. I believe Microsoft’s renaming (this is my personal belief) was somewhat influenced by that internal push.
It may not mean much to you, but if it made some people feel more comfortable it’s a good change and has very few downsides.
It’s not pandering, it’s taking an action that makes some people feel more comfortable at work. They aren’t doing anything to provide pleasure to the people asking, they are doing it to help reduce their pain.
I’ve spoken to multiple black Americans internally about this and they strongly associate “master” with slavery since members of their families where literally owned by people and had to call those people “master”.
Maybe it would matter to them less if the US had abolished slavery and made people of all color equal, but since we instead created racist policies that historically put non-whites at a disadvantage, I can see how they have a strong dislike for that word.
In this time, software engineering is likely the most powerful professional skill in the entire world.
As a result, the entire world is changing to suit the desires of software engineers. (such as throwing massive sums of money at them)
So if your contributions are significant enough, your entire world will change to suit your preferences, whether the people in your world want to or not.
This is my sense as well. Much of change comes down to daily "inconvenience." In that way, Guggenheim's "An Inconvenient Truth" nailed this.
Attacks on "main" as being ineffectual or indications that "the real problem to solve is this over here so don't do this" doesn't diminish the value of iterative changes.
SCRUM focuses on learning by doing, and we may look back on main vs master as an experiment that had no effect. Or we may look back on branches with a master branch and feel differently about them. It is far too early to tell.
> It signals to other privileged white boys, “hey, come work for us, we pretend to care more than all our competitors xoxo”. This shit aint for us, it never was.
This, a thousand times. It was never about black people, it was always about wealthy, largely white progressives comforting themselves with the narrative that they're valiant defenders of black folks (namely from those horrible oppressors, middle- and lower-class whites) without having to do anything. This is why "defund the police" is supported by a majority of wealthy progressives but a small minority of black Americans.
An ordinary writer on a topic like this does not bury a link to Daily Stormer in the middle of the text.
Odds on this is a false flag "AsABlackMan" article & everyone responding to it has been had. Lobste.rs pulled it for this reason & the comments on r/programming are pretty direct.
That is extremely odd. The previous times I looked at this thread, I skimmed the article once or twice and mostly focused on the comments. Inevitably there was flamewar, trolling, and other dreck, but large parts of the discussion are worthwhile [1], even compared to the throng of threads HN has already had about this. I think that the comments from black software engineers on this issue are particularly worth reading and it makes me happy that HN is a place where they choose to share their perspectives [2] and the rest of us can hear them.
That said, that DS link is weird enough that a user emailed about it. My initial reaction was that we would need more evidence than just one link to make a moderation call about this being trolling. Fortunately the user who emailed questioned that further, which prompted me to read the article closely. Having read it closely, I've changed my mind—I'm not buying it. More precisely: I think the odds are > 50% that there's something false about this piece (and if so, most likely a whole lot false about it), so I'm going to restore the flags on it and put nofollow on the link.
This is one of those shitty situations where all we can do is guess and guessing wrong has bad outcomes either way. If the article is authentic I would want to respect the author. If the article is not authentic, then it's against both the rules and spirit of HN and should not be here. At the moment I'm guessing not. If new information comes up, we can revisit.
The natural thing to do in such a case would be also to kill the submission (i.e. make it [dead] in addition to [flagged], which is the maximal level of moderation we could do). But that would remove context from the discussion, which I don't think would be fair to the many thoughtful commenters who contributed. So at the moment I'm not going to do that.
For the future: if any of you see something like this and are willing to give us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com, I'd appreciate it. There's no way we can come close to reading everything closely. We can't even read everything loosely, or even see everything (probably not even 10%) of what gets posted here. There's just too much. Fortunately the HN community can see everything, so we rely on community members to be our eyes and ears. If a user hadn't pointed this out to me, I'd have continued to be ignorant about it, and most likely some people somewhere would have drawn some wrong conclusions about HN, the community, and/or the moderation here. I wish I'd known sooner, but better late than never.
[1] Note that this thread has over 2000 comments and you have to click 'More' at the bottom of the thread to get to them. The further you go the worse they'll get, so be warned.
[2] Of course, it's an anonymous forum and we have to take people's word about who they are—but I believe that the good commenters are being truthful. There's a certain type of low-rent troll who does that but the longer that sort of account talks, the more they usually give themselves away.
Update: we received an email from someone claiming to be the author. I've copied it below with their permission.
Of course we can't tell anything for sure, but in my experience, this kind of thing is usually authentic. For me it changes the balance of probability enough to justify guessing differently again, so I'm going to take [flagged] off the thread now.
------
Hey,
I recently wrote an article which was posted on HN and is now flagged for the use of a link to a website called Daily Stormer (article title is, “GitHub, f*ck your name change”). Obvs this is you guys community and I didn’t mean for a post I wrote to seem trolly. I just wanted to clarify the situation.
I had genuinely never heard of Daily Stormer or ever been on the website until the time I was writing the post. I use DuckDuckGo, which evidently doesn’t ban gnarly websites the way that Google does. I was looking for articles written about the misidentification of black people as gorillas in facial recognition systems. The DS article came up as one of the top results, I read the first paragraph and it seemed on topic so I used it. I have since removed the link from the post.
I’m not trying to justify the use of the website, it 100% my fault for not doing better due diligence. I just wanted to say I’m sorry as I didn’t mean for the post to come across as trolling.
For what its worth, I am black, I live (born and raised) in London and work as a SWE. Nothing in the post was a lie.
"It has come to my attention that at the time of writing one of the links used points to a site with views I don’t identify with and has since been removed."
The Daily Stormer is full-on Neo-Nazi website that has been hell-banned by just about every hosting & websearch company out there.
"I appreciate diversity of opinion" - sorry, but you don't let Nazis take up space in your online discourse because that's how you end up with your space being full of Nazis.
The fact that the argument over the name change (which, hey, who knows) is the most commented thing I've ever seen here, as opposed to, e.g. another article where the focus is a substantive issue, speaks volumes and furthers the author's point.
> I just don’t appreciate the idea that we as software engineers can now sit back and believe we’ve made some kind of positive change, coz we haven’t.
I might have missed the GitHub communication there, but thats not at all what I think when thinking about changing the default branch name for new repos to a name thats, in my perception, at least as good as the old one, maybe better.
If there is window dressing involved around this change, then thats bs and need to be called out, but I nonetheless think that this change itself is not bad. Like many of these terminology changes discussed and implemented in the past, I actually think `main` is a better term for the (default) main branch. Personally I would opt for a branch name that better fits the projects needs, like 'stable' or 'production' or 'less-broken' or whatever you want. But we are talkin about a default here.
> I’m not pissed off because I expected tech companies to do more, no, I didn’t expect them to do anything. I’m
pissed off because they pretended to be doing good and wanted me to congratulate them for it.
'master' is better than 'main' because it successfully conveys the mental picture of the branch from which others are typically cloned. 'main' doesn't carry that connotation.
You could of course have branches that evolve in parallel, even without common code if you want. But what people almost always do is have one primary branch from which exact copies are made, given other names, then continue to evolve either more slowly (stable releases) or faster (speculative work). You could call that primary branch "primary" or "main" or "premier" or "trunk" and they all work, but "master" conveys that expectation very successfully, and that's why people tend to like that name.
This may be because english is not my first language, or just "wrong", but for me it does not convey the that information.
Good point, how language is perceived is very subjective and personal. I can see how people like the term "master" here more than "main" because it carries more information for them. Thanks!
I am reminded of Antirez's experience on being pushed to rename the master/slave terminology in Redis: http://antirez.com/news/122
> I believe that political correctness has a puritan root. As such it focuses on formalities, but actually it has a real root of prejudice against others. For instance Mark bullied me because I was not complying with his ideas, showing problems at accepting differences in the way people think.
Otherwise, about the article, it's unfair to say that we need to correct the AI/ML to a more "neutral" perspective.
I'm always worried about artificial "neutrality", as neutrality often ends up just adding more weight to the perspective that you consider more socially and politically acceptable.
If tomorrow you build software for the shops to identify risks; well, whether you like it or not, it'll target French.
Should we artificially add more examples of non-stealing French in the dataset just because it's socially more acceptable ?
(I took French because it's socially and legally ok to blame French for mistakes of this planet, and I was born there, but replace with whatever suits you)
The current problem surrounding using AI/ML in this area is that it can't distinguish between Jean Pierre and John Paul, Luc and Luke and authorities rely on it with no nuance or discernment.
You worry about artificial neutrality creeping in to the algorithms, but the algorithms already reflect human bias. We can't even reliably tell where someone is from yet we expect our AI to do it close to flawlessly.
I'm from East Asia and I think I can distinguish an East Asian's country of origin maybe 70% of the time. But 70% is nowhere near good enough if a person's life literally depends on the decision. And I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find someone even in around 90% accuracy. Migration and shared culture, among other things, make this difficult.
> Should we artificially add more examples of non-stealing French in the dataset just because it's socially more acceptable ?
You are completely missing the point.
This issue is simple. Take two groups A and B. Ceteris paribus if you control twice as much in group A than group B you will see twice as much positive events in group A. That's a sampling bias. Then you conclude group A is worth and should be controlled more leading to even more positive. It's all about sampling bias and feedback loops.
Actually it's in git now. I just got this warning when doing git init . last night.
Eh I realized the warning isn't in english but it basically says master will be changed to main and how I could set a global setting and how I could rename a newly created branch.
> it basically says master will be changed to main
It doesn’t do this. Here is the message:
hint: Using 'master' as the name for the initial branch. This default branch name
hint: is subject to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all
hint: of your new repositories, which will suppress this warning, call:
hint:
hint: git config --global init.defaultBranch <name>
hint:
hint: Names commonly chosen instead of 'master' are 'main', 'trunk' and
hint: 'development'. The just-created branch can be renamed via this command:
hint:
hint: git branch -m <name>
> Otherwise, about the article, it's unfair to say that we need to correct the AI/ML to a more "neutral" perspective.
I work in ML. its not neutrality, its representation.
if you use your own staff to train a face detector, a detector to detect small faces in CCTV, it'll only work on your staff. It won't pick up children, anybody who is slightly brown, anyone with big hair, or people who wear hats.
thats rubbish if you expect your models to work in the wider world.
don't think of is as political, think of it as trying to release a word processor to the world that only support ANSII, and wondering why its not selling overseas.
I'm a bit late to the game, but I don't understand what this fuss is all about, from a technical point of view. I just created a git repo this morning and the default branch was named "master" (using the git command line). Then I pushed it to github to make it visible, as I have done several times before. The command line instructions at the "new repository" interface on github suggest changing the branch name to main, but I did not do that (just for trying) and now I have a brand new github repository whose branch is named "master". Basically github allows to name your branches however you like. The example instructions suggest that you rename your master branch to "main", by running this code on your command line:
git branch -M main
But that is all. You can name it "trunk" if you want, for all that matter.
Now, I think that the whole github renaming thing is a bit ridiculous and probably a faux pas on their part. But the people complaining about "the great rename" sound even more ridiculous: as far as I can see, there's no rename, just a stupid modification of the initialization instructions that suggest that users rename their branch. All that fuss for the damn "git branch -M" line?
A lot of places will have extra effort in their CI/CD pipelines, too. I know, I know, commands like the following exist:
grep -rl master | sed -ie "s/master/main/g"
but there's always going to be bugs or whatever come out of it, and also.. this misses the point of the article. It's a hollow virtue signal. It does literally nothing to help the cause it proclaims to help, yet it requires some effort from well.. everyone. It is the definitive example of a waste of time, al be it not much per instance, but some time is wasted.
My point is that you do not need to follow github's suggestion and rename your branch to "main". It seems to me that github's "change" is only a suggestion in their instructions to create a new repository. They do not rename your branches nor force a name to you. You get to chose the name of your branches, and the default name for the git program is still "master".
Which is still an empty gesture, that is still leading to wasted time.
FYI github's repo creation tool now defaults to main. A lot of orgs use this tool because they will also use repo templates. I know git, the program, is still defaulting to master.
What is this tool? I always used github by pushing my locally-created repos to it, and this procedure still creates a "master" branch. I was not aware that there are other ways to use github, thus my surprise at the exaltation. I guess people who still use "plain git" are unaffected by the renaming of the default branch in github (whatever that means).
So, in that page, after you enter the repo name, three options appear.
1. Start the repository by creating new file: it opens a github text editor. I never used this option (what kind of savage uses github's text editor???), but to be fair it creates a default branch named "main"
2. Create a new repository from the command line: run git init, etc. You get to choose the branch name, then push it to github.
3. Push your existing local repository to github. It will get whateber branch name it already had, probably "master".
So the only people affected by the change are those who use github's text editor and chose the first option. I guess not many people do that? For the most common options you get to chose the name of the branch, that by default is "master" (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Also we can argue until the cows come home about how little effort is actually involved. It could literally be a single click and it's still all still by-the-by. This is an empty virtue signal doing nothing - repeat nothing - to help the inclusion of minorities.
Sure, the name change was a stupid move in the first place. But as stupid moves go, this one fortunately does not affect my life at all (and that of most github users I guess).
The name change, which despite its being easy for you, will cause confusion and higher barriers-to-entry to new devs who will need to sort out older tutorials and manuals from new ones. This is but one foreseeable consequence among other potentially unintended and unforseen consequences.
This because an exceedingly tiny group of people at the best, most charitable
interpretation of their motives, wilfully misapprehend that 'master' refers to more than their narrow concerns.
Sure, it’s fine and easy if you’re starting a project today. But if you have any build or deployment automation that interacts with git repos for existing projects it will be broken by the change.
But they did not rename any existing repositories (that would be in very bad taste!). Such an automatic renaming would possibly break a lot of scripts, but this is not what is happening. All old repositories still have their branch names intact. The new repositories can have whatever name you choose.
What does "the change" actually do? Is it just in the "new repository" instructions or is there some automated process that may fail? Maybe I'm missing a way to create github repositories besides the "New" button on your user page?
As a white person, the difference this change will make to my life is so negligible that if it makes one PoC feel more included then it's fine by me.
I totally take on board the point that a lot of man hours have been consumed debating how and when to execute this change. Possibly to the exclusion of doing something potentially more meaningful.
However, the glee with which the authors opinion is accepted as the opinion of an entire race of people by other comments here strikes me as an example of confirmation bias. Simply finding one PoC who agrees with you doesn't validate your view point.
How about if it does make one PoC feel more included but it also makes three PoC feel more excluded at the same time?
Is it then about numbers? Shouldn't you therefore look at and ask the community of PoC what they think as a whole?
To me, the article was saying that this holistic consultation was not done. And this has lead to the waste of time, energy and feeling of exclusion. Other comments in this thread have said that this consultation (seems to be limited to employees in Microsoft, etc) has been done...
Confirmation bias can be examined rationally. The arguments in favour of this change can be explained away in multiple ways which will override any data that is found.
I was expecting the article to list some technical problems coming from switching `remote/master` to `remote/main`. There aren't any, and reading this article took more time than trying to remember which one to use for this project.
Is there a name for anti-political correctness, where people go into long rants about how changes that have zero effect in their lives are a sign of the collapse of society? They are pretty popular in social media and specially on this site.
You're fine with the change because of one hypothetical PoC you imagine who likes it, but you resent that others are not fine with the change and feel supported by one real PoC who dislikes it.
Not you are presenting a false dichotomy. I'm not speaking for or against this change. I'm speaking against the people who are butt hurt by this change because it's not even master as in slave but master as in boot record, using this one data point to justify their position.
It's the same as those people who find the one doctor or nurse who thinks that covid-19 is just a flu or that one engineer who concludes that the twin towers couldn't possibly have fallen because of fire alone.
Microsoft did the same with Edge. They forked Chrome but they did a big search/replace of certain configuration keys... Everything called Whitelist is now called Allowlist.
This tripped me up in work, as the configuration variables I pushed for Kerberos authentication no longer worked. AuthNegotiateDelegateWhitelist became AuthNegotiateDelegateAllowlist and AuthServerWhitelist became AuthServerAllowlist. Sure, I understand why this is better. What I have a problem with is the way this is done. It wasn't very well documented or announced, they just did a big search replace, on internal configuration variables that no end user will ever see.
I don't even mind the work, but at least make it known. This was not handled very well and had all the hallmarks of an emergency PR-fueled scramble. It feels more like window dressing than an actual desire to change things.
With computers there is often a master/slave relationship, there is one system that's in near absolute control of another. It's practical and there's no ethical issues, the slave computer doesn't feel anything. Of course, with human beings it's a completely different story, but we're talking about computers.
As far as human beings, the problem was (and is) slavery, it's not the word "master". Especially in the US, there's this idea that we just have to change the terminology around, ban a word, and suddenly racism will disappear. Both political parties, the mainstream media, and major corporations all love this, because they get to make superficial changes and then sweep racism under the rug.
Now if GitHub wanted to do something truly radical to fight racism, they'd change the name of the "master" branch to the "black" branch. I understand most people will be resistant to this, simply because "black" has a negative connotation, but please be aware of your own personal reactions to the word, as that's my whole point. The word "black" also means darkness, evil, it's something dirty, while "white" means purity, goodness, and cleanliness. And I'm just pointing out the what's already in people's minds, don't shoot the messenger!
If something is "black and white", there's a clear right and wrong. In our language, "black" is synonymous with "wrong", and yet this word with negative connotations is used for an entire race of people.
Instead of practicing censorship, which is reprehensible in a free society, and reminiscent of the same kind of authoritarianism that produces master/slave relationships among human beings, why not do something actually progressive? Have we forgotten what that looks like? Challenge society's entire perception of the word "black", rename the "master" branch "black", and begin to associate the word with something good for once. Start by changing the way people think. Turn black into something positive, and if you really want to see people's racism come out, use white in a negative sense.
> If something is "black and white", there's a clear right and wrong. In our language, "black" is synonymous with "wrong", and yet this word with negative connotations is used for an entire race of people.
I don't think most people think like that. Black and white in that meaning is used in very specific contexts, not in general. Nobody thinks that a "black and white film" is about moral issues. In German, "black on white" (schwarz auf weiß) refers to (usually black) ink on (usually white) paper and nobody has race on their mind when they say it. We're not wearing black at funerals "because it's wrong that somebody died". Black numbers are good ("schwarze Zahlen schreiben" = "writing black numbers" = earning money), red numbers usually aren't. Waving the white flag isn't great. Black/brown bread is delicious, and so is Schwarzbier if you're into stronger tastes in beer, and you can get black-out drunk with enough of it. There's really no association with Africans with that usage of "black".
I have a feeling that a lot of people believe that first came racism and Europeans looking down on Africans and then came "black = bad" associations in language. There was no European colonialism back then, Northern African slave raiders regularly went on slave raids to (mostly Southern) Europe etc. The use of black in that sense is, at least in German, at least 1200 years old, long before significant contact between Central Europe and Africa.
I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is.
I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.
I will never go along with that farce, especially when I learned that a bunch of people bullied Antirez for years in order to force him to change the language in Redis.
It serves absolutely no purpose, other than for a group of people to feel like they have an ideological hold on the IT industry. Some of these people are already coming with new lists of "forbidden words" they are trying to impose with the old same excuse of "diversity and inclusiveness". Enough.
I know it's anecdotal but I've asked my colleagues the same - in a country with a terrible history of this sort too. And turns out I can't find a single person who agrees with Github's decision.
Almost everybody has ancestors that were enslaved. E.g. most Germanic people where enslaved by other Germanic people, or the Romans at some point in time. The only question is how far back you have to look and how far back you can look.
When you think about masters/slaves, do you think about black people only? If so, why?
There are countless examples in the history of the world about slaves, including different ethnics, in every continent. May they have a word on this issue too?
Throughout history, various races struggled from slavery, pretty much the entire spectrum is fully covered across the world. Nowadays there are more people in slavery than at any given time before.
Slavery in Russian empire was de jure abolished about the same time as slavery in US. Not surprisingly, it took even more time for "de facto" changes to happen with various restrictions still being a thing into 1970ies. If anything, kolhoz system was anything but slavery with the government being ultimate owner.
I am reminded of Catch-22 about how strong Italy is by not fighting these things, just go with it. Another side will come up and push some other agenda, then just go with that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVWupFBkA8 "“But of course I do,” exclaimed the old man cheerfully. “The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying anymore. But American and German officers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed.”"
It was amusing to see the GitLab ticket where they try to orchestrate the change. It’s still going on. At least 100 people involved and multiple tickets open for an entirely pointless change.
Take a look at CIA's "The Simple Sabotage Field Manual" from 1944 (declassified 2008). Under the section "General Interference with Organizations and Production" it recommends among other things:
- "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible"
- "Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions."
This is actually worse. With bikeshedding, once the bored people have finally decided on the color of the bikeshed, everyone just goes on with their life unhindered. With this, once the bored people have decided to make the change, everyone and their mom has to waste time on following or actively resisting the change on their end.
This is amazing, I'm noting this down for future use.
As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it makes you wonder what's really going on while we are distracted by this stuff.
What I find interesting is that there (probably? maybe?) isn't a shadowy CIA-like organisation promoting this stuff, this "tactic" is a naturally emergent property of the woke belief system.
I think I find this more frightening than if there actually were a shadowy organisation pulling the strings: here we have a philosophy, which many well-intended people subscribe to, that causes them to behave like a sophisticated intelligence agency deliberately trying to disrupt a foreign power.
In fact, a lot of that woke stuff actually comes from the CIA.
It's a tactic they first used in the 70s in Europe, when "real" left parties (i.e. the old-school socialist/communist parties, affiliated with the soviet union) started gaining ground.
All of a sudden they started funding a lot of stuff like that, because it weakened/marginalized those parties. Why fight for workers rights when you can fight for LGBT, immigrant, women rights, etc. I.e. the right of fifteen distinct groups that have no power.
Much more recently that tactic was used to destroy the Occupy Wall Street movement.
I think you're too naive. This decision makers are not worried about anything but their PR. Your competitor is the Woke mob, although they'll say they do it for you.
Adressing real issues cost money. Making bullshit changes is free.
The culture shock is particularly noticeable for non-anglo people.
The logic according to one Microsoft PM is that if one [white virtue signalling person on behalf of some person involuntary labelled as non privileged] person is offended it's one person too much... It didn't sound well thought out then or now...
What if one black person feels discriminated? What if all black people feel discriminated? I think it's clear that the term blacklist is not discriminatory in origin nor is it used in a discriminating way. If, hypothetically, all black people would feel discriminated then there would be a real gain from changing these words, even if they were never discriminatory to begin with. Still, even in that case, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to give in to "feelings". Feeling discriminated is decidedly not the same as being discriminated and it's a slippery slope when hurting other people's feelings becomes a punishable offence.
So what? There are lots of people of "color" in this world, and most of us don't need our time wasted because some emotionally challenged persons have nothing more productive to do than obsess over how some APIs can conform better to their desires.
The funny thing is that this whole tradeoff of breaking an API to make it better is nothing new; The woke is just bullying everyone by asking the tradeoff to be ignored completely in their favor.
>We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.
I suppose they are not doing it for your feeling's sake. They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.
> on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.
I'd love to see some demographics around this. When I lived in the bay area, most of my friends were part of this woke / "activist" community. I had some friends who disagreed, but mostly they were terrified to say so for fear of the mob.
Here in Australia, it seems like the demographics are the other way around. I know a few people who are part of the leftist woke / "activist" tribe. But most people I interact with socially think that while racism is a problem, the twitter mobs are a bit silly, and the woke stuff is overblown.
I don't know how you'd measure, but I'd love to see stats on what percentage of the communities in different cities hold this political stance. Is it growing or shrinking? Is it widespread in the west, or is it mostly just a bay area / portland / NY phenomenon - with small satellite groups in other countries?
From my subjective and anecdotal perception as someone who interacts with people from many countries, it looks mostly like an US thing at the moment.
The problem is that most of the West tends to imitate cultural and political trends that originate in the US. And this is already being imitated. In most other countries we are not yet seeing a war to the extent we see in the US, but the American situation could be the canary in the coal mine.
My theory is that because the US has been shifting right for decades, parts of the US leftwing has to some extent resigned itself to thought policing and arguing semantics instead of fighting for actual policy changes. When you can't fix the big problems, find some small problem that you can focus on instead. If the US had a leftwing party that occasionally got in power (instead of a two-party system with a centrist and a rightwing party) then lefties would probably spend their effort on making that happen instead.
> Here in Australia, it seems like the demographics are the other way around. I know a few people who are part of the leftist woke / "activist" tribe. But most people I interact with socially think that while racism is a problem, the twitter mobs are a bit silly, and the woke stuff is overblown.
It's going to be funny a few years down the road when the trend comes to Australia before they actually notice.
Think pendulums reacting to their perceptions of each other, maybe.
I work with a Canadian team but American parent company. We see what they are going through and it is definitely different. I think our version of equality is just working together as peers and respecting each other, there is no performative or ablutionary aspect.
For the record, I think parent co. is genuine and seems very diverse too. Views are my own yada yada.
This isn’t a real thing. It’s an artificial nonsense of social media. It’s nonsense for two reasons:
1a. The number of valid participants is low. It is easy to feel powerful sitting comfortably hidden in your parent’s basement behind a keyboard craving attention and direction. Misery loves company and when such people band together their numbers can appear large compared to something like a real world gathering of persons in a physical space. But it’s not real people in a real space, because that takes considerably greater effort.
1b. The numbers also appear artificially inflated because there is a low effort of repetition, which can appear as false participation, spam, trolling, denial of service.
2. There isn’t any real investment in most of this. Most of the motivation are bored people looking for inspiration to be emotionally concerned. They will point where the carrot leads. That isn’t a movement. A real movement features numerous participants willing to make a personal investment like those criminals that stormed the capital.
They've immense power over corporations. It's a flex. It doesn't have to make any sense or to be connected in any way to the people it is allegedly helping.
Insisting to help people is quite insulting, actually. Empowerment means you voice your own grievances. It doesn't mean recruit an army of armchair activists to do it for you.
One have to be careful to not generalize their power, since I hear this a lot. It is strictly restricted to the "cultural sphere", just like a lot of politics itself. It is all about managing affections, not actions. Woke is performative radicalism.
Or to put it this way, if the "woke mob" decided to protest capitalism or even higher/stricter taxes, do you think that anything would change? Probably not, because production for profit it still at the core of every corp while at the same time the woke crowd has a limited understanding of capitalism to begin with (as can be seen by the claims that capitalism is by necessity based on racism). It is the worst of both worlds.
It's not for helping minorities. It's for helping the PMC stay on top, by making rules that only people who grew up in the right class and went to the right schools will be able to follow, cloaking that function in a nominal reason for those rules that's unimpeachable. And it does that very well.
Yes, pretty sure that this is a reference to the professional-managerial class. It's a common refrain on the populist left/"dirtbag left" that identity politics are often dishonest class warfare. (I agree.)
> If they actually made a positive difference- say, lowered the births out of wedlock/divorce rate among black US parents, thereby causing a slew of knock-on effects- if they actually solved the problems they complained about, they'd be out of a job
I get your sentiment, but this seems to be putting the cart before the horse, in multiple ways. Divorce rates and births out of wedlock do not have "a slew of knock-on effects"; they are the effects. There are only two reasons to care about those rates:
- They are easily measured, due to existing government accounting (birth/marriage/divorce certificates, etc.)
- Religious bullshit
I'll ignore the latter, since it cannot be reasoned with.
In the case of divorce, it doesn't happen without reason. Anecdotally, my parents divorced due to alcoholism and domestic abuse; my childhood, social mobility, earnings potential, etc. was improved by their divorce. Tackling alcoholism and domestic abuse may have "a slew of knock-on effects", including lower divorce rates; yet the reverse is not true, e.g. making it harder to get a divorce will not reduce alcoholism and abuse, it would merely subject more children to it for longer.
If we make the charitable assumption that the goal of what you're saying is for more children to receive more help and support, rather than the opposite described above, then that's several levels removed from what you actually said; and each of those levels introduces exactly the distracting, partisan rhetoric that you are arguing against.
- The first level of abstraction is focusing on the US. This seems fair enough, assuming you're in the US. Yet it's still important to note this abstraction, e.g. in the context of foreign aid. For example, it might be more efficient (i.e. give more help to more children) to spend more on foreign aid, since money can go further in poorer countries; alternatively, spending that money domestically might be more efficient (give more help to more children) due to targeting and accountability. If we want to give the most help to the most children, we should base policy on measured impacts; yet this is often framed as a "left vs right" partisan issue (pretending for the moment that the US even has a left wing), which distracts from actually achieving the stated goal.
- Next, you further narrow your focus to the black US population. This also seems fair, as they are a disenfranchised and oppressed group, and hence this focuses on a large number of large issues that need fixing. Even from a purely utilitarian point of view, it may be cheaper (or even reduce costs) to, say, tackle over-policing of black neighbourhoods; compared to tackling some more diffuse, less directly-controllable issue in other populations (e.g. suicide rates in white males). However, it's again worth noting the abstraction: in particular, a large improvement for the minority black population may have less impact than a smaller improvement for a larger population (e.g. the female population). Again, policy should be based on measurable impacts towards the stated goal, and again this has been turned into a partisan circus to distract from real change (e.g. with concern trolling about 'ignoring' white males).
- Next you split the focus between births out of wedlock and divorce rates. I've mentioned the impacts of divorce above; the partisan circus in this case involves 'traditional values', and bleeds into other areas like gay, trans and women's rights.
- The phrase "lowered births out of wedlock" is problematic, since (again) it is very far removed from the assumed goal of 'the most help to the most children', and hence puts the cart before the horse; and secondly it is charged with dangerous ambiguity. For example, lowering birth rates of 'undesirable' demographics (e.g. unmarried black people) could be achieved via eugenics; I'm hoping that is not what you had in mind, but that depends heavily on the reader's overton window; hence provoking both the far right and their opposition. Another way to lower this rate would be forced marriage; again, I hope that wasn't your intention, but again that depends on the reader, and the normalisation of such rhetoric stokes division.
I agree with your overall point that 'culture wars', 'wokeness', etc. are a distraction from solving real problems; yet what you are saying is itself an example of such distraction. I'm not aware of a word that sums up 'concern-trolling about how "wokeness" is concern-trolling', but that's how I would describe your phrasing.
In this case, I'm not aware of any person or group (e.g. Black Lives Matter, 'wokeists', etc.) who has asked for Github to change their naming policy, let alone demand it under threat of protest/boycot (AKA 'cancel culture'/'voting with your wallet', depending on which side of the circus one is sitting). Exactly the same can be said of Washington DC renaming Black Lives Matter plaza, and many other such real, measurable examples. Hence, when discussing such actions, any focus (for or against) on 'woke' individuals is itself a distraction.
Those who applaud such moves (if that's actually a thing; I've come across nothing but scorn for such actions) have been successfully distracted from the real issues that have sparked protest and boycot; whether it's GitHub's sexism and discrimination, or the US police system's racism and lack of accountability.
Those (like yourself) who scorn such applause (again, under the assumption that it actually exists in some non-manufactured/devil's-advocate form) have also been successfully distracted from those real issues of sexism, discrimination and racism. Complaining about 'wokeness' is a partisan circus, abstracted away from the stated issues themselves, fighting hypothetical slights from imagined enemies.
Of course, I'm not immune from such attacks myself. In this case, I'm grounded by the sheer prevalence of such backwards logic as you've expressed here, which I come across without seeking it out (cherry-picking smallfry posts scoured from Twitter/Tumblr/etc. is a perennial hobby of the 'anti-woke' distraction machine). On sites like Reddit I merely find it concerning (whether real or astroturfing to shift the overton window, the effect is similar). When it starts infecting sites like HN, which tend to reward thoughtful, reasoned content rather than knee-jerk memes, I feel a need to push back :)
I hate this “woke mob” branding, there isn’t one, there are people who care about social issues who are individuals. Some go too far, I agree, but we should aim to treat everyone, no matter what they believe (yes even if you think they are really wrong) with respect rather than pigeon holing all their views in with a group you don’t like.
Translation: people who see an opportunity to debase others for free and put themselves on a pedestal
Update: We call this class of people Mullahs here in Iran. It's been slowly but surely becoming apparent to us that they are somewhat of a societal parasite.
I actually knew my comment was following essentially the same game-theory as the woke, like almost every single complaint on the internet. The difference in targets' deservability is apparent to me.
Except a lot of those individuals will happily brand you to pigeon hole all your views with a dislikable group, so at this point I think branding them back is fair game.
Okay so now you’re saying you want to get in there and call the other side names just in case. “But but but they started it” is not an argument for anything. I prefer personally to being open to both right wing and left wing ideas and people.
No. I'm saying I don't feel the need to protect any side [+] from being called names. I'm saying people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. That kind of stuff.
[+] note how you just assumed "the other side", and the existence of exactly 2 sides.
These individuals generally share something in common. Whilst I think that "woke mob" may be a bit harsh, arguing that this isn't a group of people (regardless of they themselves think they are a group) is counterproductive. Having a name just makes it easier to talk about this. This isn't about pigeonholing, not any more than labeling people as "far right" or "antifa" is pigeonholing.
But they behave like a mob. The smallest thing can set them off, even them misunderstanding the situation. When they go off, they unashamedly target people's livelihoods. Even if you later have your name cleared, it doesn't undo the damage. The Covington kids are an example that they do behave like a mob.
The alternative interpretation is that they're consciously being malicious.
That goes for literally any group of people though. SJW, Proud Boys, Antifa, Islamic State, Nazis, the CIA, Drug Cartels. They're all made up of individuals, yet I doubt you want to reserve judgement on individual's membership unless you know what exactly they were doing and do believe for most of those.
They are the woke mob. Who else ever cared about this? It's the doing of the toxic corporate diversity committees who pull this shit to appear like they're doing something against discrimination without actually making any meaningful changes.
They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.
Another example, Bezos recently banned books critical of transgender from being sold on Amazon. And just like that, everyone forgot about Amazon's brutal suppression of union organising activity in their warehouses. Similarly the rest of Big Tech thinks it can toss out token gestures and placate those who are critical of its business practices.
No, but if GitHub is mentioned in a very angry Twitter thread, and is being targeted by a woke and bored journalist which would write an angry and misdirected article putting the words "racism" and "GitHub" together, is most likely a good enough motivation to avoid a PR disaster
The "woke mob" were chasing them because of the contract with ICE and the police facial recognition stuff that's very profitable and they'd like to continue doing.
The master branch thing was an attempt at misdirection and throwing the mob a bone.
It's a classic PR move. The entire objective was to generate distracting noise.
Policing language is popular among corporations for the same reason oil companies got "woke" about recycling in the 80s:
* It doesn't really change anything and doesn't affect profit margins.
* It affects everybody albeit very lightly and is extemely visible.
* It naturally leads people to shame each other, taking the heat off the corp.
* They can score some progressive points at minimum cost.
At some point if things continue to get worse overall, these games wont work because the "woke mob" (not limited to that particular "group", individuals may share the same opinion on such activities, or at least where the most disgruntled overlaps with most capable) will start to realize what you describe and just figure its more effective to target GH infrastructure/employees/family/friends and officers directly, no need for angry tweets (and not strictly related to GH but other corporations that engage in similar services as well).
I read the parent comment to mean that by pro-actively making changes in an effort you avoid the woke buffoons, while completely ignoring the voices of those who ought matter most, you're admitting defeat and in doing so granting the buffoons yet more power.
I'd argue if someone is feigning offense we should call them out on it, not collectively fucking prostrate ourselves.
This whole fiasco just makes me wonder what the hell is going on in the background while we're being distracted by this... surströmming-level red herring.
Same here in germany.
When we hear the word master, most people think of the master in karate kid or the master degree of a university.
I think only in the usa people are so full of hate that they directly think of bad stuff.
The funny thing is, I don't think very many people thought of "bad stuff" before this idiotic culture war planted it in everyone's mind, even if in a negative light.
I would bet that most people didn't have any idea that words like "grandfather" or "blacklist" had (or didn't have) any racist history.
Wouldn't it have been better to just let the words outgrow their history? These words were already dead or dying as racist terms. Not any more.
I don't know, but it seems plausible that awareness of the term's origin might well be considerably higher among those whose own father or grandfather was disenfranchised by one of the original grandfather clauses.
I at least was intellectually gratified to learn about it.
> In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.
In the Netherlands, which unlike Germany was significantly involved in the transatlantic slave trade, AFAIK the word meester never had any connotations of slavery, only of expertise and teaching ability (as in a guild master).
It's still used to refer to a male teacher, particularly in elementary schools, as well as being the title used by lawyers.
Or slavendrijver, which is still a very derogatory way to point out exploitative behavior.
I think an important difference between ex-colonial European powers and the US is that the (ethnic) slavery did not take place on European soil. Most colonies were operated with very few Europeans to oversee, and as such people were not as exposed to it as people in the US, where masters and slaves would perhaps not live in the same part of town, but also not a continent away. So this may explain why those terms seem inoffensive/only have their meaning outside of the slavery context in Europe.
I wouldn't say they are full of hate. Slavery has defined the country and has repercussions still.
But I'm really worried about how we import everything American to Germany without thinking twice.
Left newspapers have started to write BIPoC everywhere when it comes to domestic issues. What exactly are the indigenous people of Germany? Even blacks are relatively rare. It would make much more sense to coin an acronym that includes Jews, Sinti and Roma, given our sordid history. But we simply take what American culture has thought up.
We have problems to integrate Turkish or Russian immigrants and their children as Germans, not as people from elsewhere. As well as the refugees from Syria.
Having lived in a mostly Turkish neighborhood for five years (as a German, Turkish landlord, Turkish "housemates" (?)) I think some just don't want to be integrated...
Landlord was pretty chill and I kind of miss being able to just ask anything and he would try to make it happen (including things like repairing car motors).
Housemates were of the mildly radicalized religious kind, with daughters that did not attend the normal school system and are now being married of early.
I don't know if the German "integration system" has failed for the later ... they have the freedom to chose and they chose a path that is different from what is considered "normal" in the "West".
I think "integration" is a sham. Integration implies a give and take, a compromise. It seems actually assimilation or submission is what many Euro countries want.
As a Canadian (Vancouver), I can tell you true integration happens over generations of people working together and respecting each other. In those conditions, it is unavoidable.
If either group lacks respect, the outcome is always conflict.
You put their kids into school together young and they won't know not to be friends until you tell them. That was my experience, anyway.
>It seems actually assimilation or submission is what many Euro countries want.
No we think that forced marriage has no place in Europe, or the oppression of woman's. And yes, that's our culture..so is the freedom to choose your religion and to have free speech. If someone from another culture comes we are happy to integrate it into ours, but NOT when it clashes with our Laws.
>You put their kids into school together young and they won't know not to be friends until you tell them.
And what when they go into different schools (Jewish or Muslim etc), live in different parts of the City (look at Paris or Berlin), and never met someone outside of their bubble until 20 or later?
I said it in another post ... it's not about being forced into something, it's about freedom of choice. And that is something universal, it's just codified in our laws.
It's completely fine if a women decides to become married and have children early ... it's probably not a good choice ... but morally there is no way to reject that.
The problem arises when people never learn that they have a choice ... I have (female) friends from rural Germany that think it's perfectly reasonable to go study and once finished move in with their husband and be the perfect stay-at-home mom.
edit: heck ... I even have friends from larger cities who would just prefer to be stay-at-home moms because that gives an excuse to sloth on the couch for half of the day :-)
The point is, "BIPoC" means specifically "Black, Indigenous, People of Color". It does not mean "immigrants" or "refugees" or "all marginalized groups" or whoever else needs social justice in Germany.
Borrowing that specific term for other purposes is stupid.
As an immigrant, I didn't want to leave my country, let alone integrate where I did.
I was forced to because the government in my country steals and wastes so much money that the economy breaks and you can't make money there.
Still the quality of life is much better at home and I'd rather stay there.
All my friends are immigrants, I couldn care less to integrate here. Ideally I'd just rather live in a town with just immigrants from my country. As long as you keep them out of politics they'll probably won't rob you.
Interesting.
I also left my country but mostly because there wasn’t really anything left for me there and I met my girlfriend and she was from somewhere else... So I moved to her country.
Her country is clearly superior in almost everything except for weather and food. I like living here and I've made good friends and enjoy my life here.
Now the curious part comes...
I have zero attachment to both countries, their culture and their national identities.
I couldn’t care less about their language or customs. I just see myself has some kind of post-nationalistic person that would much rather speak English with everyone, hang out on the internet and live wherever.
As far as I'm concerned national identities and culture are useless and holding us down as a species. I really wish people could outgrow this nonsense.
I partly feel the same. I agree with you that identification with a country (patriotism/nationalism) is holding us back. However I do recognize that my upbringing has shaped me culturally and similar in my behaviour. Similarly the 3 other countries I have lived in for significant time, which have also formed my personality. I also do feel attachment to those places, but this is much more due do people and the location, not the nation.
I agree with you that the culture I was raised in has had a huge effect on me.
You can take the man of the country but you can’t take the country out of the man.
In hindsight I don’t think I was raised in a particularly enlightened culture. Do those even exist?
I would much rather have us move past dumb social biases and constructs and work together to build a better future and a more universal and cooperative world.
"I would much rather have us move past dumb social biases "
On person's unbiased Baysian predictions based on a lifetime of experience and evidence, looks a lot like biases and prejudice to the delicate of mind.
And they get nasty about it.
So no, there will be no building of a better world.
Generalizations like "chinese people are ..." or "muslims tend to..." are garbage. There is no possible objective truth to any of these since we are talking about billions of people.
You brain might think it’s very smart and clever and has the world all figured out but most likely it doesn’t.
The world is a chaotic system beyond any one's comprehension. All generalizations that are not purely mathematical and 100% abstract in nature are wrong.
Just like any other immigrants, westeners in Asia integrate do different degrees. Some only hang out with people from their own country and refuse to go to anything but restaurants that serve their own food. While others practically become locals.
Some nationalities integrate more than others. This goes for different European countries even, so it has very little to do with "race".
I understand and I think that is acceptable. I'd welcome you and yours in Canada. When both groups respect each other, true integration comes over generations of working together.
Obviously we did not respect the Indigenous people and I hope that can me mended through generations of mutual respect.
I think Vancouver is better because of the rich mix of cultures. It's not perfect here but I think it is pretty good. I have seen a Muslim man give his shoes to a homeless man on the bus and walk home barefoot in the rain. I believe anything is possible.
> What exactly are the indigenous people of Germany?
Ha! I remember a drunken night with a north-american colleague; he asked why didn't we have indigenous people here in Europe. Then he suddenly realized the answer: oh, but it is you, you all are!
I'm in no way a native speaker - but even I recognize that in English 'master' has - and always had - many different meanings. One of them completely equal to the German 'Meister'.
It is all about context. Question is, why certain groups emphasize - or better: impose deceivingly by altering him - the wrong context to a crystal-clear situation.
It is the only right association because it's the same word coming from "magister" in Latin and which traveled to become maestro in Italian, meister in German, maestre and then maitre in French and finally master in English.
"I'm in the USA. I think only in Germany are people so full of themselves that they over-generalize entire nations with their own ignorant assumptions."
That would be a rather rude, dare I say hateful thing for me to say, wouldn't it? In reality, I really enjoyed all the places in Germany I've visited, and most of my interactions with German folk that I've interacted with socially and professionally over the years. I especially enjoyed taking a technical and engineering German language course, so I can appreciate words like "Kaftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung" and "benzinbetriebenes Motorsystem". I wouldn't think to make such a comment about the German people, like you did about people in the USA.
The point I'm attempting to make is that stating blanket negative over-generalizations about any group of people isn't productive, and in this case it's seemingly ironic to me. If you think I'm a hateful person because of pointing that out, then by your definition I am hateful and I'm okay with you thinking that. I obviously disagree, though, and I'm happy to attempt to civilly discuss that with you if you'd like.
Germany is a really bad example though. The German way is to pretend racism just doesn't exist - today is the aniversary of a racist, arson attack that happened in 1994 killing 7 people (one of them pregnant) where the official line is still "the guy was just crazy what can you do ?!".
If you want to transplant the "master"-example, look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts as well as a weird insistance that offensively named streets, underground-stations and (for some reason) pharmacies "must not need to be renamed, why would you even be offended".
Germany is not the example to go with concerning offensive language.
You just showed the problem: Mixing completely different things and pretending it's the same. The parent comment and the parent-parent and the submitted text all talked about something, you come up with something else.
> look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts
Okay I do - and that is exactly the useless actions that the submitted text and this discussion is about. For some reason you just ignore all that was said and just repeat those exact criticized points as if nothing happened.
Well, they parent tried to transplant the word "master" into a german context and noted it doesn't translate. I then gave examples of words that work analogous to the word "master" in English. These things are connected by the concept that "I'm not offended by them, why should anyone else?"
Where these discussions about how Germans call their pharmacies connect to the article is that in both cases the arbiters who decide how things are called are the white - once you start to involve the people that these offensive words are about, you suddenly get a different sense of how important or offensive these words are. There's a recent example of a talkshow where a couple of white more-or-less-celebrities decided that these words are just german heritage, and really what is all the fuzz about ? To appease the ensuing mini-scandal the station organized a roundpanel of people who might be affected by these slurs - and surprise, they really weren't so fond of them.
You are obviously right, changing words by itself doesn't change a thing - but if I can't even count on someone not using slurs about me, I can't expect to respected at all.
I don't buy the assertion that the German way is to pretend racism just doesn't exist.
There are racists, and fascists, neo-nazis and old-nazis. They do exist, it's just that they don't pose that widespread of a problem in every day life, like it does in other western countries.
I'd say gender (in)equality is something you will encounter much more often in every day life over there.
It's about choice ... there are women (also in Germany) that gladly _chose_ to stay at home, _chose_ to prepare meals for their husband and _chose_ to care for the kids.
On the other hand there are women that _chose_ to give their children into daycare weeks after birth to go back to work.
It's not about condemning any lifestyle as wrong, it's about given everybody (males included) the ability to life their live as they want.
Sadly this is far from the reality with median wages being barely high enough to sustain one person, forcing women (and men) to work and robbing them of their agency.
We've got a far right party that gets around 13% in national elections, in some states around 25%.
We've got a minister of interior that does not want to start a study on racism in the police forces.
That's two of the big issues, that's not even every-day racism where it's hard to get an apartment or a job with a "foreign name", underrepresentation in leading positions or that in some parts you'll get at least hassled for walking with brown skin.
Germany is and always has been extremely conservative and integration/racism is an issue precisely because the largest party always saw imported skilled labor as people that should be forced back "home" again, even with a second and third generation growing up in Germany.
See the thing about that is, that it let's you neatly compartmentalize racism to the nazis, and since the nazis don't exist anymore (well, the ones being talked about in history class) there is not racism or antisemitism anymore.
That is of course simplifying it a lot, but Germany as a whole has a problem with right-wing extremism who almost regularely murder people, and a police force who regularly have scandals involving members being present day Nazis, and these Problems not being adressed properly.
So I am not sure learning about The Nazis of the olden days is very helpful withouth showing the reach that these ideologies have into present day Germany.
And I say that as someone who has gone through these years that you reference as well.
> but having went to school there entire years of our history class were dedicated to the Nazis.
To be precise it is about the atrocities committed by the Nazis and how they managed to subvert the society to be able do their crimes. By the way they started early on to change the everyday language.
"Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment" - it was candidly named, if nothing else.
> Indeed, Goebbels initially opposed the term propaganda, recognizing that in popular usage, both in Germany and abroad, it was associated with lies. Even after the ministry had been in existence for a year, he proposed changing its name to Ministry of Culture and Public Enlightenment, but Hitler vetoed this proposal.
Of course everyone would have a different feeling towards those words. Every country has their own history. I think it is a positive step in the US going through all these hurdles to address their past. US has the power and the economic leverage to really step to next level, it can afford it.
Every country is different. Developing world wouldn't care about rights, because they have to make cakes as fast as possible, and developed world can spend much time on being fair. It is something we should do.
Is a name change really that difficult for everyone? I remember when I first saw 'main' branch on Azure, yes, I have to slow down a bit, is it the end of world? It means something important for the US, and would be good for the future generation, I think I can afford the personal inconvenience. We, developers, are having the best job in this world, do we really need to get pissed off for this?
> Is a name change really that difficult for everyone?
It's just a complete misunderstanding of the topic. Changing "master" branches simply confuses signified and signifier, and the fact that multiple signified can have the same signifier (like the signifier stool and the signified faeces and a thing to sit on. Removing the word doesn't remove the concept.
If these companies actually wanted to work for diversity, they could just do exactly that: employ more people from other backgrounds, or have extra internships for early orientiation in high school, or fund computer labs schools in poor neighbourhoods and so on.
Edit: As an illustration of how this doesn't affect the underlying meaning: In Germany there's a similar discourse going on, and the result is that the German radical right also started to talk about migrants instead of aliens or foreigners. But they didn't change their attitudes at all! They just adapted to the new word and kept their old concept.
>Is a name change really that difficult for everyone?
So whole world has to change because US has its core problems?
>We, developers, are having the best job in this world, do we really need to get pissed off for this?
do we?
spend thousands of hours of your free time in front of computer just to learn stuff,
then spend 3.5/5 or even more years for degree
then stay competitive / in touch with tech as a part of life style
just to have office/remote job with good pay?
is this "best job"? seems decent, but I wouldn't call it "the best", especially in countries where programmers do not have really outstanding pay like in SF.
GitHubs decision is a form of cultural imperialism. That's what it really is. Only because the US want's to somehow deal with a dark part of it's history, the rest of the world should not be foreced to adapt their views.
In many cases it's more than ridiculous, it
s completely non-sensical. What is the logic behind removing the word "master" even supposed to be?
The problem with slavery is not that there is a word for it, it's that it exists, and used to be very common. By using the word "master" we are not condoning slavery, nobody can believe that. Just like we are not condoning domestic violence by using the word "hit" in "hit song".
For the word blacklist I can see how misguided people could make a case, since the word black is used for something negative. Still ridiculous of course.
Another absurd example: In my project they decided to change the name of a "blackout tool". There is nothing negative about this tool, it doesn't make things worse, it just colours them black.
It does rather smack of presentism, SV companies might be better doing a proper transparent pay / promotion survay to identify discrimination amongst their employees - Based on my direct experience in the UK there will be Discrimination.
Additionally properly identifying the impact of race on ai/ml derived algorithms would be a better use of time.
But of course these would have cost and other implications that companies would not want to do.
> Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.
So do we know where that decision actually came from?
Unfortunately I think it is more of a cultural problem than a matter of leadership. The widely used FactoryGirl Ruby gem (the vast majority of Rails setups embed it) was renamed FactoryBot a couple years ago. It's not like my team had a say in this change but overall I was the only one against it but ended up implemented the change, which took about an hour (all our repos + the PRs). Note: technically I was in a situation of harassment.
We've had a few months to turn off an option in Github to change this behavior. I believe there was even an email that went out and a thread on HN concerning this change. Any conversation at this point is just whinging to the void to farm engagement.
Not only is your post unnecessarily offensive, you also did not read the OP's post correctly. He did not write that the occupation ended 700 years ago, it lasted 700 years. If my guess for OP's country is correct, it actually ended just 150 years ago.
I think this is kindof an important question. "If it's so insignificant, why do you care?".
I don't think it's so hard to understand why some people might be irritated, though. The social attitude that motivates the change to switch away from the term 'master' is not widely held outside of a subset of Americans who are apparently vastly over represented in making these kinds of decisions. It's a bit grating to be saying "consider how others feel" while ignoring how most people feel about it, and making the change made you want anyway.
It's a zeitgeist which results in things like someone complaining that VSCode including a candy cane icon is more offensive than the swastika, and the VSCode repository acceeding this complaint. - I feel if that's where you end up from wanting everyone to feel welcome and included, that you've gotten lost along the way.
Allowing this faux diversity change will only lead to more calls for other faux diversity changes, so the time spent pointing out its vacuousness is well worth it.
Just as security theater isn't real security, diversity theater isn't real diversity. We must stand up and denounce diversity theater and those who profit from it so that we can get focus on diversity efforts that have substance behind them.
But what about getting rid of "slave", "blacklist" and "whitelist".
The last two kind of opened my eyes to connotation of black and white, that may be problematic to some. Also I find "allow/denylist" more descriptive, maybe that helps.
Something to think about: are you typically prescriptivist about language, or are you more of a descriptivist? If you are a descriptivist (most people are, but you might not be) it might be worth pondering why you're being prescriptivist on this issue.
Technically speaking, this is the opposite - the point is that while a prescriptivist would find the whole thing a bit silly a descriptivist would have a problem with this situation, because it is creating new racial insult (eg, calling something a blacklist in the presence of a black person) where none existed before.
It seems like a mistake to invent racial terms out of whole cloth for no reason. It shouldn't be done.
Linguistic prescription is saying it shouldn't be done because there are rules, and the change breaks them.
I'm not saying that. My position is it shouldn't be done because creating new slurs for no reason is stupid. A prescriptivist and a descriptivist could both agree to that, though they'd disagree with each other on whether the idea of the change is legitimate.
Which is probably a similar position to ccmcarey's original comment. No position was taken on whether the change breaks the rules of language or not, the argument was that either way the change is being bought on by ignorance of both normal usage and the lineage of the word (ie, potentially in defiance of both prescriptivist and descriptivist logic).
This isn't really an issue of prescriptive vs descriptive philosophy. Although the descriptivists will be hopping mad.
>The issue with that is that those words (blacklist/whitelist specifically) have no connotation to race.
Not directly no. But they enforce the unconscious belief that "black == bad" and "white == good". Read up a bit on unconscious/implicit bias [0]. There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening.
Also consider how other industries have approached this problem[1] and how things have changed there.
> But they enforce the unconscious belief that "black == bad" and "white == good".
No, they don't. What your sources did was bring to light the current stereotypes in people's head, not how they were created. What you want to do is change those stereotypes, not mingling with the words that only communicate the stereotypes. It's about the concepts in the heads, not the words.
If you want to change the stereotypes (which you can't remove, just change), you have to provide different pictures: Showcase black business men/women, talk about the performance of Obama, have high achievers with diverse background do talks in schools, or sports stars do shows with kids, do shows with female arab DJs and so on. In short: Give the brains of people input that forces them to adapt their stereotypes.
This differentiation of signified and signifier often is hard to get right if your own moral system already conforms to the social goal, because in that case the word seems to be equal to the concept/meaning. So we just have to transport to word to transport the meaning, right? But this isn't how language works. Words can only trigger the frame they belong to if the other person already has the concept in her mind.
Just to be clear we talk about the same thing: Words have zero meaning by themselves (and this is not my personal opinion, but consensus in cognitive linguistics).
So you can use words to describe things (like we do right now), and thus hope to invoke mutual understanding, but you can't put a new concept into another person's head by inventing a word. You can trigger a concept already there if the other person already associates a specific meaning with a specific word, though.
So if you want to better the situation for e.g. African Americans in the US, replacing "master branch" with "main branch" has no effect, because a) this master is not the master/slave master - the words may have had identical meaning (I don't know, perhaps both meanings have a common ancestor), but today the word "master" in the context (=frame) of source code respositories means something completely different than master/slave. Just as "slave" in the US doesn't mean "person of slavic origin" anymore.
But more importantly you don't change the stereotype of African Americans this way. That you'll only achieve by constantly pushing different images of African Americans in the relevant contexts, like, off the top of my head, a collective day where every github user with darker skin starts to use a real profile picture on github.
You can justify pretty much anything with that reasoning. If you follow through with that, you'd have to ban the words "black" and "white" from the language completely, except in a racial context.
> There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening.
This investigation was about seeing faces, not hearing words though.
The 1997 version of the IAT (the test you're talking about) actually used names associated with Black and White American people.
Interestingly enough, there was one paper that concluded that some of the responses to the test was driven by the prior associations between the colours themselves, rather than the racial part.
But in some contexts black is bad and white is good. Would you rather move into the light or into the darkness? It's in our genes to prefer the more well light areas much of the time and this is a valuable survival instinct.
Should we also stop dressing in black for funerals? Should we stop referring to Black Friday (in Christianity, a day of mourning)? Should we start protesting when Death is represented as dressed in black?
Also, what do blind auditions/interviews (a real change that would make sense in the Software industry as well) have to do with language policing?
Black Friday is actually an economic thing (day after Thanksgiving in US) the day the companies go into the black/ start showing a profit for the year.
Oops, you're right, I should have researched that a bit...
Still, apparently the origin of the name seems to have more to do with the idea of a "black day" (a day when a disaster occurs), according to Wikipedia:
> The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday originated in Philadelphia, where it was used by police to describe the heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961.
Twitch removed the tag "blind playthrough" because someone complained that it might be offensive to blind people. Of course the person complaining wasn't blind, they just thought they were doing a good deed. Absolute idiots all of them, both the person complaining and Twitch for following with it.
Black has a negative connotation because of its association with death. That is in fact the origin of the term "blacklist" - a list of people associated with the execution of Charles II's father. It's also the origin of the term "black day" - a day of death and, by extension, disaster.
While this association is not in any way "natural" or necessary, and it's not even universal, it is still extraordinarily old - dating all the way to Ancient Egypt and influencing European culture from there to now. And thus, it is extraordinarily hard to remove by playing language games with one word.
I'm not sure if you're adding to what I was saying or contradicting me, but either way, I believe we should be in agreement. Colors have positive and negative connotations way outside of race, they are contextually dependent (your accounting example is very nice, as black is positive while red is negative), and trying to police that is absurd and counter-productive.
I should also mention that I am aware that in Japanese culture (and I believe others in that area, but don't know for sure), the traditional color for mourning is white, not black.
> Not directly no. But they enforce the unconscious belief that "black == bad" and "white == good". Read up a bit on unconscious/implicit bias [0]. There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening.
This is a pretty huge jump in reasoning. These things have nothing to do with each other. You might as well be saying "red means stop and green means go, so subconsciously people hate Native Americans". Which is nonsense for many reasons.
Perhaps principally that people can discern racial features from faces without using colors at all.
It's not common usage, but we're supposedly talking about unspoken and unconscious bias, so why aren't any vague linguistic or metaphorical associations fair game? The argument is precisely that you _don't_ directly think of red as related to Native Americans, so it doesn't make much sense for you to say that people don't think about it like that in response. Because well, yeah, the question is whether they _unthinkingly_ make the association.
Let me paraphrase this argument, but correct me if you have a different understanding:
- 'black' and 'white' have some racial associative strength, x, which is sufficient to cause bias in other contexts. I.e. x > r for some threshold r.
- 'red' has racial associative strength kx, for some k < 1. I think we agree that k < 1, since the association is less strong. Where we differ is I am (hypothetically) saying kx > r, still, whereas you (seemingly) think kx < r.
This is a strange argument because we've never actually established the relative values of x or r. Even if we assume the first point is true, it tells us nothing about the second, because kx might still be below or above the threshold.
In fact, we _haven't_ demonstrated the first point anyway, so it's just compounding an already hand-wavey explanation of how things work. If someone can assume x > r with little evidence, why can't I assume kx > r? You might have priors on the size of k because you think 'red' is less strongly associated with race, but we know nothing about x or r, so it's pretty irrelevant. If you can hand wave the first point, you can hand wave the second. As I did.
I'd rather there was no hand-waving. But if that's the game we're playing...
Unconscious bias may well exist and have a meaningful impact on life.
But unconscious bias testing has been shown not to test anything in a consistent manner, being largely unreproducible, and unconscious bias training has been shown not to impact anything much or even consistently impact test results.
Such things appear to be pseudoscience and bordering on a scam.
None of this helps. All this worthless virtue signalling does is irk people, and make them start ignoring actual societal issues.
Absolutely no one is using words like blacklist in association with black people, in the same way that (almost) no one uses lame in reference to a crippled person anymore.
Do you even know any black people that give a damn about changing words just to appease American black people? Most of my family is black and so are most of my close friends. They would all find this absurd.
Mind you, these are Trinidadian black people, and so we are all the descendents of slaves as well. This is all so condescending and borderline demeaning that white people think that we are so inept that we think such changes would affect literally anything in life.
My own country has been occupied by foreign forces so hard that it stopped existing for 100 years. It nearly erased our culture and lots of people died. Should I now start telling people that using the word "occupied" in places like "occupied toilet" or "occupation" to mean employment is somehow offensive to me?
Or maybe should I realize that as a literate adult, I have the ability to understand context around the words that are used?
Do you think there's any relation between the naming of whitelist/blacklist and skin color? I certainly don't. Colors and their associations exist beyond racial identity.
Also, what is the problem in calling the relationship between two processes (one fully controlling the other) master-slave? It's a perfectly suitable analogy and does not have anything to do with any one person's ethnicity or history. I'll go a step further and say that looking at this whole thing entirely in the context of the mistreatment of african americans is unfair to people all over the world who have a history of slavery - as other posters have noted, there are plenty examples of that for people of all races. This is not exclusive to one group of people and no one can claim ownership of the word.
I'm generally not in favor of these changes. Blacklist/whitelist I can kind of see, but then again, why make it about skin color? It's natural that we'd have a connotation of bright things being good and dark things being bad (as in, our surroundings), because we like being able to see.
Any resemblance to words used to describe skin color is coincidental, I think.
it should be noted that git (the binary) is also in the process of deprecating `master`.
This is the message I get on my machine when running git init:
hint: Using 'master' as the name for the initial branch. This default branch name
hint: is subject to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all
hint: of your new repositories, which will suppress this warning, call:
hint:
hint: git config --global init.defaultBranch <name>
hint:
hint: Names commonly chosen instead of 'master' are 'main', 'trunk' and
hint: 'development'. The just-created branch can be renamed via this command:
hint:
hint: git branch -m <name>
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/test
I wouldn't say it's in the process of deprecating "master". It's just reminding user that they shouldn't plainly assume that the default initial branch is, or will always be, named "master".
Why do you think this means that git is deprecating master?
Similarly, GitHub claims that git is making similar changes, and links to a "Statement" that actually says the opposite, and a code change that also does not include anything like making that change (both are from June 2020). Since GitHub's claim is obviously in error, I wonder if it's malice or incompetence.
Is there some other evidence that git is going to deprecate master?
> init: provide useful advice about init.defaultBranch
> To give ample warning for users wishing to override Git's the fall-back for an unconfigured `init.defaultBranch` (in case we decide to change it in a future Git version), let's introduce some advice that is shown upon `git init` when that value is not set.
I get this on version 2.30.1 so presumably a 2.30 change. I don't think they're planning to move to main for definite, just that they're preparing people to stop treating `master` as always the default branch
A lot of people in this industry are not going to like it, but this post needed to be written and is 100% spot on. Wake me up when I can go to an "about our team" page for any of the companies posted on here and not see virtually the same exact team picture, from a diversity perspective, for nearly every company.
> We’re going to change the branch name because it could be seen as offensive but we’re still going to sell police facial recognition software that is biased against black people and women. Facial recognition software that misidentifies black people as gorillas. Facial recognition software that was used to identify unmasked BLM protesters. We’re going to change the branch name to be more inclusive of minorities but we’re going to carry on selling software to ICE. Get the fuck outta here.
This is a weird paragraph. They are contrasting GitHub's decisions against some other companies entirely.
Microsoft was the talking point in a couple of the articles, and they also own Github. The rest, could be considered under the tech giants umbrella -- so I'd say the links are topical and relevant.
Whats not clear to me is whether the first part of the sentence is talking about Github or tech giants? Actually, thats a general thing in this article, switching between those two modes.
This name change only gives the satisfaction/feeling of doing something but actually not having any impact (and possibly negative) on the world.
As a person of color, the LAST thing I want is attention. Granted I am SEA in Canada, but when someone talks about minorities i just cringe. In my country, my race is the majority and I myself feel bad/awful about my own ra
Honestly, if your company is such a moral pillar that you oh care so much about minorities and the poor people then why the *ck do you have billions of dollar stashed in some foreign company? Fix that first you dipshit.
In sociology, the term "majority" doesn't refer to proportions of a population, rather it refers to classes of people (economic, racial, religious, among others) that hold power in a community. Likewise a minority isn't the smallest demographic in the population, but anyone who doesn't belong to the social majority under discussion. In sociology, these terms have nothing whatsoever to do with the size of the respective populations (which is super annoying and confusing, to be sure). A social minority can actually make up most of the population, while a social majority can be only a few individuals.
For example, Bahrain is 75% Shia Muslim, but the royal family which controls the government and military are Sunni Muslims. Despite making up the majority of the population, Shia Muslims are religious minorities there since they are regularly subject to various forms of discrimination and repression on the basis of their religious beliefs.
The word "master" (or "slave", really, if I am honest with myself) doesn't mean anything to me.
However I can think of other words which _would_ be very offensive to me, and I would not like to have to use them every day in my job.
Imagine being black and having to type "Negrolist" several times per day. Or being a jew and having to write the word "marrano" (Spanish word which means "pig", but also a despective word used to refer to jews in the past). Or a recovering drug addict having to type "heroin" every day.
My point is that this list of words is probably a little different for everyone, and changes over time. I have heard some people express that "master" and "slave" (and "blacklist") feel that way to them. I have decided to trust that this is a real sentiment shared by a non-insignificant amount of people, even if for this particular black person they do not.
So, if they want to change it to main, sure. It is not a big deal to me, and it can help some people.
I also agree that it is not a big deal for companies like Github, and that the gesture feels empty if not accompanied with a more substantial effort.
Yes and no. Git took the terminology from BitKeeper, which did have master and slave repositories. So while there are no slave anythings in git, git uses the term because of the master-slave meaning.
I often wonder if these name change/inclusion initiatives are started for promotion purposes. At least from my observation at work, it seems none of them are led by under-represented groups. Instead, they are mostly led by white/over-represented PoCs.
Of course I don't dare to raise these questions at work (or with my real identity). These days if you are not onboard with these changes you might get labeled as racists.
Well 'main' is a more intuitive & UX friendly name than 'master' which new devs are going to intuitively relate to as it's commonly used to refer to the 'main thing', e.g. main road, main course, etc. I can't recall the last time I used 'Master' as a synonym to 'main' outside of technology (as a Redis Client author I still deal with Master nomenclature a bit). Can only think of 'Masters degree' but that has to do with Mastery knowledge rather than 'Master copy'. The only other usages of 'Master' I can think of (from TV & Films) is basically what they're trying to move away from.
As a library author I often deprecate & rename new APIs when I can think of (or have been proposed) a more appropriate and a descriptive name to replace a misleading name. I put a lot of weight into the name of symbols as it basically has the largest bearing in understanding its functionality & purpose. This is effectively what GitHub is doing, deprecating 'master' in favor of 'main' for new repos, which I don't see a problem with as it's looking pretty clear that all new technology is moving away from master/slave terminology - I don't see why Software needs to be forced to use their old legacy names forever if they're able to deprecate it and move to new more appropriate naming without immediate breaking changes.
This change hasn't broken any of my 100+ existing repos, GitHub is only changing the default branch to 'main' for new repos & have implemented a bunch of work behind the scenes to reduce the friction for orgs & users who also wish to rename their existing mater branches [1]. I don't understand the hate this effort to more modern & inclusive naming is inciting, if you want to criticize GitHub for their lack of action in other areas, criticize that instead.
being a device or mechanism that controls the operation of another mechanism or that establishes a standard (such as a dimension or weight)
being or relating to a master from which duplicates are made
In the realm of version control, the master branch tends to have special conceptual status as the branch you fork from and merge back to. It's not "main" like the main room of your house or main street in your city, it's the canonical branch which others are understood in relation to. It has nothing to do with slavery and renaming it to "main" obscures and confuses what was being communicated with the original name.
Yes "Master copy" was the terminology it was based on, but I'm more likely to hear and use "Original version" or "Original copy" today. I associate "Master copy" or to refer to old artifacts like Vinyl LPs, Film reel or document, with it's usage becoming more rare with the move to a digitized world. So I see its relevance & usage declining, esp. in Software where it's being proactively avoided in new technology.
But I don't believe "Master" is more intuitive nomenclature for new devs learning version control either nor a better representation for the naming the main branch where terminology is around a tree with branches being created from and committed to the 'main' single branch (i.e. trunk). When visualizing branches in a commit history it's shown and referred to as branches off the main trunk that deviates from the main branch at different commit points that may or may not return to the main branch like small roads off a main highway. The emphasis of branches being they're deviations or snapshots of a main branch's commit timeline, not in their state in which they're old copies of a main branch. The "Master copy" by definition does not change, it's a completed artwork, which is the opposite in CVS where it's always growing & changing with a tree of commits and often it's the branches which are snapshots of the main branch in labelled, well-defined points in its history.
Either way the terminology is definitely moving away usage of 'master' in new Software, so I don't fault their reasoning for deprecating existing naming and moving to more modern, intuitive & inclusive terminology.
There’re two aspects to the “master” vs “main” debate: (A) the negative connotation that “master” acquired during slavery in parts of the English-speaking world; and (B) the fact that “main” is objectively clearer, benefitting newcomers and effectively reducing the barrier to entry.
I’m not entirely on board with (A).
The downside to fighting words is that the negative connotation in the word is actually strengthened when a major organization decides to censor it on such grounds.
Consider Winnie the Pooh and CCP: used to be a cute children’s cartoon character, was compared to China’s dictator and got banned—now any display of Winnie is effectively a statement. Previously you were free to take it at face value clear of any political agenda, but now the meaning is decided for you by a central authority.
Furthermore, in the case of “master”, it was replaced with another word—and words continuously acquire connotations. If some white supremacist community now adopts “main” as a slang for “white”, what do we do? Keep on renaming branches? Doesn’t strike me as a sustainable approach.
I dream of a world where every single person is secure and no one takes terms personally, but I guess that can’t happen in foreseeable future.
However, I have to support (B). If we were starting with a blank slate, there’s really no argument to be made for “master” as somehow better than “main” at denoting the, well, main branch. (It could be a tough choice between “default” and “main” though.)
It’s hard to say for sure, but I suspect a lot of the pushback is subconsciously of the “we had to learn obscure terminology, so why should newcomers be spared?” variety.
I fully agree that changing master to main doesn't really solve anything. When supporting people, they should be supported in a way that matters.
git itself changing the default branch name to main was a sufficiently good reason for me to go for main as the default branch name for my projects as well. It's a central project and their decision carries weight, regardless of their motivation.
If people choose to use main for their new projects, I see the argument for also renaming master to main for older projects, to be able to have a slightly more uniform git workflow on the command line. It depends on the project if making this change outweighs the hassle.
> git itself changing the default branch name to main was a sufficiently good reason for me to go for main as the default branch name for my projects as well. It's a central project and their decision carries weight, regardless of their motivation.
Git hasn’t changed the default. It’s still master. It’s GitHub that changed their default. The only thing Git has done is make it configurable.
You are right. I thought git itself had changed the default branch from master to main, but I found no mention of that in the release notes. I was wrong on the internet.
> I just don’t appreciate the idea that we as software engineers can now sit back and believe we’ve made some kind of positive change, coz we haven’t
Why does the author think that GitHub — and the people who support the naming change — think of this as “real” change and are complacent to leave it at that?
As opposed to, say, the name change initiative being both a small thing and one that is a natural outgrowth of the mindset already committed to making positive change?
Digressing here, but I really dislike Medium. I wanted to look up HBCUs which is an acronym in this article I was not familiar with (I am not American), but Medium's crappy UI displays a "quote on Twitter" popup thing when you select any text, and then deselects the text. This means I can't use the "look up" feature but into the OS, like I can on almost every other web page.
Because somewhere in my company pipeline there was a hardcoded "master" branch. So no new projects where building. The old guy have quited, so they asked me to review scripts, and only after a few hours It ocurred to me that was because new projects where being created with the main branch.
So... fuck you github. You changed nothing, and annoyed a lot of people. And being all honest, if that is a thing that annoys you because when you hear master you thing of slavery and stuff like that, you probably get too much free time on your mind.
I for example hear naster and immediately thing immediately about kung fu and stuff like that.
> Yet at these same companies the majority of each grad scheme cohort tend to be from basically the same five colleges/universities. Are HBCUs one of these colleges??
The resistance of the software industry (and other elite professional industries) to recruit from HBCUs is an indictment of their DIE efforts. It’s not that reasonable name changes don’t matter, it’s that they don’t matter when you refuse to fix glaring pipeline problems like narrow recruiting strategy.
> Yet more important than their famous alumni is the Black middle and upper-middle class, which HBCUs have almost single-handedly created. HBCUs have produced more than 80 percent of Black judges, 40 percent of Black Congress members, and roughly half of Black public-school teachers. More than 70 percent of Black doctors and dentists earn their bachelor’s degree at HBCUs.
I've said before; I don't mind the master->main rename in essence because I think "main" is a better fit if it were to be picked today. Is it worth the hassle? Probably not, but we're past that now.
But Github went way too far by aggressively pushing devs to rename their own local master branches to main. This caught me by surprise and I almost accidentally renamed the branch of one of my previous clients.
What in the hell is wrong with them?! As a Github user of more than 10 years I never read those instructions any more so didn't notice this. It's still there! They are insidiously instructing inexperienced developers to modify their own repositories for no reason other than earning imaginary "not racist" bonus points. Horrible behaviour and a total abuse of power.
This explains my WTF moment when teaching a class full of students to push to the github classroom using push -u origin master and it being rejected and having to use main!
Yeah. For my own projects, and/or on my own command-line, I don't care what "ma<tab>" resolves to. "main" is not a terrible choice.
But as a teacher, the way this makes all the existing guides and tutorials wrong means I have to waste 15 minutes of my semester (about 1%) explaining this.
In short, the main effect of this change is to very slightly raise the barrier to entry for new developers.
On the other hand, for the non/new developers I’ve interacted with [non-US], “master” was a confusingly jargonistic name that has raised eyebrows for years. Being the “main” branch seems a much plainer, obvious name, and I think it’s an improvement entirely separate from any social reasons.
Is it an empty gesture? Maybe? Does it cost more than a couple of seconds for making things clearer and making a minority of people people happy? No.
It probably wasted more integrated time across all the people reading this article than just shrugging and changing it does.
Told you how useless this branch change was to bring this 'inclusivity' in. Nothing but woke virtue-signalling as a whole. They want real change not solidarity stunts like this. GitHub and everyone else might as well have done nothing instead of bringing this attention to themselves.
This fallacious logic of 'If you are silent, you are against us' or 'Your silence is violence' means that when we are still waiting for Mastercard to change their name, at the same time they are also virtue signalling for 'inclusivity' as well. One can just say: 'Why haven't you changed your offensive name yet?''Since they are still silent about this demand, they are probably still against us and what we believe in.'.
It is better to ignore them in the first place rather than give in to their ridiculous demands and copy their virtue signalling stunts which achieve absolutely nothing.
He had a masters degree. We were impressed by her mastery of the subject. They were master archers. The zen master suggested they should meditate.
Etc etc etc...
I realize the word can be used in a negative context but that's the case with any word and in none of the cases is it the word itself that is the problem, but peoples actions.
I don't care if we call master 'main' or whatever. They both work. The discussion around the name change does annoy me. This isn't D-day, it's a name change for the sake of PR.
As mentioned elsewhere, the prose doesn't read British, this is the only post from an anonymous account and there is a link to Daily Stormer. Flagging this.
Doesn't matter, it's still a 2/3 chance that someone saying they live in London is British. That's not such a crazy assumption, especially as a software developer.
There is a difference between "necessary" and "sufficient".
I am (mildly) happy with the name change, but as the author of the piece makes clear, it it not enough in itself, not even close.
Maybe you view it as a distraction from real change? However, I'm sure that many of the people publicly dunking on this change have even less interest in more substantial change.
> "However, I'm sure that many of the people publicly dunking on this change have even less interest in more substantial change."
I'm openly scornful of this change and would absolutely love to see these large companies put their money where their mouth is by putting up meaningful (i.e. large enough to sting them) amounts of cash to create educational and job opportunities for minorities.
> We’re going to change the branch name because it could be seen as offensive but we’re still going to sell police facial recognition software that is biased against black people and women.
Some parts of tech are populated and led by 29-35 y/os who were sold a bill of goods in their early 20's about how virtuous and pro-social their tech was. "Making a better place through....", well it turned out to be to through surveillance-y adtech and working with China but not the DoD because "war is bad."
So much of tech's labor challenges right now seem driven by the above.
I guess the author is talking about a Western country? There are plenty of countries where another color is dominant across all sectors (not just tech). For example, brown in Asian countries, black in African countries. I don't hear any complaints about that.
If the OP is saying that people of minority race are discriminated, that is a different and valid point. But blindly saying that there should be more people of minority race (which would make them the majority, not the minority) in every sector, doesn't make any sense.
He is in the UK. He says "Take the company I work for as an example, there are about 7 black people in the whole company, a company of 250+ people." The UK is 3% black. 7/250 is equal to 0.03. So you are totally correct. This is not "abysmal" representation, it is the expected representation. For now, Europe is inhabited by over 90% Native Europeans which are white.
I was indifferent about it at first. main is a good name, master as well. It was completely unnecessary for reasons pointed out in the article.
Now, I can agree, f ck this change. I work with a lot of legacy repos, multiple devs, and I always have to check whether a repo uses master or main. Sometimes we end up with both master and main branches, then we have to deal with that too. It's nothing bad ever, maybe in total I wasted 1-2 hours. But if millions of other devs also wasted many minutes of work time on this unnecessary change, that adds up.
For the lazy, here [1,2] are some wiktionary links. Assuming these are correct, wow, this makes the whole main vs master thing seem even more silly.
> SLAVE: From Middle English, from Old French sclave, from Medieval Latin sclāvus (“slave”), from Late Latin Sclāvus (“Slav”), because Slavs were often forced into slavery in the Middle Ages.[1][2][3][4][5] The Latin word is from Byzantine Greek Σκλάβος (Sklábos), see that entry and Slav for more.
> ROBOT: Borrowed from Czech robot, from robota (“drudgery, servitude”). Coined in the 1921 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek after having been suggested to him by his brother Josef, and taken into English without change.
Well that ruins the fun of the surprise a little... but I guess people can still look forward to real plot twist: who the "masters" were. Hint: it wasn't the Moops!
Well I think heavy industry will do better weathering the wave of tech articles helpfully suggesting laughable solutions to non-problems. They don't share the same weakness to slacktivist pull-requests.
It's interesting the way old problems come back around. The master/slave terminology was a controversial thing people argued about when I started with Usenet in the early nineties. It's a pity those old Usenet postings aren't easier to search and reference.
More recently, the comments on this 2003 Slashdot story echo what's had been written here today pretty closely, just replace "woke" with "politically correct". [1] A quick scan makes it seem like there is a master/slave drinking game to be had, involving finding the same comment in that comment section and this one.
I assume the argument about master/slave terminology dates back even further than my experience, but the question of how a person would conduct a controversy without NNTP or at least, for the love of God, UUCP is a mystery. Magnetic tape transported via sailing ships? Signals transferred great distances by lighting fiery beacons atop mountains? Passenger pigeons? The way people are using this extremely old argument and their peers' engagement with it to draw conclusions about where their current popular culture is going is entertaining.
For context, I'm an African American, so many of my ancestors were slaves.
I don't want more people thinking about my race. I also don't want my presence to constitute a burden on my coworkers. I want white people to be colorblind around me.
Unfortunately, white people don't care what I want.
Cannot argue with any of the points brought up by the author at all. That being said, "main" is a better name for that branch, especially for people new to VCS. The change would've been worthwhile on its own without the expectation of a standing ovation.
It's fine to think "main" or "trunk" or whatever is a better name, it's very easy with git to use a branch with whatever name you like. The issue I and others have (and I appreciate you aren't saying this in your comment) is we don't agree that "master" is "problematic" at all.
at an older company we used main. then we created master and development. and the master/main branch was set to development. good luck to anyone inspecting that repo!
I just wish that all the weirdness of US politics didn't just spill out on the rest of the world like that.
We live in an age of profound cultural exchange between civilizations, and as with anything of this magnitude it has great benefits and major drawbacks
These ideas about inclusion and language aren’t actually new. They just got more attention recently.
While I agree that we should start fixing bigger and more perceptible issues about racism (e.g., hiring biases), but let's not mix these things together. I assume people that pushed these changes don't have influence on hiring. So let's celebrate their small but impactful success.
I was personally a bit skeptical about the whole idea of not using “master” or “whitelist & blacklist” because my brain never associated them to race and racism and I assume it’s just the same for everyone. So it seemed like a pointless change at first glance.
But, maybe we should change it. Maybe the whole notion of “black” being used in “bad” and “negative” context has an influence on our perception about other things that we are not aware of.
For comparison, the notion of associating Pink to girls and Blue to boys isn’t something very old at all. It’s a 20th century change and yet it comes so naturally to us that you would be surprised when you learn about its history. Perhaps “black” being the label for unfavorable things has an influence on our subconscious and how we see other things around us.
There are many studies about how language has influence on our culture and the way we think. Actually you can even see it with programming languages. A Scala programmer solves a problem very different than a Python programmer would. Their mental model is very different.
So I personally don’t mind changing them anymore. Why resist the change and insist on something so cheap to change? Let’s try it and perhaps it will take a few generations until it becomes the new normal. Every small progress is still good especially if it has deep cultural impact.
I welcome changes and I admire forward thinking. Don’t fall into the trap of false but appealing and convincing arguments against this and also don't mix it with other issues that we have.
At some companies diversity & inclusion initiatives are just about language and nothing more and we know that’s very wrong. But, progress even in a company like that is still a progress. Let's try to fix other things too while we take some other small steps.
After a few times hearing it, I think I quite like “main” for branch name. I think it even makes more sense to say this is the main branch.
Language matters. The way we use language and tell stories, associates white with good and black with bad. A snippet from Languston Hughe's 'That Word Black':
"Now as I were saying, the word black, white folks have done used that word to mean something bad so often until now
when the N.A.A.C.P. asks for civil rights for the black man, they think they must be bad. Looking back into
history, I reckon it all started with a black cat meaning bad luck. Don't let one cross your path!
"Next, somebody got up a blacklist on which you get if you don't vote right. Then when lodges come into being,
the folks they didn't want in them got blackballed. If you kept a skeleton in your closet, you might get
blackmailed. And everything bad was black. When it came down to the unlucky ball on the pool table, the
eight-rock, they made it the black ball. So no wonder there ain't no equal rights for the black man."
Sure, it's a small change. And yes, it takes time away from doing something else productive with your day. But it is valuable to reflect on our usage of these terms in everyday life, and how it might affect others, even in subtle ways.
Using a term other than master is technically annoying as most developers have that memorized and would disrupt their work to a small degree. Nevertheless this is a non-zero cost put on the entire tech community. There isn't much difference between forcing people to not user master branch than let's say not being able to use VSCode, Atom or Sublime, just because the name happens to fit the bill doesn't mean the cost isn't real.
I still believe it makes sense for the tech community to incur this cost. Awareness of these issues is an important part of the solution, no matter how idiotic the change that is making us aware actually is.
There will be people who will use this to their benefit like the example given where Github sells software to ICE and at the same time pretends to care about master branch? Even if a small portion of this change helps with a solution that's a win even if most of it is for publicity stunts or corporate America opportunistically jumping on a social cause bandwagon to sell more products or virtue signal to hire more talent, etc. (I'm looking at you Apple recent diversity/inclusive commercials.)
> I don’t want this post to be about The Solutions™ but here’s one for your noggin; there is this a significant intersection between career changers/developers coming from non traditional backgrounds (i.e. people with no CS degree) and minorities. Put your money where your fucking mouths are and hire these people. Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants? As someone with a psychology background I can’t overstate what difference it makes to get a legit company to give you a chance, both in terms of your CV and your confidence.
I would one-up this and say that tech companies should be opening offices in under-represented areas with large minority populations and start investing in public education there, if they really care about workplace diversity. However, this quickly turns into an argument about money, money, money and effectively would never be accomplished. And so what they're doing is just simply a virtue signaling clown show which gets enough done to not get picked on.
I think we've reached the peak of absurdity, when a linting utility adds an enabled by default inclusive language rule that breaks people's builds for daring to use racist terms like "MasterViewController" or "MasterCard".
I generally think of it as “cheap” inclusivity. Companies looking to cast the biggest virtual signal with the smallest amount of capital. On paper it looks nice enough, but dig a little deeper and you realize that it’s everything under the sun minus the most important part: training and hiring more women, people of color, and other minority groups in tech.
I’ve worked for companies that do this with mental health too. Everyone is burned out and unhappy? We’re bringing in a professional on workplace happiness! We’re partnering with non-profits! We’re doing everything! Except, you know, addressing the actual cause of the burn out and unhappiness. Because that requires a hard, sober look at our own behavior and wrongdoings. It’s so much easier to look outward instead.
I don’t identify as a minority in tech, so I won’t even pretend to understand exactly what that’s like. But it seems like being gaslit constantly. It sounds so painful and invalidating and exhausting and outright maddening to be told to look at all of this progress when you know they know it’s all the cheapest version of it and it’s mostly just for show.
> there is this a significant intersection between career changers/developers coming from non traditional backgrounds (i.e. people with no CS degree) and minorities. Put your money where your fucking mouths are and hire these people.
I am white, and grew up in what would best be described as a mix between military housing and a trailer park. Crime was a part of daily life, upward mobility was "join the military", and access to educational resources was a joke. I made it to software because I was incredibly lucky and ahead of the curve in the industry. Pre-internet, programming was something I found because I was bored and the one library I had access to had a computer and a few books by Peter Norton. I was programming when adults around me couldn't figure out wordperfect to type a letter (not that that was an easy task). A kind person gave me an old clunker of a machine to take home and that was enough to spark a career. (after my mother yelled at me for using so much electricity, of course)
I am now in a place where I can use my experience to speak for me instead of my educational credentials, but the first half of my career I worked some abysmal tech jobs because many companies gate kept positions behind college degrees, even with relevant work experience (and compared to most unskilled jobs, even a bad tech job is a good job). Even now, among my peers the phrase "Where did you go to school?" is one I hear often, and when I say "I didn't." it gets me some strange looks and often a feeling of instantly being devalued in this person's eyes. I've done what I can to remove these hiring practices in orgs I've been a part of in the last 20 years, and I have seen positive change in general, but the system is still fundamentally biased against those with the financial means to enter it.
While I agree with some of the points made, this article is mostly a rant filled with generalizations and untruths.
>They forgot to talk to people who are actually members of the black community.
>Regardless, did anyone try to reach out to black software engineers or developers
>Yet at these same companies the majority of each grad scheme cohort tend to be from basically the same five colleges/universities.
>I guess mummy and daddy paying $20 mil for a new library to get me a seat at an ‘elite’ school is still meritocracy eh?
How does the author know any of this? From the original discussions around this topic ~9 months ago I remember several instances of companies asking their employees.
>We’re going to change the branch name to be more inclusive of minorities but we’re going to carry on selling software to ICE. Get the fuck outta here.
If this is referring to Microsoft, since they own Github, they explicitly banned law enforcement from using their facial recognition technology.
>It signals to other privileged white boys, “hey, come work for us, we pretend to care more than all our competitors xoxo”. This shit aint for us, it never was.
This is a good point.
>I’m pissed off because they pretended to be doing good and wanted me to congratulate them for it.
I don't think Github asked for any pats on the back for their change, but I can see how it's implied. Also, master/slave can be offensive to a lot of communities, not just the black community.
I do totally agree that major tech companies need to sponsor way more outreach within black communities. It's way too easy to blame diversity problems on the "pipeline" and then do nothing to improve why the pipeline is like that in the first place.
> They forgot to talk to people who are actually members of the black community. The very people they are trying to not offend.
I don't get what makes the author think that any such change should only happen with an explicit approval from "black community". TBH I don't see how community's opinion on this topic is relevant at all.
This is a change by people who felt uneasy about the old name for people who felt the same. If you're not in this category, it's a no-op for you. Existing repos still have master, new repos can have main branch renamed to master trivially.
Don't attach so much meaning to something so fucking insignificant. It makes zero difference for some, it makes some difference to others. Who gives a shit?
My only problem with the rename is that I apparently have muscle memory of typing `gco master` and `git rebase master` without thinking so I now lose a few seconds of productivity on newer repos until I learn to adapt to it. I can live with that.
I think an interesting technical problem is: How can a person reliably understand the amount of consensus within the black (or any other) community for a given idea?
It's an challenging problem that could apply to any demographic group or subculture.
Any person only interacts with a portion of a demographic and thus developed biased impressions based on the slice they see. Ex. "Are black people nerdier than portrayed in the media, or is my social circle just disproportionally nerds?" or "My liberal friend group is more pro-gun more than liberal political rhetoric implies, is my friend group or the political rhetoric closer to the median liberal position?"
Currently, we have polls and extrapolation - but this system has a number of its own flaws and selection biases.
I think there would be a lot of technical and social challenges to succeeding, but building a web service that could measure community sentiment and quantify consensus more accurately than current polls would be incredibly powerful and valuable. Perhaps there is a method where you could measure the size of each tail of the bell curve (people who love or hate idea X enough to create an account to make their opinion known) to estimate the position of the mode.
> We’re going to change the branch name to be more inclusive of minorities
It struck me that GitHub's suggested alternative, "main", could be taken to mean "mainstream", as in not inclusive of minorities. In which case OP's suggested "fuck-github" is by far the more preferable branch name.
Just wanted to call out this excerpt from the article - the author makes an extremely good point:
> I don’t want this post to be about The Solutions™ but here’s one for your noggin; there is this a significant intersection between career changers/developers coming from non traditional backgrounds (i.e. people with no CS degree) and minorities. Put your money where your fucking mouths are and hire these people. Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants?
People of color often don't have the cultural or economic incentive (or capability) to engage in STEM roles for many reasons (especially in the United States), so an emphasis on bringing in people from _non-traditional backgrounds_ can have a real, quantifiable impact on workplace diversity.
I work in the games industry, and as a small piece of anecdotal evidence, some of the best programmers I've ever worked with never completed a degree, and some never even started one.
There is a lot of talented people out there, willing and able to work hard. Limiting your search to university graduates is really shortsighted.
I work for a major tech corp that employs thousands of people, went to an internal tech conference a few years back. They're based near a major US city with a big black population. I met a ton of Asian and Indian Asian people there.
The only black people I met were hotel staff. Wtf America?
So I'm a european white guy and I know that Identity Politics covers topics which make it extremely hard to find a consesus, but here are my two cents. Please share your thoughts with me.
Tackling huge problems in society (and in general) takes time. It's good do discuss the direction society should move as whole, and act accordingly in the future. But it's also important to act _right now_ as best as we can to put the fire out.
Will adjusting our language get rid of social problems? No. Will it help getting rid of social problems: in the longterm, maybe? I don't know. But I know that it doesn't hurt you to act considerate towards other people. So why not just do it?
The thing is, it shouldn't stop there. Inclusive language is just a small step towards a more peaceful society. We'll need many of those.
Former U.S. Olympic coach Payton Jordan of California set a world record (30.89 seconds) in the M80 age group in the 200-meter dash at the USATF National Mains Championships in 1997 in San Jose, California.
> I just don’t appreciate the idea that we as software engineers can now sit back and believe we’ve made some kind of positive change, coz we haven’t.
Boom.
So I'm indirectly asking a black software engineer by virtue of reading the blog: What are the things that should be done instead? Not a lot we can do it about stop and search. How do we actively bust bias? He slams the 'meritocracy' meme: I know that is widely backed here. So what can be done instead?
> Personally, I have no attachment to any of these words.
Sadly, I think a large proportion of people absolutely have a very strong attachment to not changing anything. Who will agree with you on this front but be against anything more substantial? I've been told on this board that the only racism is antiwhite.
>Inevitably there will be some of you in the audience asking, “Well what do you want them to do? They’re trying their hardest, help them with some solutions!!”.
>I don’t want this post to be about The Solutions™ but here’s one for your noggin; there is this a significant intersection between career changers/developers coming from non traditional backgrounds (i.e. people with no CS degree) and minorities. Put your money where your fucking mouths are and hire these people. Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants?
This reminds me of a discussion in my company after the BLM movement.
It was a talk under article about moving away from blacklist/whitelist. The discussion was done by purely white people and they were suggesting what other names they could change. It looked like people started looking at dictionary for words containing "white" or "black" and started suggesting strange changes.
Going as far as suggesting that "whitespace" is offensive, because it has "white" in name and suggests "opportunity".
I was hard to explain to this person that whitespace comes from book printing.
Basically a savior complex which trivializes the problem, but makes some white folks happy because they did something "important".
Basically I agree with tda's post: this does nothing to address the real problem, and allows people to feel they've done something when they haven't.
On the other hand, it's not a big deal to do it and we've done it.
If you're bothered by the demands for empty gestures, how about addressing the root cause: the rising tide of racism, especially official and policy racism, and the tragic outcomes it produces.
(We're having another round of the policing discussion in the UK, since within the same week we've had a woman murdered by an off-duty police officer, a vigil for that woman broken up by the police on the pretext of COVID restrictions, and a law proposed that makes it illegal for protests to be "annoying".)
The best of this comment section is that the OP's point was "you make barely-consequential changes like x instead of difficult ones like w, y, and z which would help more" and people are utilizing the post to argue why they should have to do even less.
Semi-related: one of the things that really bugs me about master/slave terms as applied to databases is that it's a really bad metaphor. Sure, one node controls all of the other nodes, but if the master node dies one of the slaves will randomly get promoted to master. Or if you need to move regions maybe another slave will get promoted to master while the master will get demoted to slave.
Needless to say, this isn't how most slavery systems have worked the world over. I feel that writer/reader terms are more accurately descriptive anyhow.
I'm a white middle class American so I realize I don't have much of a voice here but I do want to say that this change is so minimal compared to all the other various BS I have to put up with in my job that that who cares if its virtue signaling or not.
MSFT decided to make the change, we deal with it and move on. Things change, and things change that are out of your control. Complaining about it won't change anything. Be more accepting that there are things in this world that you cannot change. Especially as something as simple as this.
When my interviewer asked why I didn't pursue a Master's degree, I replied "You mean a SLAVE Master's degree?" and I reported him to HR. Needless to say I got the job.
I have never strongly associated the word master with slavery. I think of a master copy or a ships master, master/apprentice as much as anything. Master/slave specifically seems problematic. It does express the relationship between the software components better than most alternatives but I am happy to defer to people who know more than me on the social costs of keeping that terminology.
There was indentured labour (effectively slavery though it was technically outlawed) practised in my country but many people aren't even aware of it and it hasn't created huge racial divides, civil war and political division that persists to today. I don't feel qualified to have an opinion either way. I find 'main' totally acceptable for the default git branch.
I think change should be real and pragmatic and improve peoples lives, not just symbolic change to appease peoples guilt, but the truth is symbolic changes can have an impact. I am totally fine with saying sorry to my countries indigenous people. It isn't an admission I have personally done anything horrible myself to them. It is just saying sorry. It is what a decent person would do when they saw an injustice done. But I guess seeing that takes a certain level of emotional maturity and I guess that is often missing from these debates.
Companies do whatever they can in order to avoid being criticized. Nobody really cares about the root cause of things. The thought process is simple: "Company A did this, so we'll do the same, because otherwise they'll blame us for NOT doing that, so we may lose partners and that will affect our revenue".
A great example is advertisement. A lot of tech companies suddenly started to work with black/asian fashion models. This change is obviously driven by movements, similar to BLM. It's not a natural change, not an honest idea coming from a production team. They do it purely from the perspective to shut everyones mouth, so to speak.
These days, everyone expects diversity, except that if you are thinking differently or having a different opinion, then you'll be taunted, banished and then canceled from everywhere. This is not good and goes against principles of innovation. People are scared of being different.
My personal take on master branch thing is that GitHub had to either stay quiet and do nothing OR, if asked to change master to main, say "f*ck you, go build your own company and name things however you want, we are not going to change foundational things just because YOU think master word is offending". Because, what if in 5 years someone is offended by branches being named `main`?
>It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.
>Still, progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them. Moral panic around race has been the answer, taking the uneasiness a meritocratic elite must at least unconsciously feel around their economic good fortune—something they could easily share with the less fortunate, should they care to—and displacing it onto “whiteness,” an immutable characteristic that one can do nothing to change.
>In other words, critical race theory is the perfect ideology for affluent progressive whites who want nothing to change—but who still want to feel like the heroes of a story about social justice.
The words we use matter. If they didn’t you wouldn’t feel the need to use fuck in your title. If you think it is inclusive to use old terminology the. why don’t you use old technology? Because it is worth it communally for us to update and get better at cooperating. Running around tellkng Github to fuck themselves is just more toxic masculinity wrapped up in a need to stay at the center of every conversation at work and at home. I am happy I don’t have to work on your team.
As a trend-resistant individual, this entire discussion is ridiculous. While I'm white as the plowed snow, my wife is distinctly black.
Whatever injustices that happened have, for the most part, been committed by long-dead people. The concept of "ancestral guilt" is mostly a social fashion for people to maintain their lifestyles without their status quo being disrupted.
I believe this is a fashion that's moving to pivot back again, based on my metamodel of trends[1]. This may take months or years, depending on the culture, but at some point the practical use cases of judging others by what's in their minds will outpace even bothering what skin color someone is.
Though, I must concede, this fashion of demanding reparation-driven political action has gone on for decades in many black communities, so it'll probably only change when their community leaders start forgiving stuff and moving on[2] without getting ostracized by their community[3].
> So what would our tech bro saviors have found out if they had actually bothered to talk to anyone black? Well, at least this black person would have told them that calling the branch master is not offensive. Furthermore, black people as a collective are not triggered by words like master wherever they appear in the wild. Context people, context. Banning a word because you think it’s offensive is basically telling us what we should and should not be offended by. There are bigger problems around inclusivity that deserve our time, let us put this drive for change into those.
It speaks by itself. I agree.
--
Honestly trying to connect vaguely the calamity of racism or the master/slave human abuse and then bringing them forcibly into the context of a software term "master" used as a naming convention to describe the root (default) repository's branch is just stupid and insane.
Simply because both contexts are completely different. So try to mix them is big mistake and confusion-prone. Even it can fracture your community (if maybe it's already).
It's sad see how devs/companies are supporting this stupid idea of the change or even worse they encourage you to do it so.
Fortunately there are humans (devs) who really understand the matter and don't buy this nonsense.
There is limited energy available for resolving important issues. By focusing energy upon name changes that have no benefit we now rightfully criticize it for doing so, which wastes more energy. It also convinces people that the very idea of name changing is bad, and that this is a bad culture of people. Which harms future real movements for actual good change.
Therefore changes like these are far more harmful than good for everyone.
What a perfect honest great read! Kudos to the author for articulating so accurately what PC is really about: virtue signalling by privileged white people.
I agree that the intense focus on changing names and appearances in general is at best a waste of time. It's a very US/UK-centric discussion.
"Master/slave" has no relevance at all in many countries like Sweden where serfdom (träldom) was forbidden or else ended in the 13th century and never involved foreign peoples.
"Whitelisting" and "blacklisting" have never been associated with skin pigmentation. This seems like a paranoid interpretation.
Meanwhile, the real problems still remain. I will say that I think even the author makes a serious mistake in framing the discussion around skin color.
These ideas about race that prevail in the discussion are not helpful and stem from poor scientific work in the 18th to 20th century.
It’s the politician’s syllogism -with the added benefit of the ‘something’ being effectively free (no new headcount), though all the more visible by virtue of it being an annoying find and replace exercise all the line engineers get to participate in.
Read to the end, and the author suggests SWE apprenticeships - I support the idea, but by contrast, it isn’t free, and would require some actual effort by line managers, so...
Personally, I think the underlying issue is polarisation of opinion.
Polarisation produces frustration, fear, and anger. This in turn produces responses like GitHub's, intended to anticipate criticism, since the criticism trends inevitably towards fury. This is true on right and left and everywhere else. It's always been the case, just look at polemics aimed at Darwinians, suffragettes, Catholics, anti-slavers, whatever. The difference today is the sheer volume, the ease with which anyone can instantly reach a global audience. And of course the cash produced from all those comments and views and clicks.
It's still all bread and circuses, it's just been made ruthlessly efficient.
As has been pointed out by other comments, consensus is lacking. Who's asking the people who are actually affected? And who's doing that in a calm, productive, collaborative way? I'm sure it's happening somewhere but that content is hardly going to drive traffic.
Perhaps there could be a concerted, deliberate effort at helping all of us disengage from polarising media, and instead engage in meaningful conversation.
Yeah i've always looked at my master branch and stared into the horizon, missing the good old days of slavery. People forget white populations were subjected to horrible stuff too. Looking back long enough one will have a tough time accounting and redressing stuff. Hey my Neanderthal ancestors were tortured by your Neanderthal ancestors. You owe me big time and also a branch name change...
Many may agree with the author, but the fact is that many people do get offended about words. In the last few days there has been a significant firestorm about South African academic Adam Habib, who was recently appointed as head of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the a University of London because he stated on a Zoom call with some students that if someone used the word n**r that would be a breach of policy. His sin was uttering the word, rather than saying “the n word”, which as a South African person with Indian ancestry, he is apparently not entitled to do. He tried to explain that words need to be understood in context, but was ripped apart by a woke Twitter mob (he has also made enemies in South African politics who gleefully amplified the outrage). After initially standing firm, he seems to have issued a grovelling apology.
If an outrage mob on social media is going to go after you, and they can be placated by changing a few words, it seems eminently rational to change the words.
> “Meritocracy!”, I hear you cry. “They pick from the most talented students. The ones that worked the hardest to get into the most elite schools. The black students should have just worked harder”. I guess mummy and daddy paying $20 mil for a new library to get me a seat at an ‘elite’ school is still meritocracy eh?
That's quite a straw man. If you're genuinely in favor of meritocracy, you should inherently be against the rich buying their way into positions. Just because bad thing A happens, that doesn't mean we should just allow bad thing B to happen too. We should stop bad thing A!
I do agree with the basic sentiment of this article. The tech industry would benefit from more diversity - particularly diversity of thought, which does not necessarily mean increasing diversity of skin color but would probably make the industry a more inviting place for minorities in the future. Nonsense like renaming benign technical terms does absolutely nothing to help with that.
This whole change seem like rather Anglo-centric. Why don't we start utlizing other languages and scripts to be truly inclusive. Some Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew or Sanskrit would do wonders. Or maybe even smaller language like Finnish, pää would be entirely fine and neutral alternative to main or even master...
This is bikeshedding to the extreme. Who cares if Github changes what words they use (from "master" to "main").
The poster claims that they personally were not asked about the change. Who cares what that person thinks? Seriously, this is just one voice (an "anon" user, so they won't even put their reputation behind their words).
This poster is clearly uninformed which doesn't help their case. This conversation has a long history in the computer world, and many companies for years have been removing the Master/Slave terminology (including Master/Slave disks). Don't believe me? Go look at Wikipedia, which has a page devoted to this topic! This is hardly new ground!
There may be problems of race in tech, but fighting against the "good" in order to hold out for the "perfect" is a stupid approach. There is no reason to argue against this change.
Relax, this is just a marketing move. It doesn't matter the tone of the the news buzz, negative or positive. What matters is someone have written a post with "github" in the title and it's on the top of HN. Kudos to Github marketing team, exellent provocative move, everyone is talking about it.
Ha, I am surprised no one yet cried about "black hat" being bad hackers and "white hat" being noble ones. When is that change coming to DEF CON? Most surprising is how hypocritical this charade is and likely everyone understands it, but follows the proverbial "school of fish".
By declaring a gray area word as forbidden it loses its legitimate meanings and only the undesireable meanings remain. The forbidden word becomes a slur because its potential to become a neutral or positive word has been removed.
What I have read is that it is only changing the default setting for new repositories, and does not affect existing repositories, and that either way you can still change the default branch name. (I looked, and it also looks like you can now rename any branch easily in GitHub, so maybe that can also help with some things.)
I think that the change is unnecessary, but is probably mostly harmless (although, I do not use git; someone who does might know better than I do).
If you want to import from a different version control system, if it uses a different name such as "trunk", you can keep the same name in a mirror with a different version control system, if that is supported by the system that you are using.
>> “Meritocracy!”, I hear you cry. “They pick from the most talented students. The ones that worked the hardest to get into the most elite schools. The black students should have just worked harder”. I guess mummy and daddy paying $20 mil for a new library to get me a seat at an ‘elite’ school is still meritocracy eh?
yes everyone who gets into these schools donates a library. thats why harvard has 10,000 libraries. theres no jewish or asian students whose parents came here with a penny and worked menial jobs. its all rich white people.
and im sure if they didnt change the name this person would write an article about how they didnt change it because they are racist. racist if you do. racist if you dont.
> "I’m pissed off because they pretended to be doing good >
and wanted me to congratulate them for it.
Either do some real shit or stay silent. Stay the fuck out of our way and don’t pretend you care. Then we can all get on with our lives."
The key quote from that passage, to me, was "Is it too much to ask for tech companies to run an apprenticeship program for people changing careers, etc?"
Certain people face _structural_ impediments to getting into tech. CEOs and HR love to brow-beat _individual_ managers and recruiters to fix the diversity issue in companies.
But you know what the decision makers never, ever do? They never create a _structural_ program to address the _structural_ problem. What if they expanded headcount by 10% to add an apprentice and make time for the team to train that apprentice. How much difference would we make in 'fixing our ratios' every year?
As a black man in tech, I can say its always frustrating to me when a company tells me what I should be offended by. The master word has never even crossed my mind in that way, I've always thought of it as in the music term. Its one of those settle racist things that I've noticed time and time again in tech. Its as if a bunch of white people come together to prove how "not racist" they are to their other white friends. They start to try to out do each other so much It starts to have the opposite effect and alienates people that just want to be treated normal, not like former slaves.
Yet another example of corporatist human resources feel good ‘spin’, which decontextualises the historical conditions that give rise to the need for anti-discrimination, equity and diversity issues in the first place.
You know it's all for show when the employees actively celebrate ICE contracts for $56k, and when minorities use the word "nazi" to describe far right protesters they are fired as a kneejerk reaction.
Lots of good points made in this. We have eradicated the usage of the exclusive terms in our team not recently but well before 2014. It's a cultural change to be precise. We are very conscious of the biases that could arise. In fact, during hiring we specifically ask the recruiters to look for diverse pool of engineers.
Still I concur with the OP's statement that the percentage of African American in the tech industry is marginal (in the US, not sure elsewhere). I don't know what we can do about this. But we have to change as a society and as individuals.
Doesn't telling the recruiters that suggests they should take a skin color or gender when making their decisions? That sounds pretty bad to me and would be illegal in my country.
I look at it the other way. The recruiters may not be inclusive by default. By explicitly informing the recruiters to be inclusive we remove the bias they have as well.
Stuff like diversity training and wokeness and virtue signaling is all counter productive. What you've done is planted the seed of discrimination where there was none to begin with. Congratulations.
In principle, symbolic actions are meant to show the intention. (E.g. pointing to an object instead of grabbing it.) In many cases, it is impossible to act quickly, or at all, yet - someone wants to point to the direction where they head.
In practice, everywhere when PR is involved (by people, companies, or government), symbolic actions are usually used instead of actual actions. They are orders of magnitude cheaper and offer an easy way to fool people with a false sense of care and engagement.
My problem is that this is an American company trying to impose their culture to us. There are a lot of developers from China and India whom Github didn't even consider asking.
Question is why should "we" who face far worse challenges than the Blacks in US be asked to change the name. That is what doesn't make sense to me.
The idea imposition happens just because we are a poor country and nothing else. I am sure 20 years down the line, if I don't follow an American culture I will be a villain.
Far worse challenges. How about impoverishment? I am still stumbled how Github has managed to make a fool out of Americans. I thought at the very least these first world country people are educated enough to not fall for propaganda
I was on Reddit saying “let’s ask the black devs”! What do a bunch of non-black nerds really know about race in America. I’m white btw. That’s a lesson you have to experience; you won’t find it in a textbook or solve it with an algorithm.
Go to the (obvious) reference for this, and ask them (almost entirely) what should be done. It’s all about black people in the first place, just ask them. That’s not politically incorrect, not even “uncomfortable” if brought up appropriately in a formal context.
And for those needing a qualifier: I'm mixed race, black/white—I've observed both sides of this my entire life. The answer isn't wordplay, it's directly investing in black communities.
I have to agree with the writer's suggestion of hiring non-traditional job candidates. I'm teaching someone how to code pro bono to help him provide for his young family, and the anxiety that he experiences about not having the advantage I do with my degree is real.
If companies really want to do social good, they will have to prove it by putting their money where your mouth is, taking some risks, maybe they'll benefit from some new blood and a fresh perspective.
Very well said! The systemic racism of law enforcement is just crazy in the UK but it is somewhat a taboo. It exists in statistics buried deep and never to be looked at. When I was out with some of my friends that happen to have darker skin they were stop and searched but I was told to just go, as if they thought they kidnapped me? Where are the stop and searched of the City coke heads? The tech industry really needs to pull their head out of their ar$$
As a South Asian/Indian and an immigrant to USA coming from a lower middle class background, I would argue that just like Blacks we are also disadvantaged but unlike the African Americans South Asians/Indians have taken over the STEM programs. I do not think acts like these make a change but rather change in mentality of the African American community is what matters for their youth to choose careers and opportunities that help them prosper.
In world history dating back several thousand years or more, slaves have existed. It is nobody today's fault this happened. I do not see how using a medieval historical reality to be offensive. Master slave hardrive settings on IDE drives for instance, who were offended by that?
What is next?
What about the byzantine generals problem? The byzantines, I am sure someone will dig up some dirt in them and label them off limits.
It seems to me like companies have gotten away with virtue signaling without performing any meaningful change for a long time. So, the fact that this article (and others like it) is getting so much attention now feels like a sea change. Or maybe it's just me that is paying more attention, but I don't think so.
This new level of accountability makes me hopeful that we can look forward to more meaningful, impactful changes on a systemic level.
Why do people call themselves Black in a first place? Neither calling someone White or Black is accurate - perhaps why we have: Brown? Calling someone Yellow, I think, is still considered offensive though.
Indicating your belonging by color confuses. Color is such a crude indicator as it groups individual certain way, whether one wants it or not.
Overall, color coding, or grouping people by how well their skin is absorbing light, removes part of personal autonomy.
I'm really tired of when someone groups all white people in the same category like we all have rich parents and only where we are because they paid off someone at a college. It's really offensive because I worked hard to get where I was at and had no help. It's like assuming all African Americans like rap and fried chicken. It's just really offensive.
I largely agree with the sentiments of the article, but side-effect I like is that it tests assumptions in git systems about "default" branches, and ensures that software isn't too committed to a certain branch name - so that people can call branches whatever they like.
Even on Github people can still use master if they want, it just isn't the default.
Usually companies try to hire more minorities out of guilt, or because "it's the right thing to do", but I think it's a wrong motivator. If the industry is not hiring part of society for some reason, then it's missing huge amount of unused talent.
We should be doing diversity and inclusion out of greed rather than guilt
I've had to deal with projects where the "main" branch was named: master, main, blead.
I almost never "name" that "main" branch, thanks to commands and aliases.
When I want to pull (and rebase) to the "main" branch, I run "git prom". When I want to check out the "main" branch, I "git com". What actually happens depends on what the project's "main" branch is. If a project later moves to a "live" branch, I'll just update the "git-main" script to detect it ahead of the rest, and off I go.
git-com is really just: git checkout "$(git main)"
git-prom is really just: git pull --rebase origin "$(git main)"
I'm not particularly sold on "main" vs "master" being an important thing, but if it's important to some I at least want to ensure I don't get frustrated when interacting with a project which uses it. With the above aliases and functions and programs, I don't care anymore.
I teach 2 git classes each year. I used to use GitHub for the pull/push section of the class, but last autumn half the class got stuck with branch name mismatches.
I switched to GitLab in the next class.
Surely this is just anecdata, but it seems to me that there can be real commercial consequences to letting your business get hijacked by the thought police.
Wait, I need to explain details of remotes and named branches before a basic collaboration exercise because some angry lefties in California got offended? Come on. Git can be very overwhelming to new users. Any concept I can leave undiscussed before people can get their hands dirty is a win. GitHub forces me to add a concept for political reasons.
Maybe you heard some of this on TV in 2019. But what was communicated then was a very watered down version of what actually happened.
You could say those children are detainees, but even detainees have dignity. Some of those detainees were newborns. What does a newborn know about immigration? laws? countries? You have to be a real idiot or a racist to take it against them.
And meanwhile, Github gladly offered their services to help CBP and ICE to operate.
>Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants?
Specifically how would you define non-traditional, and in your opinion why should this non-traditional segment of people get a separate funnel?
I’m not the OP but am “non-traditional” - didn’t do CS at university, worked in sales before moving to programming.
I don’t want a separate funnel thank you very much. I know some companies will reject my CV because of my education - that’s fair enough. I know some interviews will be harder for me. I prefer the risk of being filtered out early or having tough interviews over the lingering suspicion that I am a non-traditional hire.
If your funnel isn’t catching certain groups then you need to do something as you’re missing the opportunity to hire talented people from those groups. Why shouldn’t that be another funnel?
Even when it's an overt master-controlling-slave analogy, what's the actual problem with that?
It's not like there's any 'har-har silly slave' value judgement attached, why is it any different to 'teacher and pupil', 'controller and controlled', 'leader and follower'?
Anecdotally I admin but I've seen tech's filter for black people first hand.
A few years ago, I invited a friend of mine to stay at my place in SF while he works on learning to code and break into the SF Tech scene. IN no time at all, he qualified to get into hack reactor and quickly fell into a mentoring role.
Despite this, it took several months to almost a year before he got his first fulltime gig. Before, I always thought maybe there was something else I wasn't seeing. In this case, I knew he was good. I worked with in personally and knew what he was capable of. I know plenty of engineers that weren't as good at engineering that were getting jobs within a month. I coached him on his interviewing skils but nothign was moving the needle for him.
It wasn't until he got a "internship" position by a diversity initiative at a prominent startup that he finally started getting work as an engineer. He excelled at that role and now he works there as a fulltime engineer.
That someone with his ability had such a hard time getting a foothold was all the proof that I needed that something is up with tech and a bias against black men.
100x this. Can you blame them though, they're scared shitless of being called racist on the Twitters, so they do dumb things.
Apprenticeship programs are a great idea. I'm amazed at how credentialist software dev is becoming when all the best hardcore developers I know are largely self-educated.
My company changed our team name: "Black" to something else. just because .. really ? are we not allowed to use colors anymore ? Everyone on the team is white and european. I wasn't there when the team was named, but I think it had to do with rock cool factor, not slavery.
Another potential issue with a change like this, for the reason that they give for doing it, is that it may communicate an inaccurate picture of what black people care about to non-black people. "Oh wow, black people are offended by and 'hurt by'[0] the use of this term. I didn't know this would make them feel hurt!"
Articles like this clarify that at least some black people in fact do not feel "hurt by" this use of this term.
I'm Jewish, if someone said "we have to take all the swastika imagery off this Hindu graphic because it will offend and hurt Jews," that would bother me. I'm not offended, much less hurt, by seeing a swastika in a cultural context unconnected to Naziism. To suggest most Jews would be "hurt" by this paints an inaccurate and extremely unflattering picture of my own resiliency and ability to contextualize words and imagery. I can't speak for black folks but I would be surprised if some didn't feel similarly about being informed that reading the word "master" would or should offend and hurt them.
I know the topic is explosive, but I see a pattern here that is being repeated over and over again: people thinking they know for better what is good for some minority, and then making a big fuss about it. At no point does anyone think to ask people in the said minority if they think this is actually a good idea and what they want.
Another similar(?) example. In my country, there is a growing immigrant Muslim minority. Recently, there was an extremely rare case of the anti-immigration right wing party and the liberal green party rallying behind a unified cause: criminalizing male circumcision. The anti-immigration folk will of course get on any bandwagon that marginalizes the immigrant minorities.
But I also talked to some of the liberals who supported the initiative. They support it because they view circumcision as torture, mutilation and a violation of the child's rights. One even described circumcised males are "handicapped". I got the impression that many of these supposedly "liberal" people have never actually discussed circumcision with a person who is circumcised. Nevertheless, they seem eager to ban the entire practice and further marginalize an entire section of the population.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the author, I feel like it's a bit pointless because it feels like the politically correct wave has already won. Just keep thinking what you want, don't cancel me. This is not a hill I want to die on.
This article made me really emotional. I really didnt think anything of "master" branch until Github pointed it out. There are bigger problems to solve and. For starters I hope the tech industry can be more open to people of colour.
I think that measures like renaming stuff creates a bunch of problems that ultimately make things harder than they already are.
Once people understand that there is a changing nomenclature that has to be used they will completely shut up about a topic in fear of repercussions from a hate mob. This in turn will eventually lead to the unconscious but very real behavior of distancing from minority groups. It worsens things. People need to understand that by forcing language change they will further divide people.
Geroge Floyd isn't dead because Linus called the git branch master. He is dead because of police misconduct. And GitHub won't be able to change that, the government needs to send police officers to academy for longer and train them right. They also need to introduce an environment in which this behavior is not tolerated and officers will lose their jobs if they behave this way.
George Floyd is dead because of his own actions. This video by Vigilante Intelligence called "George Floyd Bodycam, Finally The Truth" covers it comprehensively:
> George Floyd is dead because of his own actions.
The video doesn't mention or show suicide. If you think that death is an acceptable outcome for a simple arrest with multiple police officers on site you got an serious issue. This is neither okay nor acceptable. Those police officers were incredibly incompetent. Incapable of handling a man, supposedly on a drug that has sedative effects, with 3 man back-up.
I did, and none of the actions displayed convinced me that the man deserved death. But maybe that just because I was raised in a country that values life and human rights. Unlike in some third world shithole called U.S.A.
I am black, and I honestly find this change ridiculous. Born in Africa and lives in the US. And honestly this is ridiculous. At some point this becomes painful it spare the real discussions that need to have about slavery and history.
> "We really don’t need to arm police with any shitty, biased facial recognition software. Their eyes already do a perfectly good job of that. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor can both attest to that. I can attest to it."*
I still get very annoyed with the name change every time I encounter it. I have a bunch of poorly written scripts that occasionally break with repos that have a main branch, so I have to fix these scripts I’ve written like 8 years ago
Why are we pretending that the term master is specific to one race? Some group of every race out there has been enslaved at one point or another. In fact, at certain points in history, black masters have had (gasp) white slaves!
I just wanted to comment how great it was to "Something for ya ears while you read." music on this post. I wish every Hacker News tech link had a music link to accompany the information being shared.
> I’m not pissed off because I expected tech companies to do more, no, I didn’t expect them to do anything. I’m pissed off because they pretended to be doing good and wanted me to congratulate them for it.
I think the point about involving the people that you're supposedly helping before forging ahead is really important. An ally that picks the wrong fight on your behalf is almost worse than an enemy.
This is not a GitHub issue - Git itself now asks you if you would like to use the more inclusive `main`.
I personally don't care for these changes, I will likely keep using `master` because I "automatically" type it in my workflow, and I find master to be a lot more descriptive. `main` is the name of my main.c, main.go or main.cpp file, the name of the main function, etc. I dont need another "main" to mess up my autocomplete.
If they (github/microsoft) want to make a difference, I'm there with them, if they decide they want to put a few more millions a year towards getting lower-class children a higher education, I'm happily going to buy some GitHub pro or whatever.
Until then, they need to step down and just be the tool they are, nothing more.
> Git itself now asks you if you would like to use the more inclusive `main`.
No it doesn’t. It says this:
hint: Using 'master' as the name for the initial branch. This default branch name
hint: is subject to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all
hint: of your new repositories, which will suppress this warning, call:
hint:
hint: git config --global init.defaultBranch <name>
hint:
hint: Names commonly chosen instead of 'master' are 'main', 'trunk' and
hint: 'development'. The just-created branch can be renamed via this command:
hint:
hint: git branch -m <name>
> This is not a GitHub issue - Git itself now asks you if you would like to use the more inclusive `main`.
When does git asks this? From what I've seen, they just introduced a new config to change the name of the default branch, which is quite nice in itself (as of Git 2.28, released 27th July 2020).
I overall agree with the broad message here. If GitHub, Microsoft, other tech companies cared so much about diversity they'd have an entire recruitment arm for women-only bootcamps and HBSUs.
> All this because I fit a description. What was this description? I don’t know, black male between 4’11 and 7’4 probably.
I have been stopped, searched, and detained in handcuffs for over an hour because I "fit a description." (I was fired for being late.)
I have missed international flights because I was "randomly selected," again, to be subjected to additional screening and interrogation.
I was held at gunpoint in middle school while officers tore apart my backpack looking for a stolen pen.
I am a cis white male, the paragon of privilege, and I'd be standing right there with you if you would only stop excluding me based on the color of my skin.
Pot, meet kett--no, wait, I didn't mean--it's just an expr--aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
I don't believe anyone was ever offended by this, if they were, that would be their problem and corporate language policing or any other institutionalized efforts like that are evil
Banning a word is pointless. The word itself has no power. It is the feeling piggybacking on the word that gives life to the word. The feeling will find another word as vehicle.
Isn't "git" an offensive word for a disabled person? At least it is in the society I grew up in. When will github stop their insensitivity and change their name?
As so often is the case, people are conflating mentions of the crimes with the crimes themselves. Bickering about terminology takes away from getting at the actual offences.
is it company's fault that the some groups are underrepresented as their employees? Cant talk for all companies but in my experience females are underrepresented simply because we dont really get any female applicants.
If there is a racism/sexism within the sector it happens before the job application and I find it hard to blame companies for that. If anything I know some examples of people getting advantage during the hiring because of their race.
Microsoft doing what it does best .. ruining well established products. I still remember when they bought Skype and I thought they won't mess up this time.
Yeah? How about the other way around - I'll start using 'master' more in my code from now on. No more 'primary' things, only 'master'. What do we have here, serverUrl? How about masterUrl?
The project I work on is going to migrate codebase from SVN to Git one of next days (yeah, like it's 2011...). There are collegues that have never used Git before (e.g. one is a junior dev and this is its first job ever), so they are learning Git right now.
No one supported the use of name 'main'. It's just a name change and everyone considers it to be something totally stupid and just bc of that we are not going to use it.
I can understand whitelist vs blacklist change, master\slave from the days I built PCs with IDE HDD, but this, God...
Currently I am writing technical SoC documentation with few bus masters and many slaves on the same bus. Honestly I don’t know how to avoid these bad words since these are everywhere in the bus vendor documentation. And these words perfectly describe the relationship between instances on the bus. I guess next word to ban will be “handshake” since this is shown in movies as a greeting between criminals ans that’s what masters and slaves do in my system.
reminds me a passage in the opening chapters of the three-body problem: instead of maxwell equations, they called it electro-magnetic equations. (and so on.)
identity politics is basically infighting and it's not very productive as pointed out by some other comments.
I guess OP didn’t realize the default branch name is configurable in repo settings, and that organizations can set it at an account level (which is an easy fix to not have to retool all the ci/cd pipelines). Much more effective then a blog post that nobody is going to see. Have we learned nothing from Rick and Morty?
Does master not also designate a person that has achieved mastery in a given craft or art, like a "Kung Fu master"? Within git I think the term is used in the meaning of a "master copy" in the sense of a reference. I also think this change is pointless, and it will break so so many things.
I'm late to the thread (had to find it satirized on n-gate.com) but I'm against all conflation/confusion. Against conflating/confusing master (as opposed to copy) with master (as opposed to slave). And especially, since it seems so widespread and dangerous, I'm against conflating/confusing the accurate use of master and slave whether metaphorical or literal, with endorsing slavery of humans, i.e. conflating/confusing the act of merely mentioning with the act of endorsing. Slavery is a thing and we need words to describe and name it; isn't that the whole point of drawing attention to it? Outlawing words actually works counter to the goal. And sometimes we do make computers serve in master or slave roles. They're not sentient so it's fine. Hopefully everybody with half a brain knows the difference between that and doing it to people.
that whole thing was incredibly USA-centric for a global company like Github.
Slavery is not a US thing and that drama stemmed pretty much from US Twitter segment
>I tell you, he’s the best American president. Why? Not because his policies are good, but because he’s the most transparent president[1]
The quote being about how Trump didn't pretend to have a humanitarian foreign policy in contrast to past presidents.
It's about two different situations but they are similar. People pretending to care about a cause and through that making it worse than not caring at all. While Assad and Mooseyanon both want people to drop the act to make everything easier
Seeing this gave me the warm fuzzies. Finally some push back against the pointless posturing that makes people feel good about themselves while helping no one.
This made it to the top of HN. I'm filled with hope.
I've never in my life met a single human being who was white or black. Why do we still use this terminology when yellow and red have gone out of style?
I doubt there are very many people seriously offended by "master", "whitelist", and so on. However, I think we should probably stop using them anyways. The reason is that many people who are introduced to these terms for the first time are likely to have a negative reaction of some sort. Like "is it okay to say that?" or "eww" or "that's not aging well" or whatever. Maybe I reacted that way, or maybe not. The point is, it was long enough ago for me to forget and my tendency is to use them without thinking about their possible connotations to someone (often children) who encounter them for the first time. Until recently when people pointed out that maybe we should use other terms.
This is a small change, but a good one. There are bigger things that need to be changed as well, and we shouldn't use this one thing to pat ourselves on the back for being especially enlightened.
(Regarding those other things: at my employer, some guidance came down to transition away from these terms in our code and documentation, and there was the kind of debate you'd expect in any tech company. I made a comment something along the lines of: "not using master/slave in our technical documents isn't silencing speech. It doesn't mean we can't use the word 'slave' when talking about the real issues of forced labor, it just means we should stop using it in a case where that language is unhelpful and confusing." Fast forward a month or two and we had an opportunity to share questions we had for our CEO during his quarterly business update. I submitted a question about our manufacturing facilities in China and whether we should continue doing business there given the bad things the government is doing to Uighurs. This was removed by a moderator and I got a sternly-worded email about not trolling and complying with (internal) social media guidelines and so on. So, I guess it turns out you can't talk about slavery after all. I don't think there's any correlation between avoiding master/slave in technical communication and corporate hesitancy to allow internal communication about doing business in a country that's causing a major humanitarian crisis. But still, it seems like even companies that are in some ways committed to doing the right thing still behave erratically when it comes to some moral questions.)
The issue is way bigger than a stupid meaningless branch-rename.
I'm very happy to see this post. This whole stupidity is so extremely frustrating to me. It's a perfect example of how little thinking the mainstream wants to put into important issues, how toxic American-liberalism is, and how easy it is for the masses to follow any seemingly-positive action just to avoid seeming negative.
blacklist and whitelist
to
blocklist and allowlist
Or are we scrapping that one also due to the underrepresentation of PoC in tech and the statistical small sample of 3 guys (and they are probably guys) out of 250 people not being enough to make a policy?
If you ask me, the problem with underrepresentation is all upstream. Whether it’s women in tech, or Black people in classical music etc. the solution isn’t to remove the audition screen and do affirmative action downstream. The idea is to fix it upstream.
Also with many other things such as non biodegradeable plastic. Why are our “solutions” involving a massive change to all the individual people not to use straws or plastic bags when this has a tiny effect on the result, while disrupting many people’s lives? Instead, it takes pressure off from the real solution: pressuring the Capitalist corporations to switch from non biodegradeable plastic to something sustaiable, by taxing the negative externalities and internalizing the costs TO THEM instead of offloading them to the consumer.
We have to practice upstream thinking and not be afraid to speak openly about the SOURCE of all that plastic. If you want more Carribbean musicians for example, consider your immigration and visa policy. If you want less plastic, ask why companies switched from glass bottles. I’d rather have a directed policy upstream than trying to use tons of bandaids downstream.
From David Foster Wallace’s Authority and American English essay:
> “My own humble opinion is that some of the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project of ever actually changing them. Such pussyfooting has of course now achieved the status of a dialect […] I refer here to Politically Correct English (PCE), under whose conventions failing students become "high-potential” students and poor people “economically disadvantaged” and people in wheelchairs “differently abled” […] The same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution - namely, the sixties-era rejections of traditional authority and traditional inequality - have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is sort of funny in a dark way, maybe, and most criticism of PCE seems to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer’s own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but confused and dangerous. Usage is always political, of course, but it’s complexly political. With respect, for instance, to political change, usage conventions can function in two ways: On the one hand they can be a reflection of political change, and on the other they can be an instrument of political change. These two functions are different and have to be kept straight. Confusing them - in particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language’s political symbolism - enables the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness. This is PCE’s central fallacy - that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes. […] There’s a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the U.S. status quo. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PCE progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as “low-income” or “economically disadvantaged” or “pre-prosperous” rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates on corporations. (Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy leads to actual political change rather than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE functions as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.) As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as “economically disadvantaged” rather than “poor.” Were I he, in fact, I’d probably find the PCE term insulting - not just because it’s patronizing but because it’s hypocritical and self-serving. Like many forms of Vogue Usage, PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker - scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language - and so serves the selfish interests of the PC far more than it serves any of the persons or groups renamed.“
Saying that the left spends too much effort on rhetoric might be valid criticism, but focusing on it as reasons to "walk away from the left" (which not too many black Americans are doing, BTW) is disingenuous. Sure, the left talks about rhetoric, but it also fights for higher wages, civil liberties, healthcare, affirmative action, investment in education, workers' rights, and voting rights. It's fine not to like everything a certain political camp does, but presenting things as if that's where all or even most of the effort is is just factually wrong. Of course, knowing that this aspect is less popular, media organisations like Fox News have chosen to focus on Dr. Seuss for the past couple of weeks rather than the debate on minimum wage, so really this aspect is more of the right's focus than the left's. "Wokeism" (and the even more made-up "cancel culture") is the new War on Christmas. Sure, there are enough instances to turn into hysteria if that's in your interest, but the actual work is elsewhere.
> "Wokeism" (and the even more made-up "cancel culture") is the new War on Christmas.
Saying that woke excess is "made-up" and "hysteria" is gaslighting. Coca Cola ran a diversity training encouraging employees to "be less white": https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-co.... The Smithsonian has a whole page on "whiteness" treating it like it's a bad thing. If you work a college degree-required job, you've probably had an employer recommend you read something by Robin Di Angelo, who claims she "tries to be a little less white every day."
I've never met anyone who got offended when I said "Merry Christmas." I've repeatedly run into instances of woke excess over the past year. The faculty at my law school declared themselves "gatekeepers of white supremacy" on a Zoom call: https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrator.... (The interim dean, who declared himself a "racist," is a friend of mine, and I was shocked to read about his behavior.) Even the whole Dr. Seuss thing--"Mulberry Street," which was cancelled, is one of my daughter's favorite books. I bought it for her a couple of years ago new at a Barnes and Noble in Annapolis. It's not some obscure relic of history.
I think it's tremendously disingenuous to deny that this phenomenon has crossed the line from "manufactured outrage" into "real concern."
And I think it is tremendously disingenuous to claim the opposite. The very same attacks on the "excesses" of progressivism, and "if only you'd focus on this instead of that you wouldn't antagonize people" were beat-up clichés at the time of the women's suffrage movement if not abolition. In fact, calling the claim that there is some widespread suppression of speech and reduction in freedom at a time when clearly more people can say more things to wider audiences than ever before, and with the least interference from anyone, mere "disingenuous" is an understatement. It is hysterically delusional.
Whenever you criticize "progressive excess," some progressive says "well you would have said the same thing about slavery/women's sufferage/integration/etc".
This highlights the disagreement perfectly. Progressives view history as "the long march of progress". To progressives, ceasing to publish certain Dr. Seuss books, saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Chistmas," using terms like "latinx" and "BIPOC," announcing your pronouns, denouncing "whiteness," etc are part of the same historical process that ended slavery and passed the Civil Rights Act.
I just don't view history that way. I view historical causation and direction as fundamentally mysterious. There are a very large number of plausible interpretations of history and they all seem pretty convincing while being completely contradictory. We should argue over these interpretations, because some of them are better than others, but we shouldn't take any of them as gospel.
I think you accurately describe the misconception many progressives labor under. In reality, however, there is not a single ideology connecting all those things. White abolitionists were evangelical Christians. The confederates attacked them as religious zealots, clinging to morality that was at odds with the emerging "science" regarding the races: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto.... Woman's suffrage was also a highly religious movement.
There's also lots of progressive ideas that turn out to be ideological dead ends. Prohibition was heavily supported by women's suffragists, and was seen as a progressive social reform. Building highways through the middle of cities was seen as a progressive and futuristic approach. Eugenics was, of course, the nadir in terms of progressive ideological dead ends in the 20th century.
Take the example of same-sex marriage. Academics like Judith Butler have consistently opposed same-sex marriage because they believe it does not go far enough to dismantle, and indeed entrenches, what they see as a repressive, patriarchal institution: https://theconversation.com/why-same-sex-marriage-is-not-the... ("But there is actually a large amount of anti-homophobic academic and everyday writing from thinkers and activists that probes the numerous problems associated with same-sex marriage."). Andrew Sullivan recognized this back in 1989, arguing that same-sex marriage was the conservative option to accommodating gays and lesbians, compared to the radical dismantling of traditional norms that people like Judith Butler espoused: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/06/gay-marriage-vot....
That same Judith Butler is a leading academic in the field where "whiteness" is used as a pejorative and "objectivity" is attacked as "white culture." Maybe that, too, is an intellectual dead end, not real progress?
> In reality, however, there is not a single ideology connecting all those things.
I don't claim there was a single ideology underpinning the reasons for the calls for social change. I'm saying that there are usually people (radicals, progressives) calling for social change, and others (conservatives) warning against it, and the rhetoric employed is similar throughout history (e.g. "if you only asked for a little less", or "the previous demands were reasonable, but the new ones are excessive"). That's understandable, as conservatives throughout history sometimes don't like to appear -- possibly even to themselves -- as the enemies of progress so they claim to be in favour of "reasonable progress," but whatever it is that the progressives currently call for is unreasonable; of course, a generation later, the story repeats. Ideas like women's suffrage were deemed outright preposterous, risible, and too silly to seriously consider; in fact, it took actual acts of terror by feminist activists and a world war to get them the vote.
So if you want to compare current demands to previous ones in order to explain the reaction to them, I'm saying that you should also compare current reactions to previous ones. "Previous demands were reasonable, but now they've really crossed a line," has been pretty much the conservative refrain going back millenia to the patricians and plebeians of ancient Rome. All of this is why I reject talk of "excess." It's just how conservatives speak of social change for millenia. You can say that you agree or disagree with some policy, but the "this is too much" line is just a cliché.
At any given instant in time, progressives and radicals are calling for lots of different things. Some of those are good ideas, and some of those are bad ideas. It's the job of conservatives to filter out those bad ideas. The fact that they oppose the good ideas too doesn't mean they're wrong when they push back on the bad ones. It's like the old trope: they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown: https://wiki.c2.com/?TheyLaughedAtEinstein.
Criticizing "defund the police" (as in, actually defunding the police) or normalizing the use of "whiteness" as a pejorative is not a bad thing just because conservatives do it. In fact, conservatives are doing society a valuable service by pushing back on those things. I'm quite sure in the retrospect of history, those will be proven to be "bad ideas progressives tried at one point" rather than examples of real advancement.
I'm not saying that everything conservatives say is wrong nor that everything progressives want is a good idea, just that speaking of "excesses" does not actually make them so, because that's how conservatives have always talked about demands for change.
Having said that, I'm fairly certain that in the retrospect of history, conservative pushback on the change in our understanding of race would look like another incarnation of white supremacy, and would appear as horrendously wrong to the people in the future as segregation appears to us to day, so much so that the conservatives of the future will use them as an example of something that is obviously right, unlike whatever social change people call for then.
Perhaps the difference is that I spent a few years studying history in grad school... I'm not saying that "latinx" is analogous to abolition, but that during abolition there were also behaviours analogous to "latinx" that conservatives used to ridicule abolitionists with.
This cartoon, ridiculed abolitionists as espousing all sorts of radical ideas that just sow discord (you can search for more ridicule the men in the picture were subjected to): https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661525/
“ s. Sure, the left talks about rhetoric, but it also fights for higher wages, civil liberties, healthcare, affirmative action, investment in education, workers' rights, and voting rights.”
I don’t think the person you are replying to would agree with you about affirmative actions being a good thing. Other than that, the left is super repressive of free speech which is the only civil right left to win , detrimental to wage growth and worker rights by supporting unlimited immigration, bad for education by siding with teachers unions, manipulative when it comes to voting to the point when half of the country does not believe in elections. The right simply does not exist in the institutional level at this point, all they can do is whine about excesses of the left
Free speech is the only civil right left to win? Fear not, then, when the state legislatures get around to the Equal Rights Amendment maybe they can spare a thought for ratifying the First Amendment. It has waited long enough.
The right does not exist in the institutional level? Has anyone told Mitch McConnell about this, or Justice Thomas?
The last "right-wing" move I have seen in recent history was Trump's nerfed-ban of critical race theories. I do not remember any culturally significant initiatives produced by McConnell or Justice Thomas or anyone else on the right. The only true "right-wing" issue they still talk about is abortions.
Heritage Foundation? Rand Corporation? Cato Institute? American Enterprise Institute? The institutional right is unimaginably huge and well-funded. Half of them even have "institute" in the name.
All the policy since they source most of the ideas and especially political strategies. Since the early 2000s they ("they" now extending beyond just the think tanks listed previously) directly control the media by sourcing/compiling news for all major sources, so they basically control all political opinion. After a brief respite from their influence on social media, they seem to now do a pretty good job of influencing the influencers there as well.
Heritage Foundation: starting with Reagan and encouraging the right's obsession with smaller government, was a large advocate for us going into and staying in Iraq, and was a major influence on Trump - at least 66 foundation employees worked in the administration and advised Trump who should be in his administration, including advocating for Mick Mulvaney when other Republicans were pushing against him. After his loss, they hired three of Trump's immigration team. They have also promoted the voter fraud claims about 2016 and 2020 elections, saying that it was "rampant", and also are heavy deniers of climate change, the Clean Energy act and Kyoto Agreement.
AEI has been a little less controversial, although they've also leaned heavily on politicians about climate change, and their biggest funders are/were the Koch brothers. Notably, they were one of the earliest predictors of the 2008 housing crisis, though their focus (while not entirely incorrect) was about the causing effects of government banking, rather than private sector greed.
The Cato Institute is another organization founded and funded by one of the Kochs. The Cato Institute has lobbied hard for the deconstruction, outsourcing and privatization of the USPS (to recent great success), NASA, TSA. They have lobbied for the abolishment of minimum wage and in the absence thereof have fervently pushed for not increasing it (which hasn't happened since 2007 - legislation-wise, though the last increase went into effect in early 2009). It opposes overtime regulation and of all things, child labor prohibition (thankfully this hasn't gained much traction). It is one of the biggest opponents of universal health care, and of campaign finance reform.
In 2006 it helped Republicans propose a Balanced Budget Veto Amendment. It also strongly criticized the tobacco settlements.
Interestingly enough, the Cato Institute also supported striking down state laws against homosexuality, and the Federal Marriage Act (which would have prohibited same-sex marriage).
The Heritage Foundation's solution to climate change (if it turns out to be real), is more fossil fuels: "How Fossil Fuels Will Help Us Confront Climate Change" [1].
That article describes how in Dubai they handle an average temperature of over 100 ℉ with no problems by having air conditioned homes, offices, cars, buses, trains, and shopping malls. It's abundant oil and a government that promotes economic freedom that allows this, it says.
It then ties it to dealing with climate change:
> The current average world temperature is about 58 degrees. The true believers in climate change are predicting global catastrophe if that temperature rises by a worst-case estimate of 7 degrees Fahrenheit. That would bring the world average temperature to about 65 degrees.
> Dubai, today, is doing quite well at an average temperature 35 degrees higher.
> Obviously, Dubai is on the cutting edge of technology and prosperity as a result of its oil endowment and government policies that promote economic freedom and growth.
> Not every country has oil, but in a globalized market, cheap fossil fuels are available everywhere to spur rapid growth and technological change.
I agree with you that it's not strictly a "left" issue - and certainly the recent election in the US had the "right" bringing up voter fraud.
But it's important to remember the "left" raising flags about fraud in the 2016 election, and primary. Everything from harping on the legitimacy of a candidate that lost the popular vote, "not my president" protests, accusations of voting machine fraud, primary delegate issues, conflating gerrymandering with federal elections, etc...
In general, it seems whichever side loses is increasingly blaming "unfairness" to generate more outrage to de-legitimize winners of the election. ...rather than trying to appeal to more voters.
We're all losers in this situation because it is the voting system that keeps us from killing each other.
My only issue with this comment is that it seems to discount the idea of "unfairness" in our elections. Yes, in a federal election the districts don't matter. However, as we can see right now, the state legislatures that are elected via those districts can drastically change the landscape of a federal election within their state. The republican legislatures are moving en masse to "prevent fraud" in a way that seems to be directly aimed at making it more difficult to vote[1]. Appealing to more voters is hard when fewer people are able to vote.
If you believe only officially identified US citizens should vote, the left started attacking decades ago. Also, there was a strong 'Trump stole the vote' campaign 4 years ago, similar to the current narrative pushed by Trump supporters.
From the sounds of it, you think the beginning was 2020. There's a long history of implying the "other side's" win is questionable, across the globe and including the US.
Affirmative action biasedly lifts up minorities over others. It looks noble on the surface, but realistically creates more of the same problem.
When I applied to college, I (and all of my friends), knew that ticking any non-white ethnicity box on the application made you more likely to get accepted. I don't know that any of us did, but it was very well known that you could game the system this way.
It made acceptance into college less about your academic merit and more about your ethnicity (or ability to use ethnic bias to cheat the system) - aka, more racism.
Affirmative action is here for a reason. If there wasn't systemic racism in hiring, there would be no need for it.
What affirmative action is supposed to do is to ensure that your race isn't a determining factor in not getting hired for a job that you are qualified for.
The Rooney Rule in the NFL wouldn't need to be a thing if being a black coach in the NFL meant statistically you had a greater chance of getting fired or not being hired at all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
What affirmative action is supposed to do is to ensure that your race isn't a determining factor in not getting hired for a job that you are qualified for.
No, that's wrong. If that were the goal, it would simply be made illegal to ask about race (or race-proxy) on college application forms.
Affirmative action is meant to artifically boost the number of college graduates from a selected set of underrepresented backgrounds. If it weren't the goal, this blind recruitment trial wouldn't have been immediately canceled: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
I'm talking about job applications here.. not all job applicants have college degrees. And your link is to an Australian gender study. We are talking about similar but different issues
> the left is... manipulative when it comes to voting to the point when half of the country does not believe in elections
I disagree with essentially everything you're saying, but how on Earth can you write that with a straight face? I mean, five seconds on Google gives me:
Many elected Republicans are still lying about the election results. How is that 'the left' being 'manipulative when it comes to voting'? Not to mention the slew of disenfranchisement policies being drawn up by Republicans at the moment.
> The right simply does not exist in the institutional level at this point, all they can do is whine about excesses of the left
No, because that didn’t happen. If you were following the news the claim actually made is what the intelligence agencies of multiple countries concluded: Russia spent a considerable amount of money _influencing_ the elections with fake news and social media and they supported targeted attacks on Democrats.
There were concerns over attempts to compromise election systems, which again were confirmed by subsequent investigations, but that was reported by the mainstream media in the context of the federal government warning states to be prepared and noting that most attacks had failed and there was no reason to believe the elections would not be reliable.
You're absolutely right, Russia very likely did spent time and money attempting to influence the 2016 election, very few would doubt that. What I have issue with is the erasure of the fact that media outlets and mainstream Democrats were absolutely and without a doubt pushing the narrative that Russia "stole" or "hacked" the election, which is very different from attempting to influence.
That piece I posted, of which there are hundreds of similar ones easily perusable quotes:
"[Donald Trump] it turns out, is no more the duly elected president of the United States than I am the world’s most decorated ballerina."
Do you see the issue there? It was a mainstream opinion at the time to believe that despite misguided Americans legally voting him into power, the election was fraudulent and Donald Trump was not the legal president.
I truly believe if the Democrats had exercised more tact in their accusations 4 years prior, we wouldn't have seen the horrific events at the capital by domestic terrorists peddling essentially the same conspiracy theory which had been forced down their throats by centre-left media.
You’re going to claim authoritative representation of American mainstream opinion based on a blog post by a Canadian author who lives in Europe?
More importantly, you’re conflating two very different situations: saying that the Russians _interfered_ with the election is a factual position and random people who are not in power complaining about it or saying that the legitimately elected candidate doesn’t speak for them is very different than the current President baselessly claiming fraud and trying to use his office to get legitimate votes thrown out or request that fake ones be manufactured. Trying to equate the two is simply dishonest.
Here are a lot more representative articles that aren't from a Huffpost opinion piece by a "novelist and photographer"
Clinton says Comey's letter, Russian hackers cost her the election [0]
Russian hackers, Donald Trump, and the 2016 election, explained [1]
Russia and its influence on the presidential election [2]
The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S. [3]
CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election, say reports [4]
These are consistently and specifically about Russian hacking of Clinton's email servers and about their actions targeting voting infrastructure. They moderate, rather than amplify, any blunt or clickbait language like "Russia hacked the election." There were not widespread claims that the election was outright stolen, and certainly not from the leader of the party. Merely claims that without Russian influence, people would have cast their votes differently.
Remember that Clinton conceded the next day and said outright that "we must accept this result." [5]
There is no one to blame for the big lie that the right wing has swallowed and run with except for the leadership that has fed them those lies over and over and over for years.
There's a big difference between partisans doing that, and an actual president claiming the election is stolen for months, asking his supporters to march on the Capitol to deny the rights of voters to have their vote confirmed, calling state officials to ask them to "find votes", etc.
You said it, they brought all of that to courts, which means it was entirely supported by the full establishment of the party, not just a fringe part of it.
The fact you can't even see the major difference makes me think you are clearly looking at just one side.
I think that's an apples-to-oranges comparison (no pun intended).
It would be fairer to compare the Democrats' allegations about Russia to the Republicans' allegations about China, i.e. accusations that Biden is anywhere between a useful-idiot-for to an outright-puppet-of the CCP.
AFAIK the Democrat position has been that, for both elections, the voting/counting mechanisms have withstood targetted attacks by state actors, and in both cases gave overall tallies which correspond to the electorate's choices, within an acceptable margin of error (I'm stopping at the tallies, to avoid the separate debate regarding the electoral college versus the popular vote).
Some Democrats also allege foreign interference with the electorate's choices, through widespread misinformation and propaganda. As an extreme example, fewer people may have voted for Trump if Russian troll farms weren't claiming that Clinton harvests child organs (or whatever Q-adjacent bullshit was spreading around Facebook at the time). It's perfectly consistent to make that claim, whilst also claiming that those lie-induced Trump votes were subsequently collated and counted correctly towards the totals.
AFAIK the Republican-led investigation found the Democrats' position to be essentially correct, that there were targetted attacks on infrastructure, and misinformation/propaganda attacks nudging the electorate towards Trump. No evidence of collusion was found, i.e. that Trump was working for foreign adversaries, or foreign adversaries were working for Trump, or they were coordinating ahead of time. That would (of course) have been even worse, but the lack of (evidence of) such collusion doesn't make the idea of foreign adversaries weaponising US voters for their own ends any more palatable.
In short, choosing positions/policies/rhetoric that is useful to adversaries is not itself criminal; it could simply be naivety or coincidence. Yet knowing that a candidate's positions/policies/rhetoric is useful to adversaries would be pertinent information for voters.
You can look at the retraction itself [0] and it says nothing close to "it wasn't based in reality."
What it says is that Trump's actual words were that the state official would "find things that are gonna be unbelievable" and that "[w]hen the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised."
The specific words were a misquote, but there is no doubt from the call itself that Trump was pressuring state officials into supporting his big lie.
Trump did plenty of dumb stuff. It bothers me when people misquote him so bad they are practically lie about it because it makes people doubt all of the bad things he really did.
Did Trump do something improper by calling the Governor and pressuring them? Yea. Was it so bad as directly tell them to "find votes"? No.
I agree with you, but you have to recognize that one is just an escalation of the other. Both are terrible, even if Trump being worse. Trump would not have been possible if discourse had not already broken down.
We created a culture where this devolution of discourse was acceptable, and so fewer voters found Trump's rhetoric unacceptable - partially because they heard more and more extreme rhetoric coming from the other side - whether on social media, MSM, or even some far left wing political leaders.
Incidents like when the Bernie Sanders campaign worker SHOT a US GOP senator. ...the reporting on that was extremely asymmetric between GOP and Dem news media.
These sorts of escalations, and the MSM pandering to their base, creates a cycle of hyperbole and misinformation.
We really need to think about how we can get out of this mess and bring the rational majority back to a central forum of discourse.
The (Republican) Senate committee found that there were in fact extensive ties between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign, and that Russia actively attacked state election infrastructure. And the (Republican) special counsel found that they actively propagandized over social media, and hacked into Democratic campaign and candidate emails, which ended up being the anti-Clinton story leading up to the election.
It's tired and disingenuous at this point to claim that "the left" made this up.
All of that is true! But as I posted above, I don't take any issue with the fact that there was Russian interference in the election, I take issue with mainstream Democrats and media companies jumping to the conclusion that this meant the election was fraudulent.
> Many elected Republicans are still lying about the election results.
So we have voter IDs and secure voting? Did you miss the part about lack of confidence in voting? If we don’t have voter IDs how is the right lying? Or are you just trying to reaffirm the narrative?
Because having voter IDs is not the only or even the main thing that the right — a very vocal minority of the right, by the way — had an issue with. There were a lot of conflated FUD about
The funny thing is that Trump’s own appointed people, including Krebs who we cite here a lot, but also Barr and others admitted that there was not nearly enough evidence of fraud to overturn any election result in any state.
And even funnier is how FOX and NewsMax debunked themselves and now chase the My Pillow CEO and others off their show for suggesting there was voting machine fraud — because they got cease and desist letters and warnings.
The irony for me was Texas suing the other states and then West floating a trial baloon to secede from the union (great form, West!) because they accused the other states of vote manipulation... this from a state that works hard to close HUNDREDS of poll places in Democratic areas ahead of the election to keep the state voting Republican, in blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act (neutered by the supreme court). And no one sues Texas in federal court for that.
For Republicans, mail-in ballots were the end-run around their extensive efforts to close polling places and require voting IDs and other ways to tip the balance in their party’s favor. If people can just vote from home then all that effort to drive an hour and stand in a long line will be unnecessary! So they aren’t being totally honest about their FUD being nonpartisan either.
I just want to be clear – I said it is a small, vocal minority on the right. Most of "the right" rejected the MAGA conspiracy theories and stopped supporting the FUD. As I have pointed out, even a lot of the mainstream right-wing media has started to "deplatform" people who continue speaking about this "problem". The Supreme court and other courts have thrown out 98% of all the cases, after applying rules of standing and evidence [1].
After all that money came in to campaign promising to "fight for every LEGAL vote to be counted", Giuliani never even applied to the supreme court. A lot of it seems to have been about taking in massive amounts of money (up to 1 billion dollars) from faithful Trump voters via the campaigns. Giuliani distanced himself from Sidney Powell who actually wanted to go to the supreme court, seemingly in order to not share the large sums of cash coming in from MAGA supporters.
Also, I am not "a dem". You assume too much.
And btw, many people on the right, including social conservatives and fiscal conservatives, are also very critical of the Republican leadership. Here is far more information about why[2].
Again, if you’re focusing on the lawsuits you’ve missed the point. Are you aware there is an extreme left bias online? Knowing that, and today’s extreme cancel culture can you explain why you’re not seeing more people talk about this? Even here on HN these posts have support, until dems downvote it beyond the upvotes. There’s that bias!
Meanwhile in actual face to face conversations people can’t stop talking about it. Some have given up out of desperation but pointing to lack of media culture and deplatforming does nothing but support the claims and issues i’m pointing out.
> Are you aware there is an extreme left bias online?
Evidence please.
I am aware that 'left bias' is a consistent lie perpetuated by right-wing media, which contradicts at least twenty years of research on the subject, e.g.
So you watch the votes and downvotes come in? Before the downvote parade I had near 10 upvotes, net result after dems, -20. Clearly this is a conspiracy.
> Meanwhile in actual face to face conversations people can’t stop talking about it.
So instead your sampling bias is correct? Where is your evidence?
We don't have voter ID checks at the actual polling place for casting your vote, but we have signature checks and comparisons of who purported to vote with who is actually registered to vote at that polling place, and there are checks and verification involved in getting to that point.
This is sufficient to catch any double voting or voting as someone else that occurs at sufficient scale to be above the normal error rate.
The allegations still being made about election fraud by some Republicans have nothing to do with people double voting or voting as someone else. They are that election workers slipped in extra pre-filled ballots, or that they ran Biden ballots through the tabulating machines multiple times, or that the machines were programmed to switch votes, or that there are statistical anomalies in the vote totals or counting that could only be there due to fraud.
Every one of these is based on one or more of the following kinds of things:
1. There is simply no way, they say, Trump could possible have gotten less votes than Biden. There must have been fraud. (Variation: Trump got more votes in 2020 than Obama got in 2008 or Clinton got in 2016, so how could he lose? Completely ignoring that voter turnout was a lot higher in 2020)
2. Someone seeing something and misunderstanding it. E.g., one of the prominent claims of running ballots through the tabulating machine multiple times was actually an election worker before the count started running a test ballot through multiple times.
That's part of the standard pre-election test and setup procedure that the manufacturer's instruction call for before each election. The person who saw it happening was a volunteer who had skipped the training session where they covered that.
3. Taking things out of context. E.g., surveillance video purporting to show extra ballots being sneaked in to a counting area overnight, where we see someone pull boxes out from under a table and remove a bunch of ballots and start counting them.
We do indeed see that. But if you obtain the whole video instead of that short clip, you see that those boxes contain the ballots that were being counted when it was time for the counters to take a break. They put the uncounted ballots in their standard ballot storage lock boxes, put the boxes under the table, took their break, came back, retrieved the ballots from the boxes, and resumed counting. All completely normal.
4. Ignoring the recounts. The machines alleged to have switched Trump votes leave a paper trail. The hand recounts from the places where this switching is alleged to have occurred match the machine count.
5. Misunderstanding statistics. E.g., claims that first digit distributions of candidate totals across districts or counties not following Benford's law is proof of fraud. The mistake here is that Benford's law only applies to certain kinds of samplings of certain kinds of distributions. The distribution of population and of votes across districts or counties in most areas is not the right kind for this.
6. Ignoring that in-person election day votes are counted in many areas before mail-in ballots are counted. (Indeed, in some Republican controlled states, they have passed laws preventing election officials from starting to count mail-in ballots until the polls close).
Combine this with COVID in many "rural red, urban blue" states, where in-person urban voting often means long crowded lines at polling places, and you had a much higher percentage of urban voters going to mail-in voting than is usual. On top of that, Democrats on average were more likely to take COVID seriously, further shifting mail-in votes to be more likely to be from Democrats.
Result: in effect those states ended up counting Republican ballots first, then Democrat ballots. And so of course Trump was ahead in the evening, and then Biden got most of the later counted mail-in ballots, which mostly came from the large urban areas.
None of that has anything whatsoever to do with voter ID.
Well this is a first, a dem telling the republicans how they feel.
> This is sufficient to catch any double voting or voting as someone else that occurs at sufficient scale to be above the normal error rate.
Most of the country doesn’t believe this. Regardless of what you believe, being on the other side nobody on the right will believe you. You stand to benefit most from this.
> Well this is a first, a dem telling the republicans how they feel.
Could you please point out where the parent claims to be a Democrat? I don't see it anywhere in what they've said, or in the past few days of their comment history.
> Most of the country doesn’t believe this.
I'm not sure about "most", but it's certainly a significant fraction; presumably caused by Trump's refusal to admit defeat.
> Regardless of what you believe, being on the other side nobody on the right will believe you. You stand to benefit most from this.
What do you mean by "other side"? The Democrats? I would again ask where you got the idea that the parent is a Democrat; I don't see it in their posts.
I think you may be mixing up cause and effect. Your claim seems to be that people on the right will not believe what the parent poster says, because the parent poster is a Democrat. However, your response is evidence of the inverse: that people on the right will believe the parent poster is a Democrat, because of what the parent poster says.
This mistake is troubling, since it admits a circular argument: Democrats aren't believed, and those who aren't believed are Democrats. Like all circular arguments, this is self-consistent whilst being completely detached from reality (the content of any claims, evidence, etc. are irrelevant; that self-justifying loop will work for anything).
> Could you please point out where the parent claims to be a Democrat? I don't see it anywhere in what they've said, or in the past few days of their comment history.
Yes, reread their comment, apply context, it should be apparent.
> I'm not sure about "most", but it's certainly a significant fraction; presumably caused by Trump's refusal to admit defeat.
Why do you think Trump has anything to do with it? He doesn't. Really people couldn't care less about Trump. The system is flawed regardless.
> This mistake is troubling, since it admits a circular argument: Democrats aren't believed, and those who aren't believed are Democrats. Like all circular arguments, this is self-consistent whilst being completely detached from reality (the content of any claims, evidence, etc. are irrelevant; that self-justifying loop will work for anything).
Hmmm, yup we have a divide in this country, mostly caused by dems refusal to accept and admit the right are people with opinions, ideas and feelings as well. Right doesn't believe left, left doesn't believe right. So, divide we have!
> reread their comment, apply context, it should be apparent.
I did. It was not apparent; hence why I asked.
> Why do you think Trump has anything to do with it?
If we're still talking about "it" being a significant fraction of the US public being distrustful of the election process/results, then Trump's main relevance is the combination of:
- His holding of the most powerful office in the world for four years
- His direct attacks on the election process/results, e.g.
- The attacks on the election process/results by other Repulican politicians, either using Trump's example to seize or cling-to power, or to curry Trump's favour, or to avoid Trump's wrath (either direct, or indirect like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_... ), e.g.
Notice this started before Trump was elected? The rest of your comment is trying to support your belief this is somehow about Trump, therefore ignored.
Both the left and the right engage in suppression of free speech in different ways.
I mean when McCarthyism, Hoover’s FBI and COINTELPRO were repressing leftists left and right, sabotaging political campaigns and careers, this was considered a national security issue.
I mean, until Bernie Sanders, no politician openly called themselves a socialist. This is recent.
Are there any open atheists in US politics? Just curious
Without exception, all of the most talented individuals I’ve met wanted to be seen and interacted with as individuals. It’s Sally the engineer, not a nameless member of women-in-technology. Or Clinton the engineer, not a recent SWE graduate of an HBCU.
Protectionist thinking is off-putting to many when it strays over some imaginary line to where I act as if I must be the champion for an underrepresented group because they think I think they are less capable. When I join with them to help, it’s generally welcome; when an influential person speaks as if that help is charitable (rather than equitable), it puts off some people.
> Sure, the left talks about rhetoric, but it also fights for higher wages, civil liberties, healthcare
problem with this line is that those in power now in America aren't solving any of these issues. they engage in window dressing and have been doing so since at least Clinton. they are left-INO. What US considers center left actually is right. Unless a new progressive party is formed (AOC, Sanders etc) and this party manages then to become a serious contender and accepted in mainstream, US politics will remain what it is: a farce.
edit: Right Marcuseanism - Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” is often cited as the progenitor of the censorious left, but its real ideological heirs are now on the right: https://outsidertheory.com/right-marcuseanism/ (I shared this yesterday and it's a shame it hasn't gotten more traction considering it goes much deeper into the problem than any (justified) rant on master/slave branches and Tech/github's hypocrisy)
The ACA isn't single-payer healthcare (and didn't really bring down the cost of healthcare much if at all[0]), so I think by the standards of the left in other countries, it is window dressing.
We're not talking about the left in other countries, we're talking about the left in the United States. Within that context, the ACA is a progressive piece of legislation. You can just agree to the point rather than move the goalposts.
The ACA was considered a Republican-friendly approach to health care prior to it becoming a partisan issue (More or less the same approach was introduced by Romney in Utah). It's not particularly progressive, either in comparison to other countries or past attempts in the U.S., and is only really considered such because it turned into a blue team vs. red team issue.
> The ACA was considered a Republican-friendly approach to health care prior to it becoming a partisan issue
That's...misleading. Sure, the broad outline of a policy like the ACA first emerged as a joint Republican/insurance industry idea for national reform after the failure of the Clinton healthcare plan when it looked like there might still be enough demand for some national reform that they could use a strategy, and yes something broadly similar was pushed successfully by Republican Governor Romney at the state level (in Massachusetts, not Utah.) But even the national Republican party had moved right since then, under Bush, they had toyed with mandatory purchase of specifically HDHP/HSA plans, rather than traditional insurance, before deciding that health reform wasn't something that even needed to be on the agenda at all.)
Something like the ACA as a state-run program had none of the Constitutional problems the ACA has as a federal program. Then again, pretty much every elected American politician only believes in federalism when it suits their agenda.
I think you may also find that what's considered a Republican-friendly compromise in Massachusetts in 2006 - where Romney was actually governor - may be different from where the party of Trump and McConnell find policy to be Republican friendly.
Sorry, I was wrong on the location. I don't think that opposition to the ACA began with Trump though (witness the resistance getting it through in the first place). Republicans opinion of it did a nearly complete 180 almost immediately after Obama started advocating for it - far too short a time for the Republican party ideology to change.
Is it too short a time for Massachusetts Republicans to make different compromises than the national party in federal legislation, though? Let's not pretend that a Republican in Massachusetts, California, Illinois, or New York is in the same situation as a Republican in Alabama. Nor is a Democrat in any mostly red state going to have as much leverage as in Massachusetts.
I was a vocal supporter of the ACA when it passed. Then I had to actually use it. It's garbage. I still couldn't afford health care, and then at the end of each year I got punished for it. The ACA is a failure.
Its only component that is even slightly progressive are the subsidies for some lower income people to get insured. From a conceptual and philosophical level, it is quite conservative and has its origins from moderate conservative state government administrations. The only reason people think they can call it progressive with a straight face is because the republican party, in their quest to oppose anything and everything that comes from the left, decided it was a bad idea the moment the democratic party used it as a compromise to get a few blue dog democrats on board.
Does the US even have a chance of people passing single payer? I imagine we'll see people lighting themselves on fire in front of Congress before that happens.
Glad you mentioned the Paris Agreement. How about we ratify the agreement so it becomes a treaty otherwise post 2024, it may go out the window again.
As far as window dressing goes, we see this from both parties. They talk and vote radical when they are out of power. When they are in power, everything is status quo.
Dodd-Frank has been fairly successful, but the rest of those are emblematic of the window dressing approach.
The ACA is incredibly complex, widely variable in implementation, and didn't actually help healthcare costs. Repealing Don't Ask was a symbolic step. Actual change in LGBT rights came from the Supreme Court. The Paris Agreement is the ultimate window dressing; it allows every country involved to point to it and say they're taking action on climate change, without requiring literally any changes.
These are all classic Democratic Party moves. They take on the appearance of doing something while kicking the issue down the road a few years for someone else to deal with.
If we'd believe the slanted tone of the post you're responding to I suppose we should at least take solace in only one of Americas two parties having all the right answers.
> Sure, the left talks about rhetoric, but it also fights for higher wages, civil liberties, healthcare, affirmative action, investment in education, workers' rights, and voting rights.
And the right pursues many of these things as well, albeit in very different and sometimes polarizing ways. But we should not pretend that leftist policies are not just as polarizing.
The word "pursue" is doing a hell of a lot of work in your idea of the American right "pursuing voting rights." They're pursuing them like a hunting dog pursues a kill.
What are some examples of the right (and I mean more than a single lonely senator) fighting for higher wages, healthcare, affirmative action, workers' rights, and voting rights?
Trump’s China tariffs were supposed to increase wages. Trump also pushed down prescription prices, and I believe some sort of price transparency in healthcare. Not sure how well it worked tho.
As to worker rights - both sides are equally happy to throw them under the bus.
> but focusing on it as reasons to "walk away from the left" (which not too many black Americans are doing, BTW)
Wasn’t it black moderates that powered centrist Biden to the nomination? Bernie and Warren’s failure to gain any significant traction with the black electorate sunk their progressive candidacies.
But that's because many Democrats aren't all that progressive. Being progressive doesn't mean focusing on rhetoric. It mostly means certain views on the economy that many black Democrats disagree with at this time. Sanders in particular isn't considered all that "woke", and still primary voters shifted to Biden.
I'm not sure any data regarding Biden specifically is worth much in terms of future assessment because such a huge amount of it would be tied to Obama's enduring massive popularity amongst all democrat demographics along with being the nostalgic "return to normal" option. There really isn't anywhere to go with that beyond Biden (unless they convince Michelle Obama to run?). Iirc a substantial number of Biden voters had Sanders as their 2nd preference too?
The new options they presented flopped pretty badly. It's hard to look at Harris on the basis of her performance in the 2020 primary as being an especially strong frontrunner but it's even harder to think up of any alternatives who will be in strong enough of a position to displace her.
Biden won because many of us blacks, especially in South Carolina voted for the candidate that we thought would most likely win over whites. Warren and Bernie were seen as too progressive and the reward for that would be 4 more years of Trump.
I don't think it was specifically because of Trump - Bernie didn't poll well with Blacks in 2016 either, even before Trump was the presumptive nominee and was considered a joke candidate.
Bernie when compared with other dems in the primary will always lose out on the "white electability" test. Doesn't matter whether it's 2016 or 2020. My top comment was explaining one of the reasons Bernie was never going to do well, and the abyss that the black community was staring into.
> which not too many black Americans are doing, BTW
It’s pretty hard to measure such a statement, but I noticed that Trump won 8% of the black vote in 2020 and 6% in 2016. [0] And it seems Romney won 6% in 2012. [1]
It’s not smart to extrapolate some trend from these three data points, but I don’t think its accurate to dismiss claims that this isn’t happening. Comically, dismissing the claims of a literal black person walking away from the left speaking of others in vis community is sort of like what the author is saying happens with people patronizing black persons and making decisions for them (eg, “it’s not happening” and “master offends you”).
I am not dismissing any claims, but having a >90% party allegiance based on ethnicity is such an extreme situation, that ascribing reversions to one aspect of the left (which, true enough, the right wants to focus on), is just projection and also an exaggeration. I saw a recent interview with David Shor [1], who said that the conservative/progressive split in the US (based on self-identification, IIRC) is about 60/40 across all ethnicities, but that many vote based on reasons other than ideology. But now we're seeing a trend across the board, where people's votes increasingly align more with ideology. So many conservative blacks vote Democrat, and might be shifting away because of a general emphasis on ideology.
That actually makes perfect sense of the "walking away" talk, though. It was extreme and unusual in the first place that ardent conservatives would vote for the same political party as socialist activists based solely on race or identity. That was really weird, actually, and an end to that kind of thing is just "reversion to the mean" of people voting for what they actually believe in.
Sure, but they were attributing it to a very specific cause rather than general ideological disagreement, not to mention that the number of black people walking away from the Democratic party is not large, certainly compared to the level of support.
I don't consider myself informed enough about this subject to detract from your assertions, but confining myself to the stats you presented, the trend of 6(2012), 6(2016) and 8(2020) seems to bolster the 'status quo' claim, that Black Americans are NOT leaving the left (Dems), rather than undermine it, does it not?
I could be missing something here for sure. Like I mentioned am not well versed in American race politics nor in statistics.
1) A lot of black people don't identify as black on government forms. Whether it is for the census, some voter form I might not be aware of, a vaccine enrollment, or on a standardized test in the private sector. Out of previously substantiated fear of worse treatment or discrimination, but an inability to tell which contexts and future contexts. There won’t be data on this.
2) A lot (maybe most?) of black people don't live in states where their vote really matters for the Presidency or the Senate. Population centers, California, New York. While there is also a cultural pride in leveraging the earned ability to vote (and sustained ability at the individual level, as felons have their rights removed in many states). So there are additional deterrents in wasting it on non-consensus views of that state.
3) The way I saw the data collected about % of black people voting seemed to be based surveys, and not really cross referencing all voter data with the census. Feel free to correct my understanding and I would like to read more about that.
Surely the point is that if you cite one person, you can claim anything? Whether that's of the left or the right. You have to look a little closer to see whether that's a common or a fringe view and among what group of people.
These numbers require more context to be meaningful. First, this was for his second term, which typically sees an increase in support. Second, Biden was instrumental in quite a few policies over the years that were generally bad for black Americans, and he was extremely critical of the BLM and police reform (de-fund) movements. Third, the percentage of black Americans which don't live in poverty has increased, and middle class black Americans are more likely to be fiscally conservative for the same reasons that all middle class Americans are more likely to be fiscal conservatives than those who live below the poverty line.
The right was also extremely critical of BLM (calling them terrorists) and de-fund. But not all black people defend those anyway. The wealth argument seems much more plausible to me.
>Saying that the left spends too much effort on rhetoric might be valid criticism, but focusing on it as reasons to "walk away from the left" (which not too many black Americans are doing, BTW) is disingenuous.
That depends whether you distinguish between the Left and the Democratic Party. Most minority voters remain firm Democrats, although fewer than in 2016. Many/most minorities I've met, including myself, are completely disenchanted with "the Left" as an activist bloc that tries to take over or derail the Party. That bloc is simply two or three times as strict about "culture war" issues - which I agree with you are ultimately nigh-meaningless, but alas - as about the "kitchen table" issues where most people actually agree with them.
In short, you can be a racial or ethnic minority who wants universal healthcare, a new voting rights bill, and to strengthen workers' unions, but then you dissent from the "Left" agenda on one culture-war issue, one that theoretically applies to your group but which you were never consulted about, and bam, the Left hates you and wants you gone.
"Everyone get in line, we have to stop Trump" only worked while Trump was in office. It's hard to tell people we all need to get behind whichever street protest is marching downtown now, with Biden in office willingly signing surprisingly progressive bills like the stimulus.
> I agree with you are ultimately nigh-meaningless
I didn't say they're meaningless. Sadly, I'm one of those noisy, crazy woke, anti-free-speech neo-Marxists, but that doesn't mean I don't care more about minimum wage and healthcare. The culture war is very important to me, but other things are even more important/urgent.
> and bam, the Left hates you and wants you gone.
Nope. When such large groups are concerned, of course you'll find people who'd want to ostracize you one way or the other, so the choice of what the "Left" is to you is ultimately on you. If that's what you focus on, an aspect of the left that you don't like but which has been a part of it for a hundred years, then you're just looking for excuses.
>Nope. When such large groups are concerned, of course you'll find people who'd want to ostracize you one way or the other, so the choice of what the "Left" is to you is ultimately on you. If that's what you focus on, an aspect of the left that you don't like but which has been a part of it for a hundred years, then you're just looking for excuses.
Funny thing: you're dismissing my case here without even bothering to find out what the object-level example was going to be! You skipped the part where I explicitly specified that I'm talking about a culture-war issue that applies specifically and in depth to my minority group, too, not some opportunity to pontificate on other people's problems.
Then maybe you understand why "shut up and get in line so we can purge another bunch of you like we did with the Doctor's Plot and the Polish cadre in 1968" is an unpersuasive case. Address my issues and listen to my demands, or you don't get my support. Simple as that. I have other options.
At some point America's popular culture will internalize that the wage gap was a myth and etc and appreciate that the left has been peddling pseudoscience for ages in the name of intellectual vanity.
Too many generations lost being the lefts rosemary kennedy.
In what way is the wage gap a myth? You can argue that the wage gap isn't primarily due to absolute discrimination, but that the wage gap exists is an objective fact.
The ‘myth’ of the wage gap is that it’s an aggregate number. It is sometimes/often presented as women make 73% of the wages of men for doing the same work.
It isn’t true for the same work though. When you do apples to apples comparisons of equivalent positions the gap frequently closes to almost nothing.
The wage gap is better phrased as ‘women, on average, do jobs that pay only 73% as much as men’. Which, in my opinion, is actually a far worse and harder to solve problem. Paying women the same as their male counterparts is easy. That’s why there isn’t really much of a gap in same profession comparisons. Getting women into more lucrative careers or getting Society to pay more for traditionally women dominated industries is much much harder.
To your question: The wage gap ‘myth’ is the misinterpretation of the statistic to say that women are paid much less for the same work.
The observed differences is due to choices like having babies and choosing different career paths, but for the same job it's objectively illegal to pay female workers less.
The feminists argue by taking the average of all wages, and of course women produce less economic value overall when they're still the primary caregiver in most societies.
The real crime is because the value generated by primary caregivers is not in dollars changing hands, and thus not taxable, no government has any interest in honestly measuring that value. The value of a primary caregiver is massive and it's criminal that we as a civlization have demonized women and men who choose to fill that role.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Look at how much crappier the thread gets below. It's everybody's responsibility not to push threads in such directions.
It's DARTH VADER! Of course he is committing a micro-macro-mega-aggression! Maybe Darth Vader isn't your best choice for standards of real-world social discourse?
It's virtue-signaling nonsense like planting a tree, declaring climate change "mission accomplished" and calling it a day.
If software engineers actually cared about diversity, they'd work with community leaders on the rough side of town to mentor kids who otherwise don't get all the chances they did. I seriously doubt many would do that. I hate to say it, but a lot of office tech people don't have a lot of life experience. And maybe as a consequence, they tend to act like stereotypical self-absorbed yuppies who don't engage with the world or donate emotional labor. It's easier to outlaw certain words because of incidental associations rather than help real people.
This article is spot on with more white americans beliefs about the issues than many would publicly admit. I'm from the midwest and all I can hear are the same white people that wound racist according to today's left, but in reality, match this exact same thought process. But because they are white they can't say these things.
Yet another sad attempt to impose your narrow focused view of the world on it.
The author seems to have forgotten: There are people outside of the US who work in tech.
As shocking as it might be to him, they don't wake up in the morning thinking "O gosh, I'm white, I need to repent". They actually read and write things like "master-slave" and not for a second think about what went wrong 150 yrs ago in some far away land. An no: Not thinking that isn't racism.
Yet we all have to endure your petty fights and identity politics.
>Yet another sad attempt to impose your narrow focused view of the world on it.
>The author seems to have forgotten: There are people outside of the US who work in tech.
>As shocking as it might be to him, they don't wake up in the morning thinking "O gosh, I'm white, I need to repent". They actually read and write things like "master-slave" and not for a second think about what went wrong 150 yrs ago in some far away land. An no: Not thinking that isn't racism.
>Yet we all have to endure your petty fights and identity politics.
Never is a hard word. Let me explain: In the US the white were masters and the black were slaves. A white was rarely a slave, a black person was likely a slave. And slavery was not abolished that long ago.
In MANY countries people of color X enslaved people of color X. So now - many generations later - no one knows anymore who was slave and who was master. So the term master is insignificant for the individuals in the country and dominantly associated with mastery in something.
So while technically the statement is correct, for the discussion here, many countries are not having an active discussion around slavery because it is no concern in the society because there are not slave-descendants (which are mistreated until today) vs. master-descendants.
And is there a relatively distinct group of their descendants being pulled over by the police today in Morocco, after continuously being excluded from economic progress for a few hundred years? Actually really curious -- one of the "innovations" of US slavery was the slavery of the descendants of slaves -- was that the case in northern Africa? I think not; if you have some evidence otherwise happy to think about it.
> after continuously being excluded from economic progress for a few hundred years? Actually really curious -- one of the "innovations" of US slavery was the slavery of the descendants of slaves -- was that the case in northern Africa? I think not; if you have some evidence otherwise happy to think about it.
No, if you read the article eitland posted (no judgment, I don't know) then you'd see that it was Muslims that was behind this slave trade.
One of their habits (or "innovations" in your terminology) that we don't often talk about was that of literally emasculating (in the literal sense) male captives.
This explains a whole lot of why there isn't a white population like the black in US.
Another explanation is that some where bought out from slavery by relatives in Europe.
You should read up on this.
You'll find that compared to the Arabic slave traders (that the Western slave traders sourced from), Western slave traders were kind of nice (edit: or smart, or less sadistic or something).
Oh, and their slave trade didn't end until much later, if ever. (Ever heard about how facilities for a certain sports event in Qatar were built?)
Why don't we talk about this? Sources are after all plentiful.
Edit: Let me add my guess: it doesn't fit the narrative that white, Christian men are worse than everyone else.
Less than 1% of American whites during slavery owned slaves. In fact, the most identifying characteristic of American slave-owners was Judaism. You could just as easily say that Jews were masters and blacks were slaves, although your argument would be equally as incorrect and ignorant. To say that "whites were masters" is just as ignorant as saying "all 1940s Germans were Nazis".
Your comment is as reductionist as it is to call all slaves black.
What about Romans using Germanic slaves or ancient Greece? What about the Middle East, past and to some degree present? What about the Mongols or China?
What about Romans using Germanic slaves or ancient Greece?
British people have been enslaved at various times by the Romans, the Normans, the Vikings, the Moroccans and probably more besides. This is a matter of history that we are all aware of. But there is noone living right now who was ever a slave of a Norman nor are there any French who ever had a Saxon slave.
You are right. Smaller groups/tribes remember in many more countries. Like you said, skin color is maybe not the best example.
Take my situation: I am a German. Our slavery ("Leibeigener") cannot be seen in todays society. It cannot be seen by skin color or any other attribute.
I try to void the statement "Tell me a society which never had no slavery". My argument is: There are societies which had slaves which you cannot reflect in today society. No ones knows, no one is affected.
We have tons of other problems (like the Holocaust and tons of other crimes) we have to work on still today, but slavery among the German society (being a problem today) is no such problem. And I guess, there are many countries where this applies.
I would still consider trafficking of people slavery in everything but name and that is still going on right under our noses all over the world. Hardly anyone cares about that.
Yes. And there are enough places in the world where the "slaveowners" were those who, if I'd named them, I'd be immediately considered here as a "racist" for just mentioning the historical fact.
So... I guess we all have to learn that there are more contexts than just one.
> And there are enough places in the world where the "slaveowners" were those who, if I'd named them, I'd be immediately considered here as a "racist" for just mentioning the historical fact.
You're clearly hinting at something specific, though I don't know what it is. Mind explaining?
Also try to figure out why would the current derogatory term for slaves in South Africa have its origin in the word meaning "the unbeliever" in Arabic, i.e. one who's not an adherent of certain religion, as used in their religious texts:
Well, as it was discussed in another thread, in another culture/language it may be totally not about slavery. I mean the word "master", which comes from a common Latin root, in different languages it's evolved into a different meaning. So for Americans, it has an association with slavery (which I'm surprised to learn), but exactly the same word "master" in another language means just "doing good work".
I think this idea that “master” is associated so narrowly in English is ignorance, perhaps even willful. It obviously has broader meaning depending on context, and I would argue that the majority of its use is disassociated entirely with the history of the American slave trade (just think through examples and count them).
It also occurs to me that having these kinds of fights means people are running out of meaningful struggles, like we’re trying to wring out the last 5% and it gets inefficient because it starts doing harm as well. Then you see these hoaxes like Smollett and others and start thinking that the demand for egregious behavior exceeds supply in the US. It can happen, but it’s surprisingly rare given the state of conversation and rhetoric in this country.
For most Americans, until very recently, it only had an association with slavery in very specific contexts. Virtually nobody heard phrases like "git push origin master" or "I'm working towards my Master's degree" and thought "slavery." The blanket association is a product of very recent political activism.
There are a lot of countries 100 years or less old, that were parts of big european empires, unless you want to hold them accountable for what the foreign ruling class did.
Well ... it is societies which have a problem. As a German, my society is very old. As a country we are very young. But we would never think, that nationalism would not be a problem we had in our society.
Accountable implies a lot. But mindful we should be.
* "Common Mistakes of New Engineering Managers" (5hrs ago, 110 points, 30 comments) -> rank 2
* this post (2hrs ago, 1000 points, 500 comments) -> rank 20
Why is this post being penalized? Too many black folks commenting and up voting? (/s)
-----
Amazingly well written. I'm going to say some things. You'd guess wrongly if you infer that I'm bitter - since I'm personally very lucky. Having been born in a not so privileged family (more common than not in the world), by the luck of the draw I am today very privileged because I work in tech (in itself not that common).
The actual problem that is at the core of all of this is - incredible disconnectedness from the plight of even regular people by the world's tech bubbles. On average, people of color have it (!!!) even worse (!!!), but it seems that these SV/NY/LDN/etc. tech bros are completely devoid of any conception of how difficult any average Joe has it.
To illustrate disconnectedness: there was an interview with a YC partner a few years back that went like this:
INTERVIEWER: "What would you advise to the young folks interested in startups?"
YC-PARTNER: "I would tell them to be ambitious, try their best, work hard and if it doesn't succeed - it doesn't succeed. You should take a vacation and try again." (the emphasis and the exact phrasing of the vacuous advice are mine)
How the fuck does one TAKE A VACATION after your startup fails?!
It goes without saying that the YC partner and their brother received tech stocks from their grandparents for one of their teen-birthdays.
Here's a litmus test to know whether you're likely disconnected: As a techie/doctor/engineer did you become by far the highest paid person in your wider family by your mid 20s? If the answer is "NO", then you would be disconnected by default - unless you consciously invested effort to educate yourself.
> Why is this post being penalized? Too many black folks commenting and up voting? (/s)
That's a nasty swipe, "/s" or no "/s". Your question is answered twice in HN's FAQ: once at the top and once again ("Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?") for people who don't realize that it was already answered at the top. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Matter of fact, this thread has been carefully unpenalized by moderators who work tirelessly to support substantive, thoughtful discussion on HN. (Edit: that seems to have been a mistake—not about the thread, a lot of which was reasonably good and some of which was remarkably good, albeit on a tired topic. But it seems to have been a mistake about the article—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26507622.)
When I entered engineering in the early 2010s, I quickly started earning more than my parents and their parents did combined at their peak incomes. Hearing my background, most of my peers who weren't immigrants from south/near asia, africa, or latin america seemed surprised that life in the USA could be so "third world" in their words.
I always get a chuckle reading things by these VC types who grew up in upper middle class homes very far from impoverished people and their views on both the problems communities they've never interacted with will face and/or how to solve those problems, as recent as yesterday's post by sama on how innovation will end poverty.
Based on my experiences with people's depth on the subject, I think you have a half decent litmus test.
> How the fuck does one TAKE A VACATION after your startup fails?!
That's hilarious.
But hey, you could technically do that in France without swimming in money: you legally can keep your position in a company on-hold while creating a startup, for 1-2 years (3 if you do tricks with your right to a sabbatical year). If it fails after that, you just go back to work. [0]
The holidays you might have saved before leaving are deferred until you join again, so you can literally have paid holidays after your project fails.
> There are requirements that you are not displaying here, because you are using a source article in a language that probably 5% of the HN community can read
100% of the HN community knows how to use a translator if they're interested. Yeah, you need to be for at least 2 years in the company, and there are deadlines for requests, approvals and so on. Obviously you can't just say "hey, not coming tomorrow, plz keep my job for a while" overnight.
Anyone that wants to know the precise terms can translate them, they're right in the link.
> You are gaming the system and profit of social advantages offered by the nation for your personal interest.
No, I use the established procedure in law to follow through with what the government has tried to incentivize.
> I hope people like you get caught and that you will pay every cent you owe.
That's funny, because you don't get paid during those 1-2 years, so it roughly amounts to 0.
Why do you accuse random strangers of violating a law that you seem not to be familiar with?
indeed, the thing that struck me was how much of a middle class sausage factory SV-tech is.
I had worked in VFX/media for a long time, and we at least knew that we were mostly rich middle class fops. Having heard all the noise about how upset the tech bros were when diversity increased at FAANG, when I got here I expected to have some, well diversity.
I went from a team that had 8/30 female-male, which the company felt was too small, to a team inside FAANG which is all male. Every. fucking. team that I've been in contact, bar one, is an entire sausage factory.
Some years back I hiked the Inca Trail in Peru. The second day started with a long trek up the side of a mountain, covering a vertical distance of about 1500 m in about 4 hours. You could see the trail ahead pretty much the whole time, including the people on it. It was incredibly challenging to keep going as you were exhausted by altitude and effort and could see it was only going to get more difficult as the day progressed, and still you could see the people who were already on the trail ahead of you. This was the point where many hikers turned back.
What I learned was challenges that defeat you are never what's behind you, only what's in front of you. When it's an uphill climb, the people at the top are causing more of a challenge than what you left or even where you are.
I frequently encounter the position that "we shouldn't do anything at my level because the problem is further down the system" just like the parent comment says. Yes, it makes you feel better to deny you're part of the problem. Unfortunately it's not true in a way that makes the problem worse. It's a close cousin to "she shouldn't have dressed like that" or "she shouldn't have gone out alone". Or maybe "I was just following orders".
What if it was a hike that got less steep toward the top? The lesson you learned would completely fall apart.
I don't think you can apply a blanket logic to this. It's possible for problems to be all over, or clustered near the start or middle or end. It depends on the actual scenario.
It seems quite likely that being pushed out as a child is the biggest problem, and that's not because the kids are peering forward to look at job specifics, it's because of harmful stereotypes about boys vs. girls.
I don't know, I think it's worth trying to at least understand where the challenge lies. Maybe it is some linear progression where every person starts out with the same motivation to be a developer, and faces increasingly more hurdles till they either choose something else or succeed. Or maybe it's pretty easy to get to a certain point, but then there's some filter hurdle like toxic workplaces or university experiences that changes things. Or maybe some people just naturally have more interest in other things.
The better we understand the situation, the better we can allocate resources to address any inequities that do exist.
The problem with tackling diversity at the hiring level is that there's a finite supply of candidates. If you a proportional number of each group, you'll still end up with a large number of white men. What then?
> It's a close cousin to "she shouldn't have dressed like that" or "she shouldn't have gone out alone". Or maybe "I was just following orders".
yes, that is a problem, one we can't fix directly.
But, with apprenticeships we can grab them before they get put off by a-levels. (this again is UK specific). This means we can skip a layer off loss and get much better candidates in the process. (A lot of CS degrees are highly suspect...)
The reason why is right in plain sight: because most women aren't actually interested in tech jobs. And before you start fuming and downvote me, go look at Scandinavian countries (countries that have the most gender equality in the world) and look at the gender disparities in tech/nursing/schoolteacher jobs. It's not the 50/50 utopian vision you think it is.
I'm not asking for 50/50, I'm asking for equal opportunity.
At the moment its not equal. There are many societal issues that affect this. They even still affect Sweden et al.
I'm not asking for controversial things, like quotas, I'm just asking for companies to use the training schemes they have to get local talent thats representative of the cohort taking up CS subjects at 16.
Currently, having a 50:1 ratio is not anything like good enough. especially as its something like 25:75 split at 16
Not middle class. That include plumbers, mechanics, and other skilled technicians that really do have to work hard for their living.
SV is stuffed full of upper-middle-class, a category that is more different than the name would imply. These folks (including me) had the luxury of “not knowing what I want to do in college” (or even attending college in the first place) and getting to bounce around until we find something that sticks. Or go to medical/law/graduate school and take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt then work a free internship or residency before being able to command a salary that pays off that debt.
> getting to bounce around until we find something that sticks
This is an under-appreciated dividing line between the somewhat-rich and the somewhat-poor. Being able to choose a career that you can stick with and even be passionate about will put you in a much better situation 20+ years later than having to take the first work that comes along out of sheer necessity (often repeatedly and employers get more skeptical each time). Many people never escape that trap; even those that do find themselves many years behind their age-peers financially.
In the UK developers are overwhelmingly middle-middle class. If you were privately educated then you are much more likely to be on the business side. There are "lower middleclass" developers, but its much more rare in bigger businesses something like 20/80 split. (not as rare as women though..)
In the UK, the "trades" are seen as working class-lower middle class. Which is why the education system didn't bother catering to any kind of practical skill for trades. because Karen didn't want little Andrew to learn a trade.
Whats interesting is that yes, in the US its far more rarefied/isolationist.
Are you saying that there aren't enough jobs to go around? because that's patently not the case.
We need more engineers, to do that we need to train them. Instead of overfishing the standard places, we need to look elsewhere. If you want a purely business case, it cheaper to hire women, they are more loyal and don't ask for payrises[1]. not only that training in the UK is effectively free.
if you want a moral case: I want my daughter to work in my role (or what it evolves into.) at the moment she's going to have a shit time
>> Here's a litmus test to know whether you're likely disconnected: As a techie/doctor/engineer did you become by far the highest paid person in your wider family by your mid 20s? If the answer is "NO", then you would be disconnected by default - unless you consciously invested effort to educate yourself.
As the article hints at, many people who come from er, non-traditional tech backgrounds, enter the tech industry later in life. Your test of "by your mid 20's" would hoover them up along with the people you're trying to point to.
Let's just not group people together indiscriminately, shall we? That should be a rule of thumb that might work once in a while.
I think you're using "indiscriminately" as if it meant "if I personally don't like it".
But you're right, my litmus test is very sloppy and it could be phrased much more precisely. I hope most people will understand the spirit of it though.
If you grew up with access to upper middle class (or higher) wealth, which is what your parents would need to be to match today's early career Silicon Valley software engineer incomes, you probably don't know what it's like to not have access to many of the institutionalized resources you grew up with, because you probably never lived that experience.
That might be an overly broad test, but the underlying point is pretty clear.
I understand your anger, but that piece of advice was meant for the kind of people that CAN afford a vacation after a startup failure. Is something wrong with that? If you can afford a vacation, you take it. If you can't, you don't.
I myself have a failed startup that I ran in 2018-2019. Could I afford a vacation afterwards? Nope. Can I afford another entrepreneurial run now? Nope. Am I bitter about it? Nope.
Also, you mention "incredible disconnectedness from the plight of even regular people by the world's tech bubbles", but then you talk about starting a STARTUP. Regular people don't start companies.
They do, they're called small businesses instead of startups most often times though. I worked at businesses throughout my adolescence which were created and run by "regular people" - people of color, without generational wealth, who were raising children, and were primary caretakers for elderly family at the time of the company's creation.
In the same vein, I've met a lot of "regular people" in the same situation who've kicked off startups. Do you really think only those with the privilege of being sufficiently disconnected from impoverished communities end up having the opportunity to create a startup, or is there some reinterpretation/disconnect of the previous paragraphs going on?
Unfortunately in many countries progressive taxation means people likely to start business are unable to save and invest in it for long before they have no choice but take a bank loan or look for VC money. It is rarely possible to start a business only with your own money that you saved. I think that's bad, and is often overlooked by people supporting high progressive tax. We are cutting the wings of people who are more likely to succeed and provide jobs and force them to share their business with the rich who likely never worked hard in their lives.
>It is rarely possible to start a business only with your own money that you saved.
People outside of the upper middle class strata usually don't have the opportunity to save significantly anyways after CoL is included in the US, and usually require a loan to start a business (or at least in every case of non-upper middle class business founder I've worked for).
Regular people would personally carry a relatively lower tax burden than a flat tax would require for them actually, and a progressive corporate tax in the US would likely result in them being more likely to be successful once they start their business.
Given that many pro-business states in the US have progressive income taxes to actually encourage reinvestments into small businesses (Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, etc..) and appear to be succeeding quite well in that regard, is there any specific reason you think a progressive income tax system that reduces the burden on regular people relative to a flat tax is a significant blocker for regular people to create businesses?
Looking at your description of the problem, it almost seems like you should be advocating for a *more* progressive tax system where burden is placed further up the chain with regular people maintaining even less of a burden.
I consider myself as a regular person and I am hit by the highest bracket and my take home is like 55% of what I make. This severly inhibits the projects I develop. It is supposed to make the rich pay more but they have ways around it and most pay themselves in dividends which are taxed differently (surprise surprise) or just use offshore cards.
Well, if you're actually not upper middle class and at the top of the bracket then I'm wondering how you came to the conclusion a more regressive tax graduation would help more regular people, rather than a more progressive scheme and closing tax avoidance loop holes like you seem to describe as the problem.
That being said, it sounds like you're the upper "middle class" everyone here is describing since it's really the very rich that have the option to pay themselves in things like dividends in most countries (though this may be a miscommunication).
55% isn't bad most places outside of the US actually, where do you live precisely?
It just demonstrates the disconnect. These people are not fathoming a scenario where people can't afford a vacation and that seems indicative of these issues.
Its how you try to fix racism and just end up renaming the master branch.
> but that piece of advice was meant for the kind of people that CAN afford a vacation after a startup failure. Is something wrong with that? If you can afford a vacation, you take it. If you can't, you don't.
If they really intended that advice for the audience of 5, they could've sent them an email (or a Clubhouse invite /s) and not put it in an interview on YT. The rest of the audience is just facepalming while listening to this.
yeah this virtue signaling by Github and many tech companies was cringe while ignoring shit like this:
> Being a highly paid software engineer, like most of you reading this, did not stop a bully van flying up the curb I was walking on and 7 City of London police officers pinning me against a wall with guns in my face. They wouldn’t believe it was possible for someone like me to work in central London till one of them searched me and found my work ID. All this because I fit a description. What was this description? I don’t know, black male between 4’11 and 7’4 probably. What did I do after that? I carried on with the rest of my day like nothing had happened because I’ve fucking been there and done it all before. Out of curiosity I asked my manager, who is like 20 yrs older than me, if he had ever been stopped and searched, he said not once in his life.
this is fucked.
2000 upvotes and this submission is already disappearing.
There sure are a lot of people here who read this as saying "don't change anything", rather than the actual message "this is nowhere near big enough a change". Here is what the article actually says:
> We’re going to change the branch name because it could be seen as offensive but we’re still going to sell police facial recognition software that is biased against black people and women. Facial recognition software that misidentifies black people as gorillas. Facial recognition software that was used to identify unmasked BLM protesters. We’re going to change the branch name to be more inclusive of minorities but we’re going to carry on selling software to ICE. Get the fuck outta here.
> HN is not about downvoting things one disagrees with but rather posts that do not add anything to the discussion.
That’s not at all how any site with a downvote button works. They’re used to hide what you don’t want to see or what doesn’t fit your narrative. You’ll see this on HN as well if you stay around long enough.
No, you get upvoted for posting stuff that other people think are contributing to the discussion in a meaningful way.
Not everyone is going to be voting 100% according to HN guidelines, but it is in everyone's best interest here to hold each other to high standards regarding them.
> Ouch there goes my Sokal slant. Better read up on my Sartre.
Stuff like this will probably get you downvotes as your sarcasm is not contributing in a meaningful way (at least I think it doesn't)
People aren't offended by the change; they're irritated.
I'm irritated because it was an unnecessary change based on unsound reasoning, made by people who claim to represent a minority while not belonging to the minority or understanding its members.
I'm irritated because I can't give instructions to junior developers as easily: no longer can I rely on all of my instructions working, and documentation now requires clarifications and caveats which used to be unnecessary.
I'm irritated because it appears that GitHub has made it intentionally difficult to change the main branch in the "new repository" page; while it shows an option to change the default branch name, this requires refreshing the page and losing the repository name and description which you've already written.
Because it's utterly useless, stupid, out of context. Why Git, github, Azure DevOps, everyone have to change that and possibly broke backward compatibility with scripts, pipelines or who know what(yes, I can branch master from main, but why I have to?)? Why?
Should we completely stop to use master word altogether?
It's because I detest virtue signalling. I especially detest companies virtue signalling solely for the sake of appeasing the woke mob, a minority of people, in a transparent attempt to show how "anti-racist" they are.
what sucks more is Github creating default main branch on repo creation. It's an unwarrented hassle to rename it and if you don't rename it, you will definitely try to push to master and then realize the mistake and push to main, every effing time.
> I don’t want this post to be about The Solutions™...
is lazy.
yep, thats right, doing something meaningful is hard, and figuring out what to do is too.
...but like, raging for 3 pages and giving 3 lines to consider what solutions might look like is just a rant.
I get it, maybe if more people were focused on finding solutions, we’d get better solutions... but come on, lead by example.
“Im angry” doesn’t fix things.
“what youre doing doesnt help” doesnt fix things.
Someone has to actually do the hard work of coming up with solutions that are compatible with the HR and budget demands of large companies, otherwise, you get lame ass outcomes like this from the people who (perhaps misguidedly) tried.
Companies will go for minimal effort, minimal cost, minimal disruption unless you give them a compelling alternative narrative; its just daydreaming to expect anything else.
This is a SJW's worst nightmare... being told they aren't needed/helping by a PoC.
There are PoC on my team and they were asked about the master/main thing. None had an issue with 'master'.
They were also sent on the same Diversity 'education' course as everyone else. Again, they found it dumb and patronising. One even got into an argument with the WASP presenter. It was quite funny to witness.
"SJW" here. This kind of stuff gets posted all the time. It's usually full of logical fallacies (and anecdotal evidence, like your comment) and slurped up by people who are looking to confirm their biases. Sometimes it's not even written truly by a PoC.
>Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants?
Many of the most prestigious tech companies already run internships like this. They’re desperate to hire minorities, frankly.
Similar practices exist in elite universities. If you’re from a minority background, you can expect a significantly higher chance of being admitted, and a significantly lower SAT requirement.
I agree that the change from master to main is dumb, though. “master” has a specific meaning (as it does in “master record”), which “main” does not adequately convey.
> They forgot to talk to people who are actually members of the black community.
everyone should be consulted. however today’s black people in this case should not have the final word. they adapted to a system that opresses them so they might not have the vision of what the ideal system is. i. other words, even if today’s black people are not offended by this word it doesn’t mean it’s ok. same with the n word. black people use it but I think it is not ok. their grandchildren might do better in a world where black people don’t use this word. same with women. today’s women might not have the vision of what equality is. people with vision are needed and they might be black, women or even white men
The entertainment value of watching whining snowflake techbros get absolutely foaming mad about something they claim doesn’t matter at all makes the tiny amount of work I had to do to support this in my build system completely worthwhile.
For me, it seems like since no one dares to solve real problems like Police violence, income gap, real racism that's ingrained in the society (like people calling the police because a black guy is wandering around), they pick up some non-issue and dress it like a problem and solve it.
This is a topic I feel cannot be openly discussed on HN (and basically everywhere else), sadly.
I switched from Github to Gitlab after this change. Political correctness is a great way to know that a company has the completely wrong focus and will be unable to innovate and create good products.
It has been discussed to death on HN, what are you talking about?
Now for some notes on your comment:
- Gitlab has switched the name of the master branch too
- The point is not that it is harmful or bad to do so, and anyone actually crusading against this change as if it was some kind of a slippery slope leading to the downfall of their subculture or even civilization may want to think about their priorities and sense of hyperbole.
- This is not at all what the article complains about. The author argues that this is essentially a form of virtue signalling that allows essentially overpaid white engineers to pat themselves in the back without putting in actual work and money for diversity, inclusion, and equality; a symbolic change that is not rooted in materialism.
> It has been discussed to death on HN, what are you talking about?
Not without getting downvoted to oblivion for the only reason which is having an opposing opinion.
> Gitlab has switched the name of the master branch too
Yes I have been made aware of that now.
> The point is not that it is harmful or bad to do so, and anyone actually crusading against this change as if it was some kind of a slippery slope leading to the downfall of their subculture or even civilization may want to think about their priorities and sense of hyperbole.
I don't even understand this sentence.
> - This is not at all what the article complains about. The author argues that this is essentially a form of virtue signalling that allows essentially overpaid white engineers to pat themselves in the back without putting in actual work and money for diversity, inclusion, and equality; a symbolic change that is not rooted in materialism.
So.. it's exactly what the article complains about?
GitLab made the change[1] as well unfortunately. I completely agree with everything written in the post as well. The problem with attacking words for cheap points is that it doesn't make a difference to the actual problem and is mainly used to show "aware" and "great" people are.
Well, they gave admins the option to change the default branch name to whatever they like, and they've announced they're changing from master to main by default in the next two months or so: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/10/new-git-default-bra...
You may as well stop using Git completely then, since Git itself uses main as recommended.
What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way.
So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.