I saw a conversation on Twitter a while ago back when it still was Twitter. The OP with many followers was laying out words and classes of words with negative connotations that shouldn't be used.
Someone replied in good faith to OP and asked how we should express negative thoughts. OPs answer was basically that we shouldn't.
I find that kind of thought very off putting and minorly disturbing. An important part of the human experience is being able to express when someone else has screwed you over; to do so using flowery over the top hyperbole is the catharsis we need to live good lives.
(For those that haven’t read the classic Nineteen-eighty-four book by Eric Arthur Blair (pen name: George Orwell) one of the core themes of the story is how the ruling party controlled language, calling it “newspeak”, in order to remove the ability to express certain thoughts or opinions, most notably those that could be used to incite revolution or allow you to express discontent.)
But we also have this thing called Science. Where a firsthand encounter with nonlinguistic reality is considered key. And Science has proven its power over and over.
And you'd think that would impress people. Even if you lay the forms and products of our modern scientific culture aside. Just that philosophy. The supremacy of observation. You'd think it would lead to a momentary pause in the babble.
I don't think that what you're saying and what I'm saying are mutually exclusive at all. Science is how we tease out truths about reality. Language is about how we communicate and is closely linked with cognition.
I didn't mean to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. Just that this sphere of language definitely has a limit. (Which leads to various important stuff)
I find that conservatives most often quote "Nineteen-eighty-four" as a comment on "politically correct" language. But when asked about "family values", "obamacare", "right to work" and other conservative double-speak, they often don't feel like those apply.
My point is not that conservatives use more double-speak/newspeak then progressives, rather my point is that this is used and applied across the political spectrum, and even in the military ("enhanced interrogation", "collateral damage") and corporations ("restructuring", "cost engineering").
I think the more heinous "conservative" (as you put it) changes are related to physical conditions and the euphemism treadmill.
George Carlins "soft language" specifically spells out an example; shell-shock, battle fatigue -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I think making a term so long that it becomes an acronym is definitely part of this.
The most up-to-the-minute example I can think of is "CSAM" which removes all pain of the victims. For those not in the know "kiddie porn" as it was once known was rebranded to "child rape images", then "child abuse images" now finally "child sexual abuse images" which is now so long that it is oft abbreviated CSAM.
You are right though, there's a lot of newspeak, my (least) favourite example is "pro-life" which is a glorious bit of double-think.
> George Carlins "soft language" specifically spells out an example; shell-shock, battle fatigue -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I’ve always thought that this was a bad example of the euphemism treadmill, because each step is clearly an attempt to be more general than the last. The name makes it clear that this isn’t just a disorder you’ll find in soldiers at constant fear of being shelled at any moment (shell shock); nor even of soldiers who’ve seen the horrors of battle generally (battle fatigue); but rather that anyone who has been through any kind of chronic, fearful stress under the constant expectation that some traumatizing event might happen at any moment, is liable to end up experiencing these symptoms.
Or, to put it more viscerally: doctors would be wary of diagnosing a victim of domestic abuse with “shell shock.” But “PTSD” — not just as a symptom profile, but also as a name for that symptom profile, and a set of social connotations around that name — clearly fits.
> CSAM
This is actually an example of a completely different effect: it’s a cultural shibboleth. Police want to use automatic word filters to discover and surface conversations between pedophiles, while not triggering those filters with their own conversations about the pedophiles’ activities. So they have invented a word that is equivalent to the generic term in meaning, but part of “policing language.” (And, as a special trick, it’s a term with no potential for a treadmill effect, as pedophiles would be loath to use a term that frames them as perpetrators of abuse.)
> Or, to put it more viscerally: doctors would be wary of diagnosing a victim of domestic abuse with “shell shock.” But “PTSD” — not just as a symptom profile, but also as a name for that symptom profile, and a set of social connotations around that name — clearly fits.
In some ways it's a natural consequence of broadening the scope of something. Is the loss of impact because of the language, or because it now applies to a lot more situations which we imagine is expressed in different ways (whether that's largely true or not)?
Shell shock likely didn't conjure the idea of a person going through a harrowing experience as much as a soldier going through constant shelling for weeks. The first encompasses the other, but the second one is much more explicit and conjures specific thoughts that we can latch on to when we try to imagine the experience.
Battle fatigue also paints a somewhat specific picture, even if more broad than shell shock. We can imagine what types of things caused this, even if our imagination probably only covered a subset of the actual causes. Those things it does conjure are bad though, so the idea is very impactful.
PTSD, which more accurately encompasses a lot more situations, not all of them (or maybe even the majority of them) related to war, also leaves us without as much information to use to form an emotional response to as we imagine what it was they went through. Was it the horrors of war? Was it assault by a stranger as a civilian? Was it physical abuse by someone you know? Was it long term mental abuse? We know it was bad, to affect the sufferer, but it's harder to form a real emotional response, I think, when the cause is ambiguous.
So, is the problem the language, or is the language just a side-effect of the increased scope of the term, and the problem is actually the increased scope?
> The most up-to-the-minute example I can think of is "CSAM" which removes all pain of the victims. For those not in the know "kiddie porn" as it was once known was rebranded to "child rape images", then "child abuse images" now finally "child sexual abuse images" which is now so long that it is oft abbreviated CSAM.
There are several good reasons for this, one of which is that poorly-thought-out child pornography laws have beem used to charge and convict children for taking photos of their own bodies. Explicitly defining the prohibited material as "child sexual abuse images" puts a stop to that when it's obvious that no abuse or exploitation occurred.
And of course we use PTSD instead of "battle fatigue" because it affects many millions of people who have never been near a battle.
CSAM I'd put in a different category - just based on the flow of the conversation I'd guess some people have deep seated emotions that trigger when children get hurt. There is a reason that authoritarians use children for cover when pushing their agenda - the topic hinders people's ability to argue rationally and engage the part of their brain that that can spot obviously bad ideas (war is similar - having an enemy seems to do similar things).
"CSAM" is useful because it is so drained of any colour. It makes it much less likely that emotions get triggered because it gets discussed as an abstract thing instead of something related to children.
> George Carlins "soft language" specifically spells out an example; shell-shock, battle fatigue -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Except that his account is ahistorical ... and the term post-traumatic stress disorder actually captures what the issue is. Neither shell-shock nor battle fatigue are good descriptors.
How is 'collateral damage' newspeak? It's a useful concept even if you want to avoid it at all costs, but beyond that euphemisms have existed forever and are not the same as newspeak (which wanted to make something literally unthinkable, not merely euphemistic).
Does the father whose daughter didn’t come home from school care if the “civilian casualty” was deliberate or accidental?
“Stop killing kids” sounds much more impactful than “establish rules of engagement to minimize collateral damage”. Language matters.
Similarly: Does the worker without a job care whether they were fired, laid off, or affected by a reduction in force? Probably not. But “affected by a reduction in force” sure makes it easier for leadership to press the button.
The difference between deliberate and accidental civilian casualties is not clear cut. For instance, what do you call it when you intend to attack the enemies soldiers with a bunch of bombs but you know a certain percentage will fall on civilians and you accept that inevitability and proceed anyway? Is that deliberate? Not quite, because it wasn't your intention. Was it an accident? Not really, because you knew it was going to happen and did it anyway.
Or what do you call it when you are deliberately targeting some civilians (factory workers perhaps) but you know they share their homes with children? Do all of the civilians killed count as deliberate, or only some portion of them?
Also, how do you determine intent? Suppose the official paperwork says "we're going to target this residential neighborhood because they have military-relevant cottage industry blended in with the population", but the men actually carrying out these orders are saying and thinking "burn them all, this is payback." Do you go by the intents stated on official records, or do the intents and feelings not committed to official records change the matter? It's the kind of thing that ends up getting debated by historians for decades.
You're right, incidental and primary are better words to use than accidental and deliberate. But every term has grey areas, and people trying to spin truth to make themselves look good. That doesn't make the term meaningless or "soft".
> It's not deliberate, which is the question that matters.
I don't agree that deliberate or not deliberate is all that matters or the end of the discussion. In criminal law if you do something that could reasonably be expected to kill somebody without really desiring that outcome, you might still be guilty or murder or at least manslaughter. For instance if you drive your motorcycle at 200 MPH and crash into a family killing them, the fact that you lacked a specific desire to kill those people counts for something but it's not the end of the discussion.
> "[targeting the civilian workforce] isn't a thing."
You've obviously read my comment as commentary on the Israel/Palestine situation. Actually the incident I had in mind when I was writing that comment was the firebombing of Tokyo. If you go through official US documents about that, you'll find the justification that Tokyo had extensive cottage/light industry mixed in with their residential neighborhoods. Destroying that industry and workforce was in fact one of the official intents for firebombing Tokyo. However many of the bomber crews (who were all men, but I'm generally not one for gender-inclusive terminology anyway so you're not catching me in some hypocrisy here, lmao) were likely motivated by revenge for Pearl Harbor / etc and celebrated the civilian death toll. Not all of them I'm sure, but certainly some of them.
Anyway, I'm not here to pass judgement on whether the firebombing of Tokyo was or wasn't a war-crime, or whether or not the US was deliberately trying to kill Japanese kids. It has been debated for decades and that's precisely my point. It's not cut and dry, it's a matter that looks differently to different people who are looking back at it from different perspectives. It defies neat objective categorization, which is why counting 'civilian casualties' in one big lump, not differentiating by intent, is a useful thing to do.
> In criminal law if you do something that could reasonably be expected to kill somebody without really desiring that outcome, you might still be guilty or murder or at least manslaughter.
I think criminally negligent manslaughter would be analogous to collateral victims in war, and murder would be the intended victims. As your analogy correctly implies, neither option absolves the perpetrator of responsibility, which is what I think motivates many of the objections to 'collateral damage' in this thread - an erroneous belief that the term implies no guilt.
Again, euphemisms have always and will always exist, they are not the same as newspeak which again had the goal of making certain concepts literally unthinkable. Also you're missing an important part of 'collateral' which is that the deaths were unintentional (whether or not someone cares is another matter - but by definition it means the collateral damage was not the goal).
Something I was rather ignorant to for the longest time was how fascism can exist at both ends of the spectrum.
My last day on Mastodon was the day a few people ganged up on me quite aggressively for not putting Alt text in an image.
Tolerance isn’t acceptance. It’s letting things you don’t like exist without making a big fuss over it. You can dislike certain speech patterns without having to go on a crusade against them.
I think fascism is a bad term to use here, totalitarianism or thought-policing is more what you mean.
Fascism refers to specific political beliefs including totalitarianism plus some form of cultural supremacy (typically racism, but it can also be religious or nationalistic), rigid hierarchy, and might-makes-right morals. Not all totalitarian regimes are fascist, and the behavior you're describing is neither hierarchical nor racist, so I don't think it's fascist in any way.
And I'm not saying this to simply be pedantic. Fascism is scary and powerful because of the specific combination of those ideas, especially the militaristic efficiency of fascist organizations. PC/woke mobs are not scary in the same ways, and need different precautions.
Not to take away from anything you said, but the woke/PC mob are kind of scary right.
They have the cultural supremacy part, like a non theistic religion where adherence to the tenets are required or you'll be excused. Those weird and creepy struggle sessions. Not to mention it is one side of the ongoing culture war.
They have the rigid hierarchy known as the progressive stack that ranks people on their immutable characteristics rather than their individual merits.
The might makes right comes from the antifa groups who ”by any means necessary” violently attack those who do not adhere to the tenets of the strange religion. As well as the control from the institutions such as universities where in faculty or students that don't adhere to the tenets are abused until they leave or are fired outright.
So it's pretty close right? I'm sure there are a few other tenets of fascism that you left out for brevity which would preclude the woke/PC mob from the facist label but it's interesting and scary how close they come.
I'm just glad they're not good with weapons, except for the Jon Brown Gun Club, for whom the addition of weapons seem to have a slightly deradicalizing effect
When I say cultural supremacy, I mean the belief that your cultural group is superior to all others, and so its needs are rightfully to be prioritized even over the basic rights of other groups. Even the worse woke mobs I've heard about aren't advocating that, say, it is rightful for a hundred Republicans to go hungry to feed a trans person better or something, so I don't think they check this box.
When I say rigid hierarchy, I mean an actual hierarchical organization where there are leaders giving orders and those below them executing and giving orders of their own down the hierarchy. There is nothing of the kind in woke spaces, they are in fact infamously sectarian and often spontaneously turn on yesterday's leaders for group think. So this box is also not checked.
Might makes right refers to the explicit belief that as long as I can physically force some result, it was rightful and beyond reproach for me to have done so ("I conquered this land so I have proved I am stronger than you so I deserve it more than you"). Antifa may believe that punching nazis is justified, but they believe it is justified because of the evils of nazism, not because violence is self-justifying. Similarly, wielding organizational power against an individual accused of wrongthink is not an example of might makes right, at least not as long as the wrongthink isn't entirely arbitrarily invented for each individual. An example from actual fascist organizations sometimes is culling "weak" members by hazing rituals, where emotional or physical violence is intentionally inflicted simply to see if the subject can withstand it (this also helps in building the rigid hierarchies I mentioned above, as it tends to eliminate people who can't accept arbitrary orders). Again, this box remains un ticked.
So no, I don't think any woke mobs I've heard about resemble fascist organizations. Which, again, is not to say they are good. Just because you're not a fascist doesn't mean you're a force for good in the world, it's entirely possible to be malevolent and dangerous without being fascistic.
A glance at Mastodon top posts will show that the term “fascism” no longer refers to a set of political beliefs that arose in early 20th century Europe, and the associated violent regimes. It is used now for anything whatsoever that the person does not like. For example, since trans advocacy is such a big part of the Mastodon community, I have seen a poster claim that anything less than considering a person their claimed gender is “fascism”. That would make even non-Western cultures with an ancient tradition of acceptance of transpeople, but ascribing them to a third gender, comparable to Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. People are just using the term as a slur without even thinking it through.
Comparing people who don't use someone's preferred pronouns/gender association to Hitler is obviously ridiculous and I don't think there's too much to be gained from discussing with someone who believes such a thing.
However, I'm not sure why this contradicts my point. Those people are simply wrong in their use of the word. Unless you believe that Mastodon woke lefties are representative of the broader American English zeitgeist, I doubt you could say that the language has changed such the term fascist just means evil.
> Unless you believe that Mastodon woke lefties are representative of the broader American English zeitgeist
A year ago I would have thought those people some weird online-only fringe. But not after travels around the USA for a couple of months last year, followed by time spent in Baja and interacting with Americans who came down there. So many young Americans are very concerned with pronouns and their proper usage, and the attitudes of early-millennium activist movements like Antifa seem to have made inroads into the wider culture. Of course, American society is polarized and there is a whole other camp.
I suspect that “fascism” is increasingly a popular slur even for Americans who aren’t so terminally online, and because a word’s meaning is popularly determined by its usage, that means that it’s pointless to complain that they are “using it wrong”.
> I suspect that “fascism” is increasingly a popular slur even for Americans who aren’t so terminally online, and because a word’s meaning is popularly determined by its usage, that means that it’s pointless to complain that they are “using it wrong”.
If you're right that it's becoming such, than I would agree it's simply changing its meaning, I'm not a presciptivist.
However, from my experience, which is limited to online content, I've only seen accusations of fascism being used by left-wing speakers against right-wing (or perceived right-wing) adversaries.
So, my theory is that the term actually retains most of its original meaning even by those throwing it around willy-nilly. It is then not a wrong use of the term nor a novel use, but in fact a sign of increasingly extreme language. That is, people who call you fascist for not caring whether you add alt text to an image aren't using fascist to mean generic bad person, they actually intend to compare your actions to Hitler.
It's similar to how "socialist" is used by right-wing pundits. When they call a boss who raises employee wages "socialist", they are not using that as a generic insult, they explicitly mean to compare that boss with Stalin or Chavez or other such boogeymen.
I think it's all a sign of increasingly more extreme discourse. I would actually be much happier to find out that you are in fact right and fascist is just a more generic insult now.
> That would make even non-Western cultures with an ancient tradition of acceptance of transpeople, but ascribing them to a third gender, comparable to Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco.
It's not comparable to any of those of course, but it wasn't exactly acceptance either. These 'third genders' were a method of othering those who didn't conform to strict gender roles, typically effeminate men. It would be like if we had just three gender categories today of 'man', 'woman' and 'faggot'. Not really a societal situation to aspire to in my view, we'd be better off ridding ourselves of constrictive gender roles and be more accepting of e.g. men who enjoy wearing dresses and makeup while still understanding that they are of course men.
I recently saw several mentions of image alt text including a poll about alt text on social media. The question was something like "Would you ever post an image without alt text" and something like 99% of responses were "never".
I mean, I've literally never even thought about it so it surprised me that such a high number of respondents would have chosen that. Which I guess is kind of the point. There is an idea that ignorance is bad, but once you have been informed then non-compliance is treated as intentionally malicious. That is, if you know why you ought to add an alt-text and yet you refuse to do so then you are deemed to be complicit in the oppression of those who require alt text to enjoy the Internet.
It is a subtle reframing from "being polite and courteous is good" to "non-compliance is evil".
It also reminds me of a lot of behavior I see in tech spaces. One that comes to mind is the notorious dog-piling on the maintainer of Actix-web framework by well-meaning Rust evangelists who were upset by his use of unsafe language features. Another I recall is when a company had a mix of open source libraries (MIT license) and some other kind of business license in the same repo. They were being harassed for mentioning the product was open source in their marketing.
What is interesting to me is that some people will see some of these examples as justifiable harassment while they will see others as crossing a line. It is just a sad fact that the mechanism to get people to adhere to social norms is often through bullying and shame.
Style guides exist for good reason. Also a simple suggestion that people adhere to the style guide is often heard as harassment even when it's simply asking people to adhere to the style guide.
Also, if 99% say "never" and that sounds too high, what about "Would you ever send an image without alt text to a blind person?" Does it make sense to post a message when you know a significant number of people are physically incapable of interpreting it?
It reminds me of religious zealots. The law (or server rules) doesn’t reflect what they want it to be, so they’ll take matters into their own hands.
Of course there is a bit of every variety. There’s certainly polite people asking nicely and sensitive people seeing it as harassment. And there’s certainly people who see something they don’t agree with and just move along.
It turns out you can put whatever text you want in the alt text field and it won't get clocked by the scolds because they don't actually care enough to check. It's enough that it appears compliant in a surface-level audit.
However, there is an issue suggesting adding an automated scold in the Mastodon client (and Megalodon already has such a scold, plus a (!) of shame on images without alt text) https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/13894
I have yet to find an actual vision-impaired person complaining about missing alt text. I'm sure there is one somewhere, but it mostly seems to be a phenomenon on Mastodon for a few people to use as a cudgel to feel superior.
I don't have impaired vision, but I use alt-text to save bandwidth on metered internet connections. For instance, if there's alt-text that says "stock image of happy traveller", well, I can probably do without that until I get a better internet connection, whereas if it's "bus timetable for this stop", it might be worth me turning on images to see that despite the cost.
I saw the comment you're talking about, but I'm not sure I understand what it meant. What does a screen reader do other than skipping an image without alt text?
Either way, that person was also explicitly saying that they don't want mandatory alt-text, that they believe an option users can toggle on their own account to be reminded about alt-text is better, so I don't think they would qualify as "complaining about missing alt-text".
It seems they don't want it to be mandatory because people will likely fill it with nonsense, as your already suggesting, which is worse for them than it not being there.
I don't know what the screen reader does, presumably tells them there is an image there. I assume they want the option to remove the post all together.
I'm not running a study, I'm making an anecdotal statement.
That said, my actual position is that inconveniencing every single person who posts an image on a microblogging service by forcing them to write a description of it on the off-chance that a tiny percentage of the population who are visually impaired will want to read it is a net evil. It will, in the short term, antagonize people who just want to post something quickly and get on with life, and in the long term drive lower engagement on the platform as it raises the amount of effort required. It's a waste of potentially a massive amount of tiny slices of a nonrenewable resource: human life time.
What should happen, instead, is that the tech wizards developing the microblogging software use computer vision and language models to provide on-demand transcription of any arbitrary image. If anyone should understand that, it's the audience here.
It wasn't important for them not to include it, it wasn't important for them to include it. There is a world of difference. And being aggressively ganged up on for something you don't believe is an important detail is an excellent reason to leave a group. It makes it abundantly clear that you have a fundamental difference of values with much of that group.
No. If I don't think including alt text is important, regardless of what others tell me, I will sometimes add alt text but I may forget to do it, I may decide not to when I'm in a rush, I may be in a mood where I can't be bothered to.
Someone who believes strongly in this may see every instance of me not adding alt text as a slight or as me being obstinate. They may start demanding I go back and add alt text to all my posts retroactively. I may very well refuse to do so, since, in this thought experiment, I don't think it's important enough to spend my time on it. They may get aggressive at this time, since their values are so different from mine.
For a more contrived example, if I told you it's important to me not to see people's shoes in pictures, would you entirely stop posting pictures like that? If you sometimes forgot, and I later asked you to crop all the pictures where you did, would you start doing it just because it's important to me?
I should note I have no idea if this is how things happened for GP. For all I know, they could be making up the whole thing. I'm just trying to point out how someone who is indifferent to X may end up in conflict with someone who is strongly for X.
Fair enough. Mastodon has, historically taken accessibility for visually impaired folk quite seriously.
Letting them be first class citizens is a laudable aim. I’m probably overly aware of it because I used to work at a school for VI students and I saw their frustration as they used their screen readers to find unlabelled images.
I don’t condone people being arseholes about it. But a bit of nagging to remind people is perfectly acceptable, think. You want to keep it the norm on the system.
It doesn’t need to be an essay. Just ‘a cute cat’ is better than nothing.
In my view it’s common courtesy to a group of people who already have it tough, not a ‘I don’t like shoes’ personal whim.
A great recent example is everyone changing whitelist/blacklist to allowlist/blocklist because Americans are so fucking obsessed with race politics that they see it absolutely everywhere
Allowlist/blocklist is more clear and accurate tho?
The software community loves to complain about this stuff like the change from master to main branch but I always get the sense that people just liked to complain rather than any meaningful objection.
>Allowlist/blocklist is more clear and accurate tho?
No it's not, not at all. Is "blocklist" a list of file system blocks? Bitcoin or other crypro blocks?
As someone who speaks English as a second language, the first time I read "whitelist/blacklist", I simply looked them up in a translation dictionary and immediately understood what they mean. Those are actual words with definitions spanning centuries.
>The software community loves to complain about this stuff like the change from master to main branch but I always get the sense that people just liked to complain rather than any meaningful objection.
Yes we love to complain, but there were many meaningful objections that were ignored. There was a reddit outage that occurred due to the madness around "inclusive language" and removing the word "master": https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/11xx5o0/you_brok...
Genuinely speaking this is part of the ruling classes "divide and conquer" strategy.
Ensuring that people think that some "other" body of people are against them (right, left, woke, trumpists etc) is a strong tactic to keep people putting there energy into fighting each other and not making a big deal about the people in control of things like the media or government- which we're all too tired to fight and sort of quietly accept.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it's basically well known and nobody really cares it seems, we're too easily baited. (including myself here).
I saw it really obviously recently when the overtone window shifted in the UK and the majority of people became pretty poor pretty quickly; and how the media started going crazy trying to stoke a culture war where people were simply too poor and too tired to put blame anywhere else than the ruling political party.
Which lead to the ruling political party trying to stoke the culture war and a milquetoast response from the audience. Here's the reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQsGRwNzs-o
> It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it's basically well known and nobody really cares it seems, we're too easily baited. (including myself here).
No, it sounds like a conspiracy theory because it is. It has nothing to do with some shady cabal of elites ("the ruling class"). It's just American culture.
Sorry, as much as you believe this it's just not true.
Sure, some people are radicalised, but a large part of that radicalisation is a reaction to a perceived equal radicalisation on the $otherSide.
You'll notice that people get divided on things that just "become political" out of nowhere.
Wearing a mask for a really recent example, there was a very small window of time before any politician or media outlet said anything other than "we don't know everything" about the pandemic. In that time window it was pretty clear that most people just do what is needed.
You don't need a formal conspiracy when incentives align though, so as much as you paint it as a "shadowy elite" it's probably just a few people who know that they need to stoke a culture war and a lot of people who will get rich off of outrage bait and creating a cultural moat that makes them the voice of a cultural "side" are more opportunistic and don't particularly care all that much about furthering a particular agenda.
If you actually have time to have a conversation with someone you deeply disagree with you tend to find out pretty quickly that there's a seriously large amount in common and it's the distance to each other culturally that causes a larger rift than anything innate.
Those changes (as wells as master->main) did trigger an initial "get off my lawn" reaction for me, but it's not entirely unreasonable and is no big deal to actually act on.
It's not a big deal, but it's not a trivially small deal either. It's sufficiently annoying that there had better be a good reason. In the case of "slave", there's at least a good argument. "Master" is ridiculous. You cannot speak this language (or Spanish, or Italian, or any other latin-related language that I know of) without that word. We've got master's degrees, master copies, Let It Be (Remastered 2009), and mastery. It has no reason to die, and it will not die in our lifetime. The master->main pain is just performative pain for its own sake.
I mean, you are posting this in a hugbox forum where overtly suggesting that certain opinions don’t have merit or rigor is forbidden because it hurts peoples fee-fees. You, too, participate in society.
Some say taping aquarium rocks to your cables improves the sound, some say it’s rubbish, let’s have a discussion and if you are really so sure about your ideas I’m sure you can refute the idea right? Let’s have a debate!
(And now just continue refuting it every day for the rest of your life…)
Effectively that’s outlawing the opinion of “no that’s dumb, you’re dumb for suggesting that”, which is unfortunately rather a necessary one, science doesn’t work if everyone has to treat the idea that the moon is cheese with equal weight. At some point you can believe whatever you want but the scientific discourse doesn’t have to include you, and people don’t grow if they’re not told their opinions are wrong and objectively incorrect from time to time. The moon is not made of cheese and unless you got a real good reason then you’re dumb for suggesting it, and you’re worsening the discourse for all of us too by even entertaining it. Discourse does not benefit from entertaining facially outlandish ideas without some evidentiary backing etc just “for the sake of discussion”.
At some level, enforced politeness and forced equality-of-merit for all opinions is a thought-terminating cliche and becomes destructive to discourse. It’s a little bizarre how people love having legislated “truth in the middle” outcomes to discourse. The truth often is objectively not in the middle and it worsens the discourse to pretend it is.
(Same for the way this forum treats hanlon’s razor tbh. 99% of the time when people invoke it, it’s a handwave to excuse some pretty conveniently malice or self-interest. That’s effectively using it as a thought-terminating cliche. Any time profit or PR spokespeople are involved you should never invoke it, because malice is indistinguishable from profit-seeking in most circumstances etc.)
The same is true of certain openly callous and cruel perspectives etc. It’s not just factual perspectives that can be destructive and noxious if tolerated as though they held rigor and merit, and extreme indifference etc is just as toxic as wishing harm directly etc. Just because you don’t care about litter, or masking during a pandemic, or climate change, doesn’t mean the rest of society isn’t going to set expectations etc, and “I guess you’ll have to die then” is not exactly sympathetic, but it’s uncouth to point out the callousness here. And that is, itself, an editorial lean towards the legitimacy and integrity of such positions. You’re treating “I don’t want to die” with the same weight as “I guess you’ll have to die for me”, and tutting when people get upset about it.
Someone replied in good faith to OP and asked how we should express negative thoughts. OPs answer was basically that we shouldn't.
I find that kind of thought very off putting and minorly disturbing. An important part of the human experience is being able to express when someone else has screwed you over; to do so using flowery over the top hyperbole is the catharsis we need to live good lives.