It's not the words or the metaphors, it's the people!
If someone wants to use words against someone else, they'll find a way, no matter what.
Policing words is fascist, if anything, police people bad behaviour, actually, police how your society works and start investigating why you you masterfully created, nourished and spread to the World so many cultural stereotypes about everyone who is not you and doesn't want to be like you!
They talk to us about you, it's not the words you use, but *how* you use them.
Try to understand that thinking "you person of color -> you bad" it's not any better than thinking "you [n word] -> you bad".
Do you realize that the only one offended here is you and are using that to gaslight people into feeling bad for something they haven't done and it's mostly not even wrong?
for example: you should learn that main and master mean absolutely nothing to 95% of the people of the World. In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). they are just labels to us,, if you are offended by that, there are a lot of other ways to cope than attack people who don't care about them and rightfully so.
> symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git).
Even in English, the term "master" branch has nothing to do with slavery. It originates from a master audio recording, usually just referred to as a master, from which other recordings are made.
It actually has the same origin as the parent poster of your comment:
Late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher" (source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister), contrastive adjective ("he who is greater") from magis (adv.) "more," from PIE mag-yos-, comparative of root meg- "great." The form was influenced in Middle English by Old French cognate maistre.
> In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git).
Exactly. Which is also (what at least I think) where "master copy", which has been claimed to be the origin of git's "master branch" comes from. Whether via the music industry's "master tape" as claimed elsewhere in this discussion, or more directly from the "master's manuscript" all the other monks duplicated in a mediaeval monastery's scriptorium, who knows... But zero to do with slavery, AFAICS.
This is not to say it’s fine to make ad hominem attacks to anyone on its vocabulary. But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance, doesn’t seem any better. There is a difference on pointing every occurrence of social practices that favor the spread of a domination system, and blaming personally the people who instantiate these practices.
> But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance
The paradox I've observed people disagreeing with is you either believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them, or you believe in keeping old connotations alive precisely so you can tell people to stop using them because of the old connotations.
Telling people what their vocabulary can imply is one thing. Telling to others which word they might consider instead is a separate step, that can certainly be fine, don’t we agree?
Unilaterally telling others what words they must use is a domination mechanism, whoever engage in such a practice, don’t we agree?
If we don’t listen to what our words inspire to others, how can we know if it matches our intended meaning? If we don’t continuously hone our habits, including our language habits but definitely not only that, how can we progress as human individuals, collectives and societies?
>believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them
The trick is simple to explain, isn’t it? We can perfectly be healthy carrier, and yet people will die from this virus we contributed to spread.
Just because something is untroublesome in our own specific case doesn’t mean it won’t contribute in the diffusion of something awful at societal level. That is, the only scale level at which we can measure how much benign or hurtful this thing is for humanity.
> The trick is simple to explain, isn’t it? We can perfectly be healthy carrier, and yet people will die from this virus we contributed to spread.
Except words aren't pathogens. They aren't complex molecular nanomachines that actively avoid our bodies' defenses while incidentally doing damage to it. The only effect they have is in what connotations they trigger in people. In this case, even if the word has troublesome origin, if approximately no one knows about it, then the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen causing harm to people by convincing them to get worked up over a word, where they wouldn't before.
Words aren’t pathogens, indeed, pathogens are not that great to produce analogies and parables.
We can’t know what words will actually have on people until we release them. But we know that words we use can make a significant and measurable difference:
How close to "approximately no one knows about" are we in an antonym association like master/slave?
>the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen
Well, that is what we can call focusing on the person rather than the social mechanism at stake, isn’t it? Kind of an equivalent to the mechanism through which we produce reactions like "look this bird of ill omen that pretends that there is an invisible entity passing from one person to an other but whose malign effect only reveal randomly, clearly this person is the actual cause of the issue".
> How close to "approximately no one knows about" are we in an antonym association like master/slave?
For some in the US and those adopting this particular aspect of its culture. For everyone else... well, there's some hundred other antonyms that come to mind before:
Apprentice, amateur, loser, subordinate, subject, secondary, incompetent, inexperienced, junior - to list just a few. The only form of "master / slave" association people have - except for in the USA - is with the nomenclature used for IDE/SATA drive configuration in BIOS.
And that's in English alone. Other languages generally have their "master" equivalent disjoint from slavery or adjacent topics.
Instead the pattern seems to be a group of people on Twitter/Mastadon/social media de jur all taking a quote and sharing talking about how awful it is that someone use the word "blah" in this day and age and how they are a horrible person and we should call up their work and get them fired...
Sometimes even completely misunderstanding what the person is talking about; as one of the first examples of this rousing to cancel people was a guy telling his friend that he would fork that code and someone misunderstood it to be sexual....followed by much ado about dongles.
It wasn't on any platform - the guy got fired for saying something at a conference, and the woman who sent the photo and tweet of him also got fired as she was a "developer evangelist" and her employer didn't think that would fit.
> But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance, doesn’t seem any better
could be, but...
most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance and only carry a a notion of social dominance when used in the context of expressing social dominance (to oppress or abuse of other people).
words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole. If someone gets offended, it's their fault.
Some example:
- 2013 was the year in which the reign of Federer at the top of the men's game had supposedly come to an end
- Amazon empire: the rise and reign of Jeff Bezos
- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has been called a benevolent dictator for life
>most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance
Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics, but we can certainly agree that a significant portion of the vocabulary pertaining to social matter do.
>words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole.
Yes, sure, when the context is appropriate, we totally agree. We might lake enough proper bandwidth with flat text alone to discuss that properly though. :D
I’m confident it would be far easier to have a conversation on that topic topic around some drinks and laughs for example.
That said, in all example given here, the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious.
Every competition-focused sport is rooted in the parable of imposing one dominance on an other, carrying a supremacist perspective with it. That’s why for example yoga competitions will be controversial, while it tennis is not.
As for the two latter celebrities, they don’t really have a reputation of being paragons of empathy that we can point to and say "if everyone would act like this in its interpersonal relationships, humanity would live in gentle bliss and harmony." To be more precise, I don’t know them personally, this remark is really not about these individuals, but more on pointing that in these specific cases, the matching reputation doesn’t serve well the point of uses in metaphoric or hyperbolic ways.
> Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics
Believe me.
You wanna know something funny?
The word used in Latin for betrayal (tradunt from which derives tradimento in Italian) at its origins meant "to give, transfer, deliver"
When the Christians came to be, they changed its meaning to something bad because Judas "gave Jesus away".
A simple innocent word has become the quintessence of being an awful person because of a stupid religious myth that also started one of the many persecutions of the Jews.
So beware of changing the meaning of words or advocating for their removal from the public discourse, you'll never know who's gonna be hurt by it.
> the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious
the only thing that is obvious is that they are only hyperboles, Amazon is not an Empire, Linus Torvalds is not a dictator and Federer did not actually reign over anything.
I would also argue that Linus has been seen as "benevolent" and I really wanna know from you where the connection to the toxic social attitudes lies when we talk about Federer's reign.
It's obvious to me that the sentence was referring to "the king of mens' tennis" (as a metaphor, do you know what they are?) to celebrate him and not to some literal evil ruler who should be dethroned, with the use of the force if necessary.
Your comment seems so extreme and ridiculous to the point of Poe's law (can't tell if it's satirical or sincere). We would have to make every language very dull indeed if that was the kind of critera for acceptability of words... And how far back in the etymology would somebody have to go to determine whether it's sufficiently non-domineering??
I fail to see what is extreme in it, in all sincerity.
It’s not like it’s a call to act in any extreme way. Actually, the comment doesn’t even mention anything that one should do.
We can listen to other feelings and interpretations of our words even with zero etymological consideration at stake. But if we try to deny their feeling that some word is derogative and back our perspective on lexical neutrality, maybe we might double check we are not missing some well documented semantics of the word and its history.
That said, given the number of downvotes, it looks like I miss some contextual clues about what it might make it feels as some call to extremist POV.
kids should be kids and do what other kids are doing, even if it's watching TV or playing video games, unless it’s something truly harmful.
watching TV hasn't killed anyone and my generation, who grew up in front of the TV screen for lack of better alternatives, turned out just fine.
The real issue now is with my parents’ generation, but that’s because they’re old and their mindset has become immutable, not because they watched too much TV.
TV tends to reinforce existing biases rather than create new ones.
IMO your kids will grow up thinking that TV is bad, and while it's mostly true that 'the medium is the message', they’re missing out on the opportunity to learn how to deal with it. It’s like a vaccine — it helps them build resilience.
>watching TV hasn't killed anyone and my generation, who grew up in front of the TV screen for lack of better alternatives, turned out just fine.
I don’t think any previous generation kids spend as much time in front of the TV as they do with the screens today, sadly the damage will only be seen when it is done. The difference is mainly the content, as bad as TV could have been in the past at least there was someone responsible and liable for the content put “on air” instead on the internet your child brain is at the mercy of the algorithm.
it was the 80s, I used to walk to school at 6, passing through an hospital, in a town, quite a big one, named Rome.
It's just that parents nowadays forgot that kids are functioning humans, can learn stuff and can do stuff on their own.
edit: for the downvoters, look at what Japan does or how women in Denmark do with their kids, instead of thinking "this man must be crazy, how in the hell I can leave my kids alone in this world full of dangers, they will surely die" and react like i tried to kidnap your kids to boil them and then eat them.
I'm a parent trying to show the reasons why treating your kids as disabled people will make them grow up as disabled people.
Your kids are humans and can learn stuff, if you think they can't learn to cross a street or that drivers are out there to chase and kill specifically your children or that the probability of being run over is higher than falling off a bike and dying (ironically in recent years, more cyclists were killed in the Netherlands than car occupants [1]) you are a very anxious parent, hence a bad parent.
Sorry.
Yeah, it might be true that bike accidents are caused by cars (even though the stats of your Country say that only half of them are due to a motorized vehicle) but teaching them to walk to school it's still an order of magnitude safer than any other means of transport.
Don't you want them to be free and independent? why?
p.s. as a side note, in the Netherlands road deaths are growing (despite what the bike heaven propaganda says) [1]
Maybe, just maybe!, it's safer for your kids to walk to school.
you need space to do that, not many cities in Europe have the luxury of being built from scratch and having so much space to dedicate to a single intersection.
edit: anyway the simplest solution is to turn every intersection into a roundabout, no traffic lights needed, clear right of way, cars can't go fast and in the end it also makes it easier for pedestrians to cross the street.
Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands (sometimes with limited access for delivery and emergency vehicles), a trend fortunately becoming popular in other European cities now.
The “urban” in the title is a bit misleading, this intersection is definitely more suburban, or on the boundary of an urban center. (Or rather, the author has a different definition of urban - in my definition cities like den Bosch are really just a small medieval urban core surrounded by continuous medium-density suburban neighborhoods.)
In my experience, cars are discouraged from city centres, but not banned. You can drive your car all around Amsterdam, although you’ll have many one way streets and parking is going to very expensive for non-residents… and it’s hard (but not impossible) to find street level parking. Amsterdam has a number of car parks in the outskirts that are cheap if you can show that you used public transport afterwards.
The result is that people use their car (if they have one, still quite common esp. for families) to get out of the city, or big errands, but use bike or public transport for day to day trips.
Actual car free zones exist in cities across Europe but tend to be pretty small and constrained to the hyper centre, like the church square and the major shopping streets. Not that I’m opposed to them being bigger but that seems rare at this point.
I'm not saying that Amsterdam was built from scratch, nor that Rome is somewhat so special that you can't apply solutions used elsewhere, but that urban space is an hard requirement and the more dedicated infrastructures you build, the more the value of the area goes up and so we end up with those beautiful walkable, green, neighborhoods in Milan where the "Vertical Forest" is that only the very rich can afford.
And in those parts of the city where space is basically free, people live too far from where they need to go by bike anyway.
It's a cat and mouse game, you need very dense, very small, almost flat cities, to get to the point where Amsterdam is, which is not that typical especially in Europe.
A street like your picture would make it incredibly difficult for a car to obtain a dangerous speed, so would by itself largely eliminate the need for dedicated cycling space.
Here in the Netherlands also in small streets and areas bike lanes are common. They are literally drawn on the street and a car is basically not allowed to ride on them when a bike is passing.
cars are not allowed to hit pedestrian or bikes on any street, but they do all the time.
disallowing something doesn't make it non existent.
In the neighborhood where that picture was taken live approximately 15 thousand people and many more come every night to hang out.
I know it's bad, I do not approve people going everywhere with their cars even when it's obviously wrong, but it is what it is, and it doesn't make the problem go away.
Street space is premium space in cities.
I wish we could simply stop this car madness by wishful thinking, but we can't.
In 2016, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch received several credible allegations of abuse and torture by the regiment. Reports published by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) documented looting of civilian homes and unlawful detention and torture of civilians between September 2014 and February 2015 "by Ukrainian armed forces and the Azov regiment in and around Shyrokyne".
Another OHCHR report documented an instance of rape and torture, writing: "A man with a mental disability was subject to cruel treatment, rape and other forms of sexual violence by 8 to 10 members of the 'Azov' and the 'Donbas' battalions (both Ukrainian battalions) in August–September 2014. The victim's health subsequently deteriorated and he was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital." A report from January 2015 stated that a Donetsk People's Republic supporter was detained and tortured with electricity and waterboarding and struck repeatedly on his genitals, which resulted in his confessing to spying for pro-Russian militants.
Battalion Azov was created on May 5, 2014 along with other battalions of the Special Purpose Police Patrol Service (SPPS) on the basis of a decision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine.
That's the usual propaganda that spreads on wiki, Azov was (officially) founded as a para military group in February 2014 (I wrongly wrote 2024 in my previous post).
CIA disinformation is not information. Azov is just one of the many incarnations of the US foreign policy, it's the same thing they do every time: they train far right extremists (azov is a neo-nazi group) then they pretend we believe they are self formed organizations, spontaneously born. It's the Afghan mujahideen of the Soviet–Afghan War all over again, been there, seen that, etc. etc.
I am European, I cooperate with news agencies, I can discern truth from lies.
According to right‑wing radicalism researcher Vyacheslav Likhachev, Azov had many roots. The brigade was founded by the activists of Patriot of Ukraine, Automaidan, Social-National Assembly and other organisations active during the Euromaidan.
Euromaidan took place between 21 November 2013 and 22 February 2014.
You do the math.
Blame Wikipedia, not me
Anyway, if you really don't know what "people from ibizia" is, your loss!
More substantially: why are you (so persistently) trying to nerd-snipe some internet randoid (me) over the (obviously irrelevant) exact founding date of that organization?
If you have some broader point to make about Azov -- make it. Lemme guess: some variant of "Just forget Ukraine and support Trump's capitulation plan, because Azov, ooh, scary".
Tell that to Palestinians or Afgani or Iraki or one of the many countries US invaded or where they financed coups and mass killings...
If Americans want to participate in international communities they are free to leave the US. Aren't they?
BTW Linus is Finnish and Sergey Mikhailovich Brin is Russian
The harsh reality is that the west is now that place where people think it's a crime to be born in a place instead of another...
I'll quote something for you
criminalizing individuals based on their place of birth or nationality is generally considered a violation of international human rights law. Principles of non-discrimination are central to international agreements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. These treaties emphasize that all people, regardless of origin, have the right to equality before the law and protection from discrimination.
If you live in the west and criticise your government, nothing happens.
If you live in China and criticise your government, even in private, you can go missing or end up in a camp
This is very over simplified and glossing over a huge amount of political repression that happens in the west just because it's more sophisticated. Don't fool yourself into thinking you're free because you're not in China. You would realize this the second you go against any powerful interests
Edit: anyway it's a false premise, China has 1.4 billion people living there, do you really think 1.4 billion people do not criticize ever the government? USA has the highest rate of incarceration per capita in the World, there a say that goes "the biggest prize a journalist can win it's not the Pulitzer, it's being killed by the CIA" the DoD is the largest emplyer in the world, NSA has the largest budget in the world, I do not believe it's all spent in defense (DoD used to be named department of war) and oversimplification doesn't really explain things it only keeps stereotypes alive IMO.
What? Somehow people in the west getting arrested for protesting against genocide, is acceptable/redeemable just because another country is presumably worse??? Do you actually care about freedom/human rights at all or are you just abusing those concepts to feel superior relative to other countries and to play petty tribal us-vs-them politics?
Usually not arrested for protesting. It usually for trespassing or vandalisation or something else. Or sometimes something stupid like blocking traffic
When $NON_WESTERN_COUNTRY arrests people for, let's say, "picking quarrels", people here usually see that as just an excuse for cracking down on activities that go against government interests. But when western countries do the same, people take those excuses at face value???
didn't say it was ok to arrest people protesting. Just that it's nothing comparable with non-democratic countries like china or russia. You can protest in front of the white house. Just don't try that in moscow or beijing.
You can do stuff in front of the White House as long as you're a nobody and it doesn't actually threathen powerful interests. How many of these protests where nobody was arrested, actually resulted in change? What's the point of protesting if nothing ever changes? Thousands of children have already been killed in Gaza, but we can protest in front of the White House while the killing continues, and that makes us better than $OTHERCOUNTRY. Why are you content with a circus like that? What's even the point of comparing with $OTHERCOUNTRY if you don't have effective power to change for the better at home? Shouldn't we set higher standards for ourselves?
I think it's really, really weird that some people care more about how bad $OTHER is than problems at home.
Yes, publishing confidential documents that expose government crimes, including war crimes. On the one hand, people argue for things like free speech and human rights, but on the other hand, the same people play petty semantics games to cover up their own society's shortcomings. Are you truly a supporter of free speech and human rights, or are you just anti-$OTHER_GROUP? Behavior like this are actively harmful to the ideals of free speech and human rights.
The documents Assange published also included lots of information on civilians in places like Afghanistan who had worked against groups like the Taliban. That put those people at risk of retaliation.
It's not really very pro human rights to go around doxing the people who are working for human rights in those places. There was nothing in the government crimes or alleged crimes in the documents that needed to be released before the documents had been thoroughly reviewed and the information on people not involved redacted.
> It's not really very pro human rights to go around doxing the people who are working for human rights in those places. There was nothing in the government crimes or alleged crimes in the documents that needed to be released before the documents had been thoroughly reviewed and the information on people not involved redacted.
This is the big difference I see with the Edward Snowden case, the papers that published the leaked documents attempted to redact any information that could put people at risk.
Assange and Wikileaks just went fuck it and didn't even try to stay politically neutral.
All good and admirable, but
when I meet someone from the States and say I'm Italian, it usually ends up like this
https://www.alessandravita.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12...
or this
https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uplo...
or with a combo
https://preview.redd.it/italian-stereotypes-starter-pack-v0-...
It's not the words or the metaphors, it's the people!
If someone wants to use words against someone else, they'll find a way, no matter what.
Policing words is fascist, if anything, police people bad behaviour, actually, police how your society works and start investigating why you you masterfully created, nourished and spread to the World so many cultural stereotypes about everyone who is not you and doesn't want to be like you! They talk to us about you, it's not the words you use, but *how* you use them.
Try to understand that thinking "you person of color -> you bad" it's not any better than thinking "you [n word] -> you bad".