Insert Witty Title Here

obligatory reblog of this after I forgot to bookmark them (again)

yeah okay ill reblog that

the real “problem with political correctness” is not that it’s considered offensive to use slurs, but that there are now many “progressive” environments where saying the right things is more important than doing the right thing. it’s why it’s so easy for abusers to gain traction in leftist circles (they learn the right words quickly and employ them to frame their own behavior as progressive); it’s why so much potential activist energy gets poured into fighting about language; it’s why moderate liberals didn’t believe fer/guson had a problem until the police emails with actual racist language were leaked. (you can do racist things, you just can’t SAY racist things.) i don’t have a neat conclusion here but a related point is that i’m so much happier since i started focusing on like, being a good kind caring person instead of trying to remove the word “crazy” from the vocabulary of everyone in my family

Just saying this is truly one of the best “discourse” posts on this site like……this hits the nail directly on the head re: what is going on with language right now and everyone pushing back in the notes only serves to further prove the point it’s making

There was a big push around 2020/2021 in tech to rename your main git branch (where changes to code are tracked over time) from ‘master’ to something with fewer etymological connotations of slavery. And I posited even at the time that it was more damaging to fix these subtle, academia-driven language things without first fixing much harder but more impactful shit like hiring practices, sick leave, etc. It only makes people’s lives more difficult if we add noise by signaling that we’re so advanced we’re down to fighting deeply buried subconscious -isms when we’re actually just ignoring more important fixes. Doing the big work and being transparent about our progress is pragmatically more useful than vocab tweaks that sound like more progress than they actually represent in practice.